She uses satire and ridicule deliberately. “Satire traditionally has been the weapon by the powerless, aimed at the powerful,” she says. And that’s how she uses it - to take aim at the political elite.
She worries that this very important political tool has been twisted by some radio commentators into something quite different. “When you aim ridicule at the powerless, as Rush Limbaugh does, at those who are handicapped and homeless, that’s not just cruel, it’s profoundly vulgar,” she says.
The IWMF bestows its Lifetime Achievement Award on Ivins this fall.
Ivins calls herself a populist and not a liberal. “God knows, I never considered myself a partisan Democrat,” she says. As an early and influential writer for the liberal weekly, The Texas Observer, she often was at odds with the Texas Democratic establishment that ruled the state at the time. “As a Texas liberal, I’ve been outside my whole life,” she says. She still sees herself as outside circles of power, whether in Texas or Washington, and she wants to keep it that way.
She also heeds a key rule of politics: “Don’t let anyone else define you. I wanted to throw up when I heard Karl Rove say that ‘liberals cheer when Americans die.’”
To her, “a populist is more concerned with economic fairness, at looking at the big cheeses in society, and not so much concerned about social policy. Sometimes I say it’s all a con game and you have to keep an eye on the shell with the pea under it - and tell who’s getting screwed and who is doing the screwing. And that’s what I try to watch.
She says what’s going on is scandalous.
“There used to be a commercial where lots of people were in a crowded supermarket, grabbing as much as possible off the shelves. And the winner was the person who picked the most expensive thing off the shelf. That reminds me of politics today: the greed – the root cause is money, as usual - that grabbing things off the shelves.”
The politicians in charge “are selling our national heritage for a mess of pottage, giving away billions and billions in natural resources, in tax exemptions.”
It infuriates and motivates her. “Until we change the way the [system is funded], we’re [not] going to get democracy back.”
Her political column goes to more than 300 newspapers. That greatly amplifies her voice.
She also freelances for such national magazines as Esquire, Harper’s, and the Atlantic Monthly and Nation, and is a best-selling author of six books, including Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America, published in 2003. She’s currently writing a book on the Bill of Rights and says, “Things have gotten a lot darker since I started working on it.”
Her mission today, she says “is to talk to people with three great excuses” for why they aren’t interested in politics. Those excuses are: There’s nothing I can do; I’m just one person. Sorry, I’m just not interested in politics. Nah, they’re all a bunch of crooks.
They all disturb her. “I don’t think you can believe any of these three things, legitimately,” she says.
Ivins does her part to dissect politics in as pungent a way as she can. She believes in what she calls the “third paragraph principle,“ where you tell how important this story is. You have to put it straight to readers: ‘you will lose your home mortgage; you will lose your pension; you will lose your Social Security ... if this bill passes.’”
She admits to preaching that people should take politics seriously. She does it with humor, however, rather than a harangue. She uses humor because she can’t do “perpetual outrage” at the injustice around her, she says, adding that many crusaders “end up tired, bitter and burned out. You can’t do anything, then.”
She agrees that a steady diet of writing about injustice sometimes “does seem to wear you down. But what saves it is laughing. Jimmy Buffet says it best: if we didn’t laugh, we’d all go insane.” She adds: “Or else you turn into Rick Santorum.”
Her own personal yardstick is “can you do any good, have fun, and can you learn.”
Nearly all her jobs have met that test.
When Ivins began her career in the early 1960s with an internship at The Houston Chronicle, racially integrating the bridal news section “nearly touched off riots,” the paper didn’t cover murders unless three or more people died and in some East Texas towns, the Klan operated out of police headquarters.
To avoid being sex-segregated in women’s news, Ivins took a master’s at Columbia, then got a job as the first woman police reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune in 1967. She said she “couldn’t put up with the restrictions” of straight news, though she appreciates the lessons she learned as a daily reporter. “If you’ve never covered a five-car pileup, you shouldn’t be covering a presidential race. It gives you considerable respect for the complexity of truth. One of the problems with these pundits is they never covered a traffic accident. They’ve never been reporters and I think that makes a difference.”
In 1970, she took a one-fifth cut in salary and moved home to The Texas Observer. She stayed six years – and blossomed. “They let you make your own mistakes. And, boy, I made some. I learned a lot, about life and a point of view. I learned there’s no such thing as objectivity but there is accuracy and fairness.”
She also discovered “that it is impossible to permanently piss off politicians.” And she learned how to write about all-night legislative sessions and budget battles and, moreover, to make those stories interesting.
The New York Times hired her away “because I could write” but editors were flummoxed at her colorful writing, especially when she became the Times’ Rocky Mountains bureau chief in charge of nine states. “I’ll always be grateful to have worked for The New York Times. I got to see daily journalism practiced at a level of excellence and I remain a fan of the paper,” she says. However, Ivins does recall that working at The New York Times was often difficult for her.
After five years, she snapped up an offer from the Dallas Times-Herald to write a column on whatever she wanted. “I thought Dallas was hysterical. Nobody else in Dallas had noticed that it was,” she says. She moved to their Austin bureau three years later to write a political column, which also was used by the Houston Post. Her column was syndicated in 1990. A year later, the Times-Herald folded and she went to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for nine years. Creators Syndicate picked up her column in 2001.
Ivins has taken her share of abuse, as well as applause, for her books on George W. Bush. Some say she helped generate a mass audience for him by ridiculing his verbal ineptness.
“His dad doesn’t speak English any better,” she says, with some testiness. “Relatively speaking, W is golden tongued. I’m tired of repeating: he’s not stupid and he’s not mean. He’s just a terrible president. But it’s a sign of a grownup that you can despise the politics without hating the person. Or it used to be.”
Ivins gets a lot of mail from people in the hinterlands who say “Thank God you’re there.” But she also is jubilant at mail from opponents.
“One of my favorites was from a man who wrote ‘I’ve been reading you for 10 years ... this is the first time I’ve agreed with you.’” She wrote back “Keep reading! There’s bound to be a second time!"