Episode 21: Ding Dong the Bill Is Dead
It’s really, truly here to stay (at least for now). Plus, how movies portray the poor — and why those portrayals matter. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Paul Ryan said it best back in March: “Obamacare is the law of the land.” On Friday, for the first time in months, millions of Americans woke up with the comfort of knowing that their healthcare will remain intact. After a nail-biting week and multiple last-ditch efforts by Republicans to strip people of their coverage, Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress and one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, unpacks how we secured this victory, and what’s next for healthcare (because is this fight ever really over?). Later in the show, Jeremy shares what we all missed while we were paying attention to healthcare. And finally, Stephen Pimpare explores how movies have portrayed poor and homeless people throughout history, and why their portrayals matter.
This week’s guests:
- Neera Tanden, Center for American Progress
- Stephen Pimpare, University of New Hampshire
For more on this week’s topics:
- We’d be terribly remiss not to direct you to Stephen Pimpare’s book
- Struggled to follow what the heck happened with healthcare this week? You’re not alone and, fortunately, Vox has an explainer
- A terribly important article about the consequences of the ban of transgender service members (who, to be very, very clear, are not a burden, medically or otherwise)
This program aired on July 28, 2017.
Transcript:
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. Friday morning, millions of Americans woke up for the first time in months without fear of losing their health care. People with preexisting conditions, parents whose children have already far surpassed cruel proposed lifetime limits, sons and daughters of seniors in nursing homes wondering how they would afford their care. People with disabilities staring down the barrel of a return to 1950s era institutionalization. But after months of dodging and lying to their constituents, canceling town halls, hiding in their offices and sometimes even the bushes and proceeding with perhaps the most secretive legislative process in modern history in a dramatic, middle of the night vote-a-rama, Republicans failed to muster the votes for so-called “skinny repeal,” their latest repeal legislation which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would’ve ratcheted up the uninsured ranks by a not so skinny 15 million Americans.
Many in the media are reporting that what happened on Thursday night was all about John McCain. Personally, I’m inclined to give Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins much more credit than McCain but I also feel like focusing on the moderates in the Senate who cast ‘no’ votes misses the bigger picture here. That it was months of tireless resistance and activism that killed this cruel, cruel bill. The energy in the grassroots has been nothing short of remarkable. Activists with groups like Indivisible deserve tremendous credit. But I’d like to give a special shout out and thanks to the amazing ADAPT activists. Disabled protesters who literally put their bodies on the line and got dragged out of wheelchairs in many cases, to kill this bill. Likewise, I’d like to give a special thanks to the scores of brave individuals who shared their personal stories to put a face on what’s at stake, many on this show. As Jonathan Chait put it in New York Magazine, “The movement to save Obamacare takes its place among the great social causes in American history.” I couldn’t agree more. The fight isn’t over, Medicaid remains on the chopping block as the Republican party shifts its energy to tax and budget, and the Trump administration is pulling no punches seeking ways to sabotage the Affordable Care Act without legislation. But for now, it’s time to celebrate the fact that a law that has brought health insurance to 20 million Americans who didn’t have it before remains the law of the land.
With that, on deck for this week is a special conversation with Neera Tanden, the president of Center for American Progress and one of the people in the Obama administration who played a centeral role in shaping that legislation. Don’t worry, we’ll have an installment of In Case You Missed It to follow as well a conversation with Stephen Pimpare, author of a new book looking at portrayals of poverty and homelessness on the silver screen over time. But first, my conversation with Neera Tanden.
[MUSIC]
VALLAS: I’m now joined by CAP’s president Neera Tanden who during her tenure in the Obama administration played a central role in shaping the Affordable Care Act which remains the law of the land today. Neera, thank you so much for joining Off-Kilter.
NEERA TANDEN: I’m thrilled to be here.
VALLAS: Well, I’m thrilled about a lot of things today and I’m sure you are too.
TANDEN: Me too.
VALLAS: So just, I gotta start with the million dollar question, what happened last night? What ultimately brought the bill down?
TANDEN: The most, I mean the most central part of this is that the bill was deeply unpopular but the reason why the bill was deeply unpopular was really two things. One, substantively it hurt a lot of people. But you know, I think really central to that was that there was a resistance in the country that built up around this. There were town halls and calls into congress and protesters literally putting their bodies on the line to save health care and it was really both of those things. I think they reaffirmed each other. People were angry about the bill because the bill was so terrible and it never really got fundamentally better and then, and they were willing to take action about this bill that showed the rest of the country that there deep problems with it. I mean people were protesting for a reason. And so I lived through the 2009 legislative process and there were protests then but nothing like the resistance we’ve seen over the last six, seven months. And so we obviously have important senators to thank I’d say, obviously we need to thank Senator Collins, Senator Murkowski and Senator McCain for what they did. But also, but also the senate Democratic leadership. But this action happened because we had good leaders but they were propelled forward by the public. People in the country willing to take action to save other people’s health care which is a true, true progressive victory.
VALLAS: A lot of folks in the media are reporting that it was all about John McCain or it was all about the moderates, right. And I think that was sort of a predictable story line, we’ve heard that throughout, but I really couldn’t echo enough what you’ve just said. That really misses the bigger picture here, that it was months of tireless resistance and activism that killed this bill. What is it that we’ve learned from resistance so far that we take with us into the next fights?
