Digital Athena
How Zephyr Teachout brings ecstasy to reform
Zephyr Teachout, legal scholar, trust-buster and New York politician, rides beside me in an Uber car that’s meat-locker cold and fragrant with Spear O Mint. Running late, we’re trying to get her to Kennedy Airport in time to fly to Cambridge to lecture at Harvard on corruption in politics.
“During the campaign, I refused to take Uber,” Teachout says, suddenly pious. I notice she doesn’t quite settle into her seat, as if still keeping her distance from the $15 billion “ridesharing” business that currently threatens municipal taxi services in the U.S. and 45 other countries. Teachout had a wild ride this summer decrying just this kind of privatization as a populist Democratic gubernatorial candidate in New York. In September she won more than half the counties in the state, though Andrew Cuomo, the well-heeled incumbent, took the nomination with some 62% of the vote.
Teachout is a little overbright this morning. Her haircut — inspired by Claire Underwood’s on House of Cards — is freshly bleached, and her complexion is a mix of pink cosmetics and native flush. I know she has a ferocious hangover; she was out drinking till predawn hours, and she adjusts her sunglasses against the morning light. She’s wearing a blue Trina Turk suit with a 3D-printed necklace featuring a pink plastic flower that she bought on the street in Brooklyn. Even in this cold Lincoln she seems physically hot, as though the booze, the adrenaline and the studio lights of “The Daily Show” — last night she appeared with Jon Stewart, discussing her book “Corruption in America” —are still coursing through her.
Aw, come on. Who doesn’t like a town car? “Uber’s kinda nice in moderation, don’t you think?” I ask. Teachout’s an old friend. We went to high school together in New Hampshire, in an earnest, athletic, tomboy culture in which Teachout —an ardent Nordic skier and track star — was the local ideal. She was known in those days for her sublime athleticism and absolute commitment to gender equality.
She frowns. “There’s a lot that’s wrong with Uber,” she says. “It’s terrible for the unions.”
Ah, yes: Zephyr Teachout. The true believer, the never-not-reforming reformer and the anti-corruption activist. The Athena at the front lines of the tech revolution, determined to keep that revolution in hands of the people rather than the billionaires aiming to monopolize it.
All summer she campaigned on these anti-money, power-to-the-people platforms — against fracking, against the Time Warner-Comcast merger, against the privatization of schools and their federalization via the Common Core Standards Initiative. But most of all she’s against, yes, corruption. The American project is an anti-corruption one, in her view; so is the Zephyr Teachout project. And so she found herself genuinely aghast that, last April, just after she announced her long-shot candidacy, Gov. Cuomo boarded up the Moreland Commission, a panel he himself had convened to investigate corruption less than a year earlier.
Moreland’s preliminary report had uncovered “an epidemic of public corruption” in New York. That was enough for Cuomo to pull the plug. It was also enough to electrify Teachout.
Back in May, over breakfast, she told me that she had committed to running not by picturing Teddy Roosevelt or Mohammad Ali, two of her heroes. Rather, she pictured Anthony Weiner. That’s right: Wiener, the sexter, former congressman and failed candidate for mayor of New York City. “If I end up disgraced and humiliated like Anthony Weiner, can I live with that?” she’d asked herself. “And I could! I love a fight! I don’t care about gaffes! This is worth it to me. Someone needs to challenge the corruption of the old-boys’ network in Albany.”
More than fracking or Cuomo or mergers, then, it’s the epidemic of public corruption — nationwide —that is Teachout’s Lex Luthor.
And that corruption is a formidable foe. For one, the corrupt are sexy: think of The Good Wife, Scandal, House of Cards, The Sopranos. Reform, by contrast, rarely makes primetime: it’s all rule of law, prudery and temperance unions. Could Teachout make anti-corruption reform charismatic? She believed she could. Much of the strategy employed by Teachout — and her popular running mate, Tim Wu — was drawn from what she had invented as Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, and as a developer of Internet tools (for event-planning and volunteer matching) that were used in Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012.
When it comes to digital campaigning, Teachout is most passionate about keeping a campaign legitimately open-source. “If people have the desire to do something for you, you never say no,” she tells me now, as we speed along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She admired this strategy when Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul used it, she says. You let people make signs, videos, logos, buttons, slogans. You let them sub a campaign avatar for their own on Facebook and Twitter. You let them be DIY Zephyr Teachout franchisees. “It’s an ethos of empowerment. If you’re a supporter in Poughkeepsie, we don’t have time to tell you what to do, so we tell you to figure it out. We empower your desire.”
