Texas Monthly Talks

Molly Ivins

Interview by Evan Smith

November 2006

(Page 2 of 2)

Look what’s happened at the Dallas Morning News, where more than one hundred staffers took a buyout and split.
Some of their best people. I was with the Dallas Times Herald for ten years, and it was a wonderful newspaper war. We just had a marvelous time: One for all, all for one. Let’s go kick the crap out of the opposition. We were getting better and they were getting better. We had pretty much the same deal in Houston and San Antonio. That was when you could look around and say, “Is the Texas Observer needed?” It was seriously an open question. And it all crashed back into this place of just below mediocre. You know, when your product doesn’t sell well, it’s not a good idea to say, “Let’s make it smaller and tackier and less useful.”

“Let’s take all the guts out of it.”
Right. I wonder if that’s what people who buy newspapers are saying these days. And it’s not like I object to the idea of journalism on the Internet. You’re going to do journalism on the Internet? Great. But you have the same two problems you always have. First, you have to find out whether or not it’s true, and then you have to put it into a package that’s useful to people. Which turns out to be far more difficult than many actually expect.

Do you still read newspapers?
Oh, yeah. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Austin American-Statesman—those are the three I have delivered—and several other papers online.

Anybody you really admire?
The Knight Ridder bureau [in Washington, D.C.]. They were really on top of Iraq and the WMD stuff. And it was a newspaper chain. It wasn’t owned by a doughnut corporation.

People who sold doughnuts yesterday and are selling newspapers today assume the metrics for measuring success are the same.
I’ve seen this before. The Times used to run around hiring people to give them management theories.

When the accountants take over, you have a problem.
There are basically two ways to save money at a newspaper: You cut staff or you cut news—or both. And you expect to sell more? You make it worse, and you expect to sell more? I don’t know what to do about these swine who own newspapers.

Let’s move on to the president, whose approval ratings are down around his ankles. With Katrina and Iraq and all that, are you still catching hell these days for dissing George W. Bush?
As much as I used to, but I’ve felt a difference. For a long time it was lonely out there on the George-Bush-is-truly-an-idiot beat. I wasted all this time trying to tell people, “No, I’m not a Bush hater. It’s not like the Clinton haters hated the Clintons. This is not the same thing. I’m not a Bush hater. I’ve known him forever. He’s a decent guy. Blah, blah, blah.” He’s a terrible president, and I knew he would be. He’s a joke. He’s not interested in policy.

You’re not in the camp that says, “He was a pretty good governor. He hasn’t turned out to be a good president, but we couldn’t have known”?
We should have known, because one of the first things he did [as governor] was dismantle the alcoholic rehabilitation program that Annie put in place in the prisons.

What is history going to say about this guy?
A lot of things can be held against him, but the monumental folly is the Middle East. It’s so bad it’s almost inexplicable. We are literally at the point where the Kurds have seceded. This leaves you with a Shiite republic that will unite with Iran. [Former deputy defense secretary] Paul Wolfowitz testified before the war, in front of Congress, that there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq. Couldn’t they have at least read the encyclopedia entry?

Your column is carried in how many papers now?
I think three hundred.

A few surprising outlets, I bet.
Oh, yeah. Because I’m practically the last living liberal on the op-ed acreage, it gets carried in lots of places.

Is it hard to choose between writing about Texas and writing about what’s going on nationally?
It is. I’ve tended to write more on national stuff in recent years because Bush is there and I know him and in part because now I have so much syndication outside the state.

What is your view of Rick Perry relative to George Bush?
You wind up having to give that one to Bush, don’t you? Perry is just a terrible governor. Seven special sessions? Did it ever occur to the man that you’ve got to plan before you call a special session? He cost us millions of dollars. It’s insane. And it’s depressing. What worries me is that it seems he’s the tool of people who want to destroy the public schools. They don’t believe in government at any level. They’d just as soon privatize the schools, privatize the prisons.

Perry and Chris Bell and Kinky Friedman and Carole Strayhorn are locked in mortal combat. How will it turn out?
It looks like it’s going for Perry, at around 36 to 20 to 20 to whatever she has. Hers is the performance that has most surprised me, because Carole is a hell of a campaigner. I guess the Republicans aren’t as sick of Goodhair as they should be. If Chris had a chance, I’d vote for him. But as we all keep saying, “He doesn’t have a chance and he doesn’t have any money.” And you know, he doesn’t have a chance and he doesn’t have any money because we all keep saying it.

So you won’t vote for Bell?
I’m a mischief maker. I plan to vote for Kinky. I’m a great believer in humor and music in politics. How hard can it be? [Editor’s note: Two weeks after this interview, Ivins reversed course and endorsed Bell.]

At last, a politician who’s intentionally funny. Can you imagine a scenario in which Perry loses?
If Kinky were to come up with some new material—which he hasn’t done in months, I might add—and get the college kids stirred up, it could turn into one of those campaigns, like Jesse Ventura’s, where the people who don’t vote get all excited.

Other than covering the election, your plan now is to finish the book and get well?
And to do a little more traveling. Another one of my lifelong dreams has been to go to Africa to see the animals. There’s something about seeing the animals in the wild that is just wonderful.

And then you’re going to be back at the Legislature?
Yes, I plan to keep right on working. I can’t think of any reason not to.

They wouldn’t know what to do without you, and vice versa.
At the Grand Canyon I was sitting there in my special chair in the shade, not hiking with the group because I’m not quite up to it, and a person comes up to me and says, “You’re Molly Ivins from Austin. I’m David Sibley [the former Republican state senator from Waco].”

You two have occasionally been on the opposite sides of things.
The worst disservice I ever did him was to say in print that he was much more intelligent than the average Republican. I think it cost him the lieutenant governorship.

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