TANDEN: That’s a great question. I do want to say that the entire apparatus of the Republican party was behind this bill. So I don’t want to, we, you have to win 51 in the senate in situations like this and so did need 3 Republicans. And they were under tremendous pressure so that, those folks did the right thing and I think people should call and thank them for that. And they should also thank their senate Democratic leaders who have fought tooth and nail and truthfully very strategically smart throughout this process. They did not get into protracted negotiation to destroy the Affordable Care Act. They stayed strong and they stayed united from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin. But none of this would’ve happened without people taking action and I think the thing that we’ve learned, you know some of the lessons going forward is that people are willing to do things that they see can have a real impact on people’s lives. And your resistance matters. Making those calls matter. I mean even when we lost the vote in the House ultimately, you have to recognized that they failed first. They basically had to make a bunch of promises to people that it would get fixed down the road because everyone saw the anger across the country. It made moderates very nervous. It made House Republicans who will now face voters with a terrible vote I just want to remind everyone, nervous and anxious. So you know the key lesson I learned in this process is to keep sharing information with the grassroots. People want to know where the votes are, who to call, what to do. And they will do things and for the people inside Washington that knowing what’s motivating the grassroots, what they care about, what they’re willing to do is central to being an effective opposition movement to a party that is willing to do this. I mean it burdens me to say this, willing to do terrible things to the country.
VALLAS: And all to give tax cuts to millionaires, that being the real agenda.
TANDEN: I mean to be clear, there will be some billionaires in there too. [LAUGHTER] It’s not just the millionaires.
VALLAS: That’s right.
TANDEN: There are billionaires.
VALLAS: It’s a fair point.
TANDEN: There are like yacht owners and insurance executives too that they’re going to help out. So let’s just, you know, I don’t want to make it too small a group.
VALLAS: As much as I want to be focusing today and in the weeks ahead on this success that is the resistance and the activism that we’ve seen grow by the day. I do want to ask you an inside baseball question.
TANDEN: Sure.
VALLAS: I know I want to know the answer, I know millions of people out there want to know what you think about this. What finally swayed John McCain?
TANDEN: So I have to say that, I mean I can say this now, we had heard some reports from folks in Arizona that he was definitely not a sure vote. And I think it was multiple things that swayed him. First of all, the most important is that basically Senator McConnell in order to jam this bill through really, you know, destroyed the processes of the senate. And I think John McCain recognized as an institutionalist that that was a problem. Also the bill is terrible for Arizona, Arizona was a Medicaid expansion state. Their fallback position was just to blow up the insurance markets which would also be terrible for Arizona. So I think honestly it’s hard to look yourself in the eye and say, I am a senator who is going to do the right thing for my state and vote for this bill. I mean the fact that they got 49 Republicans to do that is just a testament to how much people are willing to put party and politics over the needs of the public. But you know, I think that was a huge part of it. There will be a million stories of the psychodrama of great Shakespearean irony of the fact that John McCain, who Donald Trump attacked and maligned as not really a war hero, as the one who did him in. But I actually think, well that’s probably a little bit of it. [LAUGHTER] I mean, I’m not going to say that’s nothing. I do think that McConnell actually sealed the fate of this by engaging in a partisan, destructive process. Everyone likes to malign the ACA but we, it was all regular order. The bill was known for months ahead of time. The idea that they were going to vote on a bill that had been public two hours earlier is just so ludicrous. And I think most senators, I think John McCain recognized he couldn’t be someone who cared about the senate and still vote for that bill.
VALLAS: You mention how unpopular this bill was. I mean in the final days I think at most it had 12% support, some polls even had it at less. But, and I’m speaking about Trumpcare.
TANDEN: Yeah.
VALLAS: The Affordable Care Act has never been more popular than it is now. But the central dynamic of what the Republican party has been trying to do in this health care debate is to take something away from millions of Americans. And that shares a common theme with what they’re going to be trying to do next. Medicaid is not out of the crosshairs, it is absolutely decimated in the Republican budget and in Trump’s budget and that’s where we’re going to be watching them head next is this tax and budget fight which is fundamentally also about taking things away from people. Whether food or housing, what does the defeat on health care and on Affordable Care Act repeal for Republicans mean for the rest of their agenda?
TANDEN: I think this is a central element. And you asked earlier what have we learned? And substantively what I think we’ve learned is something that always has been assumed in politics or assumed wrongly in politics but this really got tested. The Republicans in this bill, just to be clear, in most versions of this bill did not just destroy the Affordable Care Act, they used this as an opportunity to go after the Medicaid program. To basically fundamentally destroy the Medicaid program, to destroy the ability of the Medicaid program to basically be an automatic safety net or a guarantee for low income Americans. And why did they do that? They did it because they thought nobody cared. They thought nobody cared about Medicaid, nobody important cared about Medicaid. It didn’t matter to people, it has always been considered the weakest link in the the so-called entitlements structure. And that’s why they did what they did and you know, I think substantively the most important lesson, and I’ve said this publicly and elsewhere is that they went after Medicaid and in the final analysis, they could not get that passed the Senate. The Senate, in this ridiculously called “skinny repeal” or “skinny BCRA” had to drop the Medicaid program. And I think that is a testament to ADAPT protesters to little lobbyists, to the hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people who rely on Medicaid and who told their stories and explained to people what it meant in their lives.
And why I think this is so critical to the fights we’re going to have before, is Republicans now know that Americans are good enough to care about the most vulnerable. People who aren’t on Medicaid were defending Medicaid. People who may never will be on Medicaid thought, you know what, this is ridiculous. We’re a great country, we don’t need to make these cuts. So I think as we go into this debate on budget and tax issues, which are, you know, when you really boil it down to, you’re cutting the Medicaid program, you’re cutting a bunch of programs for vulnerable people to basically give massive tax cuts to the rich. I think you know, progressives have to very strongly make the case that this is not who America is, what it is, and we just rejected it. And I think Republicans are going to have to really recognize that the country they thought that existed, where they could get away with this, is not the country we have.