Teachout is very, very good at empowering desire — and engendering it. Unmarried and 41, Teachout is an almost comically ardent person, and never short on admirers. “Of course I took a lover during the campaign,” she confides. “I just needed that release, you know? He’s really hot.” Half of me thinks she must have forgotten I’m writing about her to make this disclosure; the other half is not surprised at all. Teachout never fails to put me in mind of the young hot-eyed idealist Hillary Rodham, in 1969, when she gave the valedictory address at Wellesley. “We need more ecstatic modes of being!” Rodham then told the puzzled assembly. Forty-five years later, Teachout — and maybe Teachout alone — embodies the Democratic Party’s more ecstatic mode of being.
Ecstasy is unusual in a reformer. Almost unheard of. Doesn’t Teachout ever want to sell out, and enjoy the free bottled water and profligate air-conditioning of an app-summoned limousine?
The night before Jon Stewart had put a version of this question to her, conjuring New York’s stock backroom melodrama: “A billionaire financier or a big union comes by and they say, ‘I have a large bag. It has a dollar sign painted on it. I could drop it off for you, if that would be helpful.’”
On Comedy Central, Teachout laughed throatily at the cartoonish image. She laughs often — a joyful laugh to match her huge, toothy smile. And then, instead of righteously condemning the moneybag scenario, she admitted to being vulnerable to money’s seductions herself.
“I’d like to say that I’d be able to resist that,” she said. Stewart had teed up Teachout, who once considered becoming a minister, to preach. Instead, she copped to having sinned herself. Evidently prospective big-money donors who disliked her support of the teachers’ unions had approached her and led her to wonder: Should she sell off her union support if the proceeds might advance her campaign? Teachout admitted, “It’s so tempting to get caught up in that net.” (She must not have caved, as her support for the United Federation of Teachers helped define her campaign.)
Teachout really gets the word tempt. Corruption to her, she told Stewart, comprises “all the kinds of ways that money can tempt politicians.” In “Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuffbox to Citizens United” (Harvard University Press), Teachout argues that the Supreme Court violates the spirit of American democracy when it defines corruption narrowly as quid pro quo. She advocates for a return to a more robust definition that includes “not just include blatant bribes and theft from the public till, but. . .many situations where politicians and public institutions serve private interests at the public’s expense.” Campaign money, then, did not get funneled to Uber, say, but rather to her subway Metrocard: Teachout takes public transportation — the New York City subway, the bus and Amtrak — wherever possible.
OK, I get it: Teachout distrusts Uber, Time-Warner, Comcast, oil companies, multinationals, and banks. She denies herself private-sector luxuries. She rides a bike. She runs. This tracks with the way we grew up: with woodstoves, and woodstacking, and a range of Yankee chores. I used to shirk mine. She didn’t. Hers included weeding, painting and killing chickens with garden shears.
“I want to reclaim the word ‘politician,’” Teachout says. “There’s joy in it. I don’t like this idea that ‘only when I’m called on’ will I run; only when the world’s coming to an end. I do this because I love it.” I ask her how her health is after months on the campaign trail. “Not to brag but I’m always in great health,” she says. “I only want to get back to more serious exercise again. And be more radiant.”
Hm. Even with a hangover Teachout is pretty goddamned radiant. She’s ecstatic, even. She’s publishing a book, appearing on “The Daily Show,” socking it to Andrew Cuomo, lining up a big career in politics, lecturing at Harvard, and taking a lover. We’re at the American Airlines terminal. I ask her what’s next and she flagrantly dodges the question, kisses me goodbye. The door to the Uber car slams — and she disappears into a revolving door in her blue suit.
“Back to Brooklyn,” I tell the driver, suddenly sad. Maybe this is how political sidekicks always feel once the whirlwind pol leaves for her next appointment. And this car does seem like a silly extravagance, now much less lively without Zephyr. This is one of the times I wish I weren’t a crony to Zephyr Teachout, who despises cronyism. I wish I were Andrew Cuomo’s crony. Cuomo would never have let me pay for the car. He’d have thanked me for my unstinting support, and told the Uber driver to take me to straight to Atlantic City, where a high-floor hotel suite, dinner at Bobby Flay Steak and tickets to something seamy like “The Real Men of Scores” would be already paid for. But no matter how hot that show was, I’d know that Zephyr Teachout, wherever she was, would be having a better time than I was.
