The Interview
Arianna Huffington
By John Koch, Boston Globe
What's your ultimate aim as columnist and author?
It's so hard to talk about this without sounding like Miss America, without platitudes about wanting to change the world. I want to be more concrete. Part of what drives me is outrage and indignation, like when I read about the women who are in jail now for nonviolent drug offenses who get 20- to 25-year sentences. The second issue is the huge, growing disparities in income. The third is the political corruption of the way that we're funding our campaigns.
You've been criticized for changing political stripes.
There is consistency in my concerns. But there is evolution in my thinking about where I see the solutions coming from. I used to believe we could have a huge citizen involvement in charitable giving to poverty-fighting.
You supported compassionate conservatism before it was called that.
But through hard experience, I saw that the private sector was not there in terms of responding to the needy. The vast majority of charitable giving goes to three things: the arts, fashionable museums especially; teaching hospitals; and prestigious educational institutions like Harvard. Having fund-raised for both the arts and homeless shelters, it was much easier to raise money for museums and the opera. I've been challenging people to give where the greatest need is. I advocate tithing, giving 10 percent of one's income, for those who can afford it, to poverty-fighting specifically.
You do this yourself?
Yes, I give 10 percent of my gross income to poverty-fighting. If I want to give more, to the opera, I don't consider that tithing. But we cannot solve the major social problems without the raw power of government appropriations.
How do you reconcile your affluent, even glitzy, lifestyle with your social conscience?
There is always a tension. I have a huge admiration for people who give up everything and go live in the middle of the people they are advocating for, as Jonathan Kozol did in the South Bronx. But I also think that people who are affluent have an even greater responsibility to be involved in the solution of social problems in a direct way. If you look at any social movement, it has always been a coalition of people who are going to benefit directly and people who are not, who are there because of their sense of justice. So I don't see a contradiction, but there is definitely a tension.
How does coming from another culture, Greece, affect your perspective?
It's very useful being an outsider. I've been an outsider longer than I've been an insider. I lived in England for 12 years, and I was an outsider there even more than here, because of my strong accent. Here, you can have an accent like mine and be secretary of state. Also, I don't mind stepping on people's toes, even my friends' or former friends', if I believe something is right. I don't need to be universally liked.
How much time do you devote to the columns?
Three days of my week, sometimes four. I love my work. I have my office in my house. I can put my children to sleep and go back to my writing. Mercifully, I can write with a lot of distractions. Isabella [one of Huffington's two young daughters] can be on my lap drawing, and I can keep working. It's part of being very tribal. I've always lived in the middle of a lot of commotion, and I love that. Unfortunately, I lost my mother at the end of August. She lived with me really all my life. She would not let a FedEx man come in without offering something to eat. It was like being in a Greek village.
As a child, what were your dreams about the future?
I always wanted to be either a journalist, which my father was, or a politician, which everybody in Greece wants to be - which is why we're such an unstable democracy. Now, I'm absolutely sure that I don't want to run for office. [Huffington was married to millionaire Michael Huffington, a Republican with political ambitions who ran for the Senate in 1994 and lost.]
Your advice to the new president?
Be bold. Don't just say you don't listen to the polls: Fire your pollsters. End the abuses of the drug war; really address what is happening in education. Elementary education is in a crisis, and that is a federal issue. And insist on McCain-Feingold [the campaign finance reform bill] becoming law. Bush has said we need to change the world one soul at a time. My advice would be pick up the pace.
Where do you see hope for politics in the future?
The book I'm working on is precisely about this. I see the source of hope in a movement that's building around the country, to a large extent among young people in colleges and even high schools. Young people are organizing against the abuses of our criminal justice system, and it's still very much beneath the radar screen of the mainstream media. This and the abuses of the drug war, and the racial disparities of the drug war, have become organizing injustices around which people are mobilizing. They're organizing very much along the lines of the early civil rights movement.
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