VALLAS: Here, here, and words to for sure end this conversation on because I can’t think of a better note to end on. Neera Tanden is —
TANDEN: And can I just say one more thing?
VALLAS: Of course you can. You’re my boss.
[LAUGHTER]
TANDEN: But I gotta just say Rebecca has done an amazing job on health care. She’s done, you’ve done incredible work with the disability community and really defending the Medicaid program throughout this and your leadership inside and outside of CAP has been fundamental to this victory so thank you.
VALLAS: Neera, even if you said that only because it’s my radio show I’m going to take it to the bank! [LAUGHTER] Neera Tanden is —
TANDEN: I’ll go on other radio shows and say it! [LAUGHTER] I’ll go on other podcasts and say it!
VALLAS: I’m not going to stop you. [LAUGHTER] Neera Tanden is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress. She played a huge role in shaping the Affordable Care Act which is still today the law of the land and I could not be happier to say that for millions of Americans, many of whom I know and have such personal stakes in this. Neera thank you for everything you did to save this bill.
[MUSIC]
VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas and I know you missed having it up at the top of the show but in case you missed it, as promised, totally still happening, joined by the Slevinator, as usual, Slevs.
JEREMY SLEVIN: Someday I’m going to get a real name.
VALLAS: Are you saying that Keith Ellison’s name for you is not a real name? Uh, I’m going to tweet that at him and we’ll see what he says.
SLEVIN: OK. Can I just say how much I enjoyed your opening monologue?
VALLAS: Oh, were you listening to the show this week?
[LAUGHTER]
SLEVIN: Who are your writers, because it was beautiful.
VALLAS: Aw, thanks Slevs. You jealous?
SLEVIN: Yeah, maybe a little bit. I mean, you wrote that.
VALLAS: I did write that, thank you. Thank you so much. No I was just speaking extemporaneously. So I feel like now is your moment to shine Slevs, what did we miss this week?
SLEVIN: I think the moment belongs to many activists who have done a lot more in this moment.
VALLAS: Good perspective.
SLEVIN: But my moment on this radio show, as a guest is right now. So I think pivoting away from health care, you mentioned in the opening that knock on wood, health care is for now dead legislatively, Trump will obviously try to sabotage it but what congressional leaders have already announce and they actually came out yesterday announcing this during the health care vote is that they’re teeing up what they’re calling tax reform, which is code word for tax breaks, mainly geared towards the wealthy and corporations. They are explicit that they are trying to slash tax rates for big corporations.
VALLAS: And you’re bringing this up this week because they said some stuff this week.
SLEVIN: Yes. So as I said, yesterday they big 6 which includes Mitch McConnell —
VALLAS: That being Thursday.
SLEVIN: Yes, sorry, giveaway, today is Friday.
VALLAS: You do this every week, every week I’m surprised.
SLEVIN: The worst ever green radio person.
VALLAS: Yeah, yeah.
SLEVIN: Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, the heads of the tax writing committees and Donald Trump all came out and said, here are our principles. And surprise, surprise, much like Trump’s tax reform principles, theirs were about 2 paragraphs long, which I think if you count the number of words, maybe is like, you know, 70 words longer than Trump’s former 1 page tax reform plan. So again, really light on details, we know they want to slash tax rates for corporations and for wealthy individuals. They’re calling it the biggest tax cut ever. Not mentioning the distributional impact. One thing was know from Trump’s tax reform plans is that it will include a giant reduction for him. And that’s because they’re going to change tax rates for non-traditional corporate entities, who usually file through the individual tax code. So like, legal firms and LLCs, and real estate businesses; like Trump has to pay taxes on most of his profit because they’re in his name. And they’re going to make it so they’re taxed at a much, much lower rate than they’re now taxed as corporations. So he will get tens of millions of dollars in windfall from this.
VALLAS: So I think what I’m hearing you say is a couple of things. Thing 1, Republicans still don’t know what they want to do on tax reform but they’re pretending they do.
SLEVIN: Yes.
VALLAS: They aren’t any closer even though they’ve had weeks and weeks and weeks more of meetings. And I think that’s notable given that a lot of experts who have been talking about the future of tax reform and what it’s going to look like have pointed out, tax reform, the devil is in the details, right. It matters tremendously what the chances of actually passing something through the Republican caucus is going to matter tremendously based on the, what’s actually in it, like the details really matter. So principles aren’t going to cut it. That’s sort of thing 1 I’m hearing. Thing 2, they’re still in this same place they’ve always been, which is wanting to move forward their Robin Hood in reverse agenda, right. Take things away from average Americans to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, and that’s what you’re still describing.
SLEVIN: Yeah, well I think that’s right but I wouldn’t rest too easy for a couple reasons.
VALLAS: Well who is resting easy?
SLEVIN: Uh, no one!
VALLAS: I’m saying this is like bad stuff but it’s the same bad stuff, right?
SLEVIN: Well I guess what makes me really scared is a couple things. One, obviously there was a tremendous amount of activism around health care. It’s a lot less visceral when it comes to tax reform and also you have a lot more opacity in the sense that it’s really complicated. Health care is complicated but you know when 22 million people are going to lose insurance, that’s pretty clear. In this case it’s going to be closing loopholes, different carve outs for different business interests, we already know today the Business Roundtable, which is a giant business lobby announced they’re launching a multimillion dollar campaign to make sure they get tax breaks. To make sure tax reform, i.e. tax cuts for them passes. So I think this is going to take a resistance that is at least commensurate or even bigger than what we saw with health care.
VALLAS: Well and I’ll be the good news bearer, because I’m in a frickin’ good mood —
SLEVIN: I’ll be the cynic as always.
VALLAS: I’m in the best mood I’ve been in since the election, I’m going to be totally honest. I, as Neera said she was, I think that not only is the resistance up to the task but we have seen, I mean like going back to December, January, I mean everybody said it was all but certain that the Affordable Care Act was friggin’ history. That was, I’ve said a lot of friggin’ already this morning. People say that it was, it wasn’t even that it was all but certain, people said it was a certainty. People said, it wasn’t even that it was all but certain, people said it was a certainty, right. The Affordable Care Act is gone because Republicans can repeal it without a single Democratic vote and you know what? What we’ve now shown, what the resistance has shown, what activists in the streets and communities across the country has shown is actually things that are deeply unpopular and that the constituents who are the bosses by the way of these senators and members of congress, things that they are saying they don’t want and particularly when the fight and the dynamic in the fight is about congress trying, Republicans in congress trying to take things away from people, that that’s actually, that’s harder for them to do than they realized. They came into office and Trump came into office thinking they were going to be able to, you know, be on easy street to pass their agenda and jam it down the throats of the American people without a single Democratic vote and guess what? The resistance is up to the task. So I’m not saying anything is going to be easy, I’m saying I know we can win.
SLEVIN: Yeah, I totally agree and think of all the times people have predicted there were be resistance fatigue. I think we heard after the election that there would be fatigue and we saw the largest march we’ve ever seen with the women’s march on Washington. And then after that they said oh, it’ll dissipate and at each point in the health care fight there has not been fatigue. It in fact has been the opposite.
VALLAS: It’s only caused people to double down.
SLEVIN: So I will share your optimism on that.
VALLAS: Thank you! Validated I feel. Apparently talking like yoda. So I feel like that’s a good segue into something else that happened this week, right? Because you mentioned that one of the reasons it was so hard for them to actually get health care repeal done was because of inconvenient facts like that 15 million Americans or 22 million Americans, depending on the version of Trumpcare you’re talking were poised to lose health insurance and guess who brought us those facts?
SLEVIN: Yeah, I think anywhere between 15 million and 32 million with the range of plans they put out and the reason we know that of course is because of the Congressional Budget Office.
VALLAS: CBO. Thank you very much.
SLEVIN: The dreamiest, most exciting office on the planet.
VALLAS: It is. I’m actually, I’m fanning myself right now because it’s so dreamy at CBO. No but they’re really important. The job they do is hugely important.
SLEVIN: These are non-partisan experts who have a lot of resources to just crunch numbers, a lot of actuaries who can predict with mathematical models how different legislation will affect people and the economy. They’re really important for health care legislation. They’re really important for the budget, hence the name Congressional Budget Office. They’re how we know how much something will increase the deficit, how many people will lose health care coverage, what the distributional impacts of a tax cut are.
VALLAS: How many people will be pushed into poverty, all this kind of stuff.
SLEVIN: And you know, to be honest, we don’t always like, as a progressive sometimes they say oh this really great anti-poverty measure will increase the deficit, which I think is worthwhile. It’s not like every time there’s a CBO story it’s good news. But we value them because they’re experts and we need expertise in the world.
VALLAS: And there’s a reason there are all kinds of rules in how congress does it’s legislating that require CBO scores of particular pieces of legislation and actually that CBO scores be published with a certain amount of time before votes are actually held. The idea being, and this sounds like common sense but apparently there’s not a lot of that happening in the Republican party right now and in the halls of congress that members of congress should be voting on things that they understand, that they know what they are and that they know what the consequences will be. And that the American people be aware of what the consequences are of legislation being considered. CBO, hugely important, but what happened this week?
SLEVIN: Yes, to cut to the chase, this week, the House Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows, who is I believe the leader of the Freedom Caucus put out an amendment that basically gutted the CBO. It would’ve cost 89 jobs at the CBO. And what it would’ve done is instructed the CBO to no longer do their job essentially. No longer crunch numbers, and instead compile reports and estimates from think tanks. And what he used as an example was the Heritage Foundation, which is a deeply conservative reactionary think tank, is a generous word. And what it said is that basically the think tanks would do the analysis, privatize the CBO effectively and they would just compile these.
VALLAS: Make it into an aggregator. So no longer would the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office be the one charged with doing its job but rather, he basically said, “Why do we really even need them, let’s just massively scale them down to a shell of what they are because we have these think tanks we love like Heritage who give us numbers that we really like,” we being the people who are finding these facts like 15 to 23 to 32 million Americans losing health insurance to be so inconvenient. So Jeremy, do you feel like it’s fair to say that this proposal, which failed so this is actually a good news piece.
SLEVIN: We’ve taken so long to give this really interesting and important tidbit of news. That amendment failed which is a very exciting tidbit of good news.
VALLAS: But it was all about, it was basically legislation embodying the conservative war on facts.
SLEVIN: Yeah.
VALLAS: Facts are inconvenient, they are gumming our Robin Hood in reverse agenda therefore we will eliminate the production of facts, right?
SLEVIN: Yeah, which is really terrifying because while time it failed, they are doing this on a number of levels. They are doing it to NIH, they are gutting science and health research that not only produces facts but saves lives. They are doing it at the Environment Protection Agency. They are eliminating diplomatic staff at the State Department. This is endemic, it’s both an assault on facts and an assault on public expertise. And as anyone who works at a think tank will know, so much of our work relies on the CBO. We’ve done a lot of health care number crunching and as our health team will tell you, almost all of that —
VALLAS: — is based on CBO work!
SLEVIN: Stems from CBO analysis.
VALLAS: That’s right, that’s right. So with this buried lede that I blame you for, really. Because this segment is your Jeremy, so —
[LAUGHTER]
SLEVIN: I’ll take it.
VALLAS: I take no blame for burying the lede and the news in this item but the short version is it failed, and thankfully it did but probably not the last we’ll see from Republicans seeking to avoid inconvenient facts. So, I don’t think you have any other good news this week, do you.
SLEVIN: I don’t have any other good news, I have some bad news that we would be remiss not to mention.
VALLAS: But we need to mention it.
SLEVIN: OK, I think —
VALLAS: Really I mean you need to mention it.
SLEVIN: I think many people saw surprise morning tweets from Donald Trump saying that our trans service members are no longer allowed in the armed forces. We now know the Pentagon didn’t see that coming. Legislators didn’t see that coming, the Pentagon responded and said that the tweets are insufficient. Essentially they’re awaiting an order.
VALLAS: Just to pause and like reflect on that for a second because I know we’re living in Trump’s America as it were, now more than six months in. And sometimes these things just, you know, people pass by moments like this and don’t even reflect on the absurdity, but we’re talking about a president who instead of issuing an executive order or doing anything that actually resembles policy making or even a statement of policy, he’s issuing fiats; no I’m getting that wrong. He’s issuing —
SLEVIN: I think it’s a fiat.
VALLAS: We’ll I was going to say policy by fiat, but fiat by tweet? Tweet by fiat? Tweet fiats?
SLEVIN: Twee-ats!
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: That feels like we’re getting into dangerous territory, let’s back away slowly, point is he’s issuing tweets and that is really actually how he’s dictating what he wants to do.
SLEVIN: Yeah.
VALLAS: Sorry, I just had to say it.
SLEVIN: Nevermind that like horribly reactionary —
VALLAS: No, of course.
SLEVIN: — substance of it. Not to dismiss the way it’s done.
VALLAS: But where do things stand now? So the Pentagon said, whoa, and you can’t just do it through a tweet so do we know anymore?
SLEVIN: As it stands, Trump now needs to issue an order, essentially following through on his tweets. And up to this point he hasn’t done it. So we’ll see.
VALLAS: So as of end of day Friday, giving away when we’re having this conversation but I think it’s helpful. We know what he wants to do but as of now, trans service members can continue to serve in the military because no action has officially been taken in a way that is not twitter involved. Jeremy, next week I’d like you to come back with some good news, but really this is a massive good news week so maybe I’m giving you too hard of a time.
SLEVIN: This was a lot of good news.
VALLAS: Yeah. Well also —
SLEVIN: CBO amendment defeated, tax reform we can defeat.
VALLAS: Yeah.
SLEVIN: Obviously the trans ban is terrible but as of yet he hasn’t followed through on his tweets.
VALLAS: And the biggest good news of all, and this is why I’m going to give you a pass because I’m in the best news, best mood, best mood, I can’t even speak! Best mood I’ve been in since the election, it’s a good news kind of day, a good news kind of week because 20 million Americans still have health insurance. So with that, Jeremy thank you for helping us not miss things, in ‘In Case You Missed It’.
SLEVIN: Thank you for having me.
VALLAS: And I’ll see you back next week, Slevs. Don’t go away, more Off-Kilter after the break.
[MUSIC]
VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. From “My Fair Lady” to “Precious”, images on film can have effects. And if politics at least in part is a struggle over which stories we tell ourselves about our country, then one thing seems likely; movies matter. So argues a new book called, “Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen” which explores how American movies have portrayed poor and homeless people from the silent era to present day. I’m so pleased to be joined by the author and a friend, Stephen Pimpare, he serves as a senior lecturer in American politics and public policy at the University of New Hampshire. Stephen, thank you so much for joining the show.
STEPHEN PIMPARE: Thank you for having me.
VALLAS: So before we get into what you found, I just, I have to ask the question, how did you come to do this research? How did you end up with the idea for this book?
PIMPARE: You know I wish I had a great answer to that question, the truth is I don’t remember at this point. I do know that at some point as I was finishing up the previous book, “A People’s History of Poverty” was starting to think about other places that I thought had been neglected in the area that I care about. And I think somehow had sort of glanced at my shelf and saw the copy of Vito Russo’s “Celluloid Closet” of course a history of representation of gays and lesbians in film. And I think somewhere in that process and I’m not sure it was immediate, something sort of clicked in the back of my head and I went, huh, I read an awful lot about this yet I don’t recall having read too much about sort of the intersection of poverty policy and the cultural representations of poor and homeless people.
VALLAS: So another question before we get into what you found, but I think that this is probably something that folks may be wondering if they haven’t read the book, I know I was wondering before I started to actually scour the pages. How did you define poverty for purposes of which films and which characters you decided to study for this book?
PIMPARE: The initial plan was I was going to come up with some sort of very fancy, sophisticated means by which I would be able to, you know, sort of turn over a movie to anyone and they would all come to the exact same conclusion about whether it counted about being about poverty or not. And very quickly determined that even me looking at the same movie at different moments I would come to different kinds of conclusions. So I spent a fair bit of time in the introduction sort of talking about the messiness and the murkiness of that process. You know a lot of what for me matters is if we are, you know, looking at places that the films seems to be telling us are populated with poor people. Then that’s something that I wind up counting. If we’re looking at people interacting with housing authorities or with relief offices or with the food stamp program or with disability, then that will fall into that category. If you know, some of them are obvious. If you think about “Precious”, it’s really obvious that we are talking a very poor black family in Harlem in the 1980s. Other movies I think different people would disagree about whether it is about poverty or not but I’m trying to sort of identify what I think are films that are communicating a message, whether the filmmakers are intending that or not.
VALLAS: So for this book you looked at about 300 American made films, just under 300 American made films that were released between 1902 and 2015. And so I guess the million dollar question here is what were your key takeaways? What are the ways that poverty and poor people and related policies are represented throughout American cinema?
PIMPARE: I mean I think there are ultimately a number of different ways in which I think it plays out. The first one is that perhaps not surprisingly given the complaints that you and I and others have made about the difficulty getting the political system to pay attention to marginalized populations of all kind is that when all is said and done I don’t think that movies wind up caring too much about poor and low income people and homeless populations. It’s real difficult to get a good handle on the number of total films that have been made in the U.S. But estimates, you know, figure maybe 70,000, maybe 100,000, maybe as many as 200,000 total movies made since 1902. As you say, I argue that perhaps 300 of them are in some non-trivial kind of way, focused principally or at least purported to be focused principally on poor and homeless people. So I think that’s sort of the first takeaway for me. And again, I think not terribly surprising perhaps that at least that arm of the popular culture has not worked terribly hard to give us images of poor and homeless people. The related thing that I found, and this did come as a surprise, and I think is still sort of something that I find fascinating and not entirely sure what to make of is that even a lot of those movies that present themselves as being concerned about poor people or homeless people are not in fact.
So if you think of something like “My Man Gofrey” or “Sullivan’s Travels” from the 1930s or the various movie versions of “Oliver Twist” or something more recent that some of your listeners may be familiar with, “My Own Private Idaho”, those are all movies, the first two from the 1930s showing us tramps in the Depression era, “Oliver Twist” probably familiar to most people, begging from more gruel in the orphanage. And in “My Own Private Idaho” the young kids tramping around Seattle or Portland, I think it’s Seattle, trading sex for food and trying to get by on the streets. Those are all movies that are presenting themselves as being concerned with homeless people, homeless men in particular, but they’re not really. And the first two movies in the ’30s, those are both actually rich guys in disguise. In the first instance, Godfrey is actually of the Boston Godfrey Park, he wound up wandering down to the shanty towns one night, desolates, and found some comradery there with the men and decided he was going to hang out there for a while. And when that had no longer been useful, he returned to his life in the fancy Fifth Avenue townhouse.
“Sullivan’s Travels” is actually about a film director who is going out to try to understand poor and homeless people. “Oliver Twist” you may remember is an urchin it would appear, but actually the heir to a very large fortune that he winds up claiming at the end. And then finally as I said, in “My Own Private Idaho” Keanu Reeves, one of those two central characters turns out to be, and we only learn this in the end of the movie, the mayor’s son and decides in the end that he’s had enough of this sort of forming exercise and decides to go back and take the place that his father wanted him to take. This shows up over and over and over again. We’ve got these movies that are presenting themselves as being stories about poor and homeless people that turn out not to be. So that for me is sort of one of the ways in which so it turns out to be this interesting and surprising kind of thing that plays out in one other way. And that is if you think about movies like “The Fisher King” or something a little bit more recently “The Soloist”, right, “The Soloist” is a movie about a homeless former Juilliard musician played by Jamie Foxx living on the streets in Los Angeles and a reporter played by Robert Downey Jr. who winds up stumbling across him and decided to write stories about him. Even if you look at the advertising for that movie, it seems to be about the Jamie Foxx character, right. It’s about this African-American homeless man in Los Angeles. But my reading of the narrative, I think if you really watch that movie closely and look at how it’s playing out that story and where it’s focusing it’s attention and whose viewpoint is being given pride of place, is being privileged. It’s a story about Robert [Downey] Jr. It’s a story about the ways in which he puts his life back together by saving this homeless man. So again we see, and think this plays out again over and over again in which homeless people and poor people are object to be acted upon, not subjects in their own right.
VALLAS: And perhaps not viewed as the target audience for these types of films.
PIMPARE: Absolutely.
VALLAS: But rather a piece of a storyline wherein they’re not going to be the protagonist.
PIMPARE: Yeah, I think there’s a British film scholar who a number of a years ago, Laura Mulvey who talked about film having a male gaze, right. This is hardly surprising to anyone who watches movies, even if it’s getting a little bit better. And these are movies by and large still made by men for men. I think that movies also have a property gaze in that way. These are movies made by people with money by and large given what it takes to put a movie together, right. And that it is exceedingly rare that they are thinking of poor and homeless and otherwise marginalized populations as their audience. They are not making these for the people who they are about and often not going to the trouble of including the subjects of those stories in the production process, right. So movies, for making a movie about blowing up ships and going to war they will typically bring in consultants from the DOD in order to make sure they’re getting details right or I think it’s now standard practice for most cop films to bring in consultants, former police officers who will come in and you know, teach the actors how to hold a gun properly and that sort of stuff.
We don’t have the equivalent in, for movies about poor and homeless people. We don’t have filmmakers recognizing that they don’t know anything about the worlds that they’re portraying and don’t have sort of the awareness or the humility to actually bring in those folks to help them understand what those worlds are like. So we get these third and fourth and fifth hand images of what it’s like to be poor and homeless and you know, unfortunately and perhaps again not surprisingly that winds up reinforcing some of them ugliest and most pernicious stereotypes of poverty and homelessness in the U.S.
VALLAS: So it’s impossible to have a conversation about media portrayals, and I’m thinking mostly about sort of news coverage of poverty and of poor people without naming the welfare queen. I’m curious in these cinematic context, what are your takeaways about how race and gender and also the concept of so-called welfare programs, anti-poverty programs, how do those themes appear on screen?
PIMPARE: Well I mean going back to what I said about Laura Mulvey’s observation in the 1970s, films I still think and even films about poverty and homelessness have a male gaze. And by and large the movies that I am concerned with, they are about men, especially if you’re looking about movies about homelessness. They are almost always about men, disproportionately men of color living on the streets even though of course we know that the larger share of the homeless population today and this has been true for decades now are in fact women with children. And we get this sort of further disconnect from reality. The portrayals of women are scarce. But they do at least again in my reading, tend to be better in lots of ways and there’s a sort of funny set of movies about funny meaning odd, I don’t think there’s anything particularly funny about them, sort of very low budget made for television movies that wound up appearing on Lifetime about homeless women and their kids and it actually did something that we very rarely see in the movies which is actually see that decline into poverty and that decline into homelessness. It’s again, one of the things that I find is that if you’re seeing a poor, homeless character in the movie, their state is typically static and they exist there to be poor or to be homeless and nobody’s particularly interested in their own particular journey.
Then a few of these movies, particularly about women showing sort of that slippery slope, right, the ways in which they’re sort of leading insecure lives and you know, one divorce and loss of a job later and suddenly you’ve got insecure housing and other thing goes wrong and suddenly you’re living in your car and that goes wrong and boom you’re in a shelter or on the streets. [INAUDIBLE] And some of those movies are really just, lovely and exceedingly difficult to find, to find them all on old video tapes and old libraries. I wonder if part of what’s going on there is that even today it is easier for women to get into positions of decision makinng power in television than it is in film. And that is simply a reflection of the fact that it is therefore on television and it easier for them to find spaces where they can tell stories about people who are more like them.
VALLAS: So part of the beauty of your book is that it spans over a century of filmmaking in this country. One of the questions I know I went into it with is have the representations of poverty and of poor people changed over time and are there any real patterns or takeaways that you have looking at that span that you exploit for purposes of this book?
PIMPARE: Most of what I find is fairly consistent rather than patterns of change. There are, you know, sort of occasional moments when we get tiny collections of movies that seem to be a little bit more thoughtful, there are decades when you get more attention to the matter than others. But I, and I was looking for the same thing when I went into the project, right. Am I going to see change over time and really the only sort of already existing literature we have is on the 1930s, right, was I going to find you know, this radically different and more sympathetic and more empathetic portrayal of poor and homeless people in the ’30s than in other periods. I didn’t even find that. And that did surprise me a little bit. I thought surely at least in that moment when there was so much widespread suffering and it was at least you know, for a tiny period of time there was at least some public rhetoric that did not make you a demon for seeking relief. Even lots of those movies made in the ’30s and later movies about the ’30s wind up using your receipt of public assistance as an indicator of your lack of moral fiber. And it pops up over and over and over again, and again, you know I don’t know which is chicken and which is egg here. Are these cultural representations sort of so permeating the world that we live in that it shapes our policy wheras as the policy so devoted to demonizing poor and homeless people and blaming them for their state that filmmakers who are not poor people are simply picking up on those messages and reflecting back on them.
My best suspicion is that we’ve got kind of a feedback cycle there. That those things wind up feeding each other and when you do get you know, filmmakers with more by way of first hand experience, smaller independent films that are offering us more thoughtful portrayals, those are seen by far fewer people. So they have less opportunity to permeate the culture and affect the way that people are thinking about these issues.
VALLAS: And that’s one of the central themes that you really question, that you explore throughout this book is sort of that relationship between, or that question of causation or of consequence. Are these portrayals a reflection of American attitudes towards marginalized people or do they actually create them? And so where, are you landing in a place of it’s really, it’s both, it’s not one or the other or are we, do we need to be actually casting some level of blame but also potentially hope on cinema for its role in shaping attitudes?
PIMPARE: Well you know, I mean I think that some of the worst offenders are movies that, do genuinely believe they mean well. You know, it’s, I perhaps reserve some of my harshest language and harshest criticism in the book for “Precious”. A movie that I loathe so deeply it is hard to express. I thought that that sort of encapsulated every ugly, racist, misogynist, ignorant stereotype on people on welfare that we have bothered to create over the last 50 years. And that much more troubling given that folks like Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey use their resources and their audience to function as producers and as marketers to see that that movie got a much larger audience. I don’t believe that any of the people involved in that film read it the same way that I did. I don’t think that they were saying you know, let’s tell the ugliest possible story we can tell about our own communities in order to reinforce those ugly political stereotypes that go back at least to Reagan and Goldwater in the 1960s. I don’t believe for a moment that that’s what they intended.
VALLAS: Well you actually quote at length from Oprah Winfrey as well as Tyler Perry in their takes on the film and how much it mirrored their own personal experiences which I found interesting. I certainly hadn’t seen those quotes although I was aware of some of the controversy around the film. But I feel like what you get into exploring in that film in particular in this book is really the question of what is authenticity, right? Can you take one person’s experience, which may actually be authentic and authentically portrayed in film, but then have that be an unproblematic presentation of poverty to audience who maybe don’t seen any other representations or don’t see different representations?
PIMPARE: And I mean that for me is sort of precisely the important point, right. If we lived in a world in which we had the enormously diverse and complicated array of poor and low-income African American families from the 1980s and ’90s, I don’t think that I would’ve reacted quite that strongly against that movie because it would have been one among many. It’s not one among many, right. That’s the only thing that a lot of American audiences will ever see put in front of them purporting to depict those particular families and those particular communities. So that then winds up reinforcing all of those ugly, pernicious and I think deeply dangerous stereotypes. So I think that, you know, under those circumstances, I know this is one of those cases in which, you know, I am arguably asking filmmakers, putting burdens on filmmakers that they have business, they have no interest in having put on them. And I totally get that. But nonetheless, I think particularly if you’re someone like Oprah Winfrey or you’re someone like Tyler Perry, you have a much larger obligation to think about the effect of what you say and what you write, given the influence that you know that it will have in the world. This is, you know, I think if you look back to sort of protests around the Al Pacino movie “Cruising”, which was this sort of awful, ugly movie about turned out to be set in gay bars in New York, turns out to be a sadistic gay serial killer. Part of the outrage about that movie is that they had to work really hard to find images of gay people on film. And this is what Hollywood was given.
That movie made today, I don’t think, and maybe I’m wrong here, but I don’t think it would elicit quite the same kind of outrage because even though we’ve still got a long way to go I think, we have a much richer, broader, more diverse array of images of gays and lesbians and even transgender folks now. So that that becomes one among many and I think that for me we have to read that, the effect that that has on the culture and that is has on our politics in a different kind of way.
VALLAS: In a section of your book, in the last couple of minutes that I have with you, and frankly I could have this conversation with you all day so it’s almost breaking my heart to have to bring it to a close but you have a whole section of the book that’s really very much devoted to homelessness and homeless people that their portrayals on the silver screen. And you hark to a sociologist named Teresa Gowen who identifies three ways that people explain homelessness. She calls them “sin talk, sick talk, and system talk.” Or put differently in her words still, homelessness as moral offense, homelessness as pathology, and homelessness as the product of systemic injustice or instability. And you come to a slightly different conclusion using a little bit of different terminology, the four V’s, vaudevillian, villain, victor and victim. I would love to hear your thoughts about not just the homelessness component here and portrayals of homelessness in movies but how the sort of, where to place the blame component of these portrayals of poverty, of poor people, of homeless people in movies. How does that play into why all of this matters when it comes to politics and policymaking?
PIMPARE: I think in some ways it goes back a little bit to what I was arguing earlier is that I think that because at least I find a certain kind of sameness, even though there is a little variation around the edges, to these portrayals. I worry and this frustrates me as a social scientists because I feel like right now I don’t have the tools to be sort of empirically more sophisticated but I worry that the repetition of those same set of images over and over again mirror in both political institutions and in cultural institutions winds up making it that much harder for us to make good policy. So I mean, I think a lot of what winds up happening on film with homeless men is they are either, when they are not the tools that somebody else is going to use to achieve their own redemption, they are there to be mocked, they are there [as] jokes, they are there to be made fun of. Their state is funny and something to be laughed at or derided or they are villains. And there’s this large spate of films, particularly in the 1980s, I think not coincidentally during the periods of so-called homelessness crisis in the big cities in which you’ve got a whole bunch of horror movies in which homeless characters are the chief villains.
It was sort of one of the silliest and most egregious offenders in the movie called “C.H.U.D: Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers” who are literally homeless men who are contaminated by some kind of toxic waste, who rise up from the sewers in order to attack respectable populations. And I think that, you know, yeah it’s just a horror movie, come on, get over yourself, you’re being silly. But I think if these are the kinds of images that over and over and over again you’re just casually having wash over you, right. You’re not in that theater in order to get sort of a social message, so your consciousness is not keyed into critical thought, but you’re having these stereotypical images wash over you while you’re focused on something else. I worry that that’s a part of what makes it so consistently difficult for us to create sound and empathetic policy for poor, low income, and homeless populations.
VALLAS: Well to end on a positive note, by contrast, what would you hold up as a film that you think portrays poverty and poor or homeless people well or in a way that maybe meets the authenticity test but also doesn’t perpetuate myths, stereotypes or just truly ugly narratives like the one that you just described?
PIMPARE: Well it’s a movie that I write about and think about as the antidote to “Precious” is a movie from the 1970s called “Claudine” that I just love and maybe I think the single best representation of poor women on welfare that you ever likely to encounter on television or film. And it’s really nicely done and it’s smart and it’s funny and it’s James Earl Jones and just prepare yourself, you’re going to see James Earl Jones naked. But it is beautifully done. [INAUDIBLE] Movie that people may be familiar with, “Grapes of Wrath”, I still still think holds up beautifully. A movie I think I referenced in passing earlier, “Winter’s Bone”, sort of one of those more sympathetic portrayals, rural poverty with women at the center I think does a lot to sort of capture just the ways in which so many of those characters are pinioned. There’s so little space for them to choose and to act, I think that’s lovely. And then maybe the last one I would mention is a documentary called “The Pruitt Igoe Myth” that is maybe the single best explanation of public housing and urban segregation and poverty that you’re likely to run across on film and honestly it beats a heck of a lot of books that have been written about it.
VALLAS: Stephen Pimpare is a senior lecturer at the University of New Hampshire. He focuses on American politics and public policy. He’s also the author of a book before this one called “A People’s History of Poverty in America” something that I would recommend folks pick up given their interest in these issues. But his book, “Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen” can be found anywhere books can be found. Stephen, thank you so much for joining the show.
And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced each week by Eliza Schultz. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow. And you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio network, or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.
