Get Used to It: Ep. 150, "Voices of Our Lives: Rick Jacobs"

(typewriter keys punching) (upbeat rock music) - Hi, welcome to "Get Used to It." I'm Sheila Kuehl, your, I was gonna say erstwhile, but I guess that means used to be, and I still am your kind of hostess through our hour's discussion. Every so often as I hope you know, we have an interview with a person that we think can carry a whole hour just on the interest of their own life. We call it "Voices of our Lives." People in our LGBT community who have made a difference, are making a difference. And today, my guest, I'm happy to say is Rick Jacobs, who is the Founder and Director of the Courage Campaign, which is an online organizing organization of, well, probably over 700, 750,000 people in California. So welcome, Rick. - Thank you, Sheila. Really happy to be here. - I'm glad you're here. We hear your name a lot in various places, and Courage Campaign, and Camp Courage, which we're going to do a show about, organizing camp for activists in California so far, but maybe beyond as it goes. But the thing I think of interest to the people who watch the show when we're doing a one-on-one like this is kind of, well, never mind only what they're doing today. How the heck did they get there? So let's, if you don't mind, let's talk about Rick Jacobs kind of from the beginning a little bit. Where were you born? - Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which is about 19 miles from Knoxville in East Tennessee. - Tennessee. So does that make you a Southerner, or a Mid-Southerner, or what's a Tennessee person? - Well, it depends where in Tennessee, but yeah, Southerner, except that Oak Ridge was built as part of the Manhattan project to build the atomic bomb in World War II. So it didn't exist until sometime in 1942. And so a lot of people like my parents went there. My parents moved there from Chicago in 1950 and Oak Ridge didn't really quite belong where it was. It happened to be there. And the old expression went that Oak Ridge wasn't sure it belonged in Tennessee, but Tennessee was sure it didn't belong in Tennessee, but it was great. It was a wonderful place to grow up. - Well, it sounds like an interesting place to grow up. Why were your folks there? I mean, they both came to work at the project? - Yes. My parents came by in 1950. It's interesting, as recently as 1950 and probably a little later, Jews could not get lots of jobs in chemical companies and oil companies. So my dad was a chemical engineer and he didn't have a very good job in Chicago and the government was hiring in Oak Ridge. And so they jumped in the car and they moved. And it was a big deal in 1950 to leave the big city and go so far away. And they stayed. - And did you have any idea kind of what mommy and daddy were working on? - Not really. Both parents worked. My dad, as I said, was a chemical engineer. and I know eventually he worked on something called the liquid metal fast breeder reactor, which I know rolls off everybody's tongues these days. - [Sheila] Sure. - Later on, he was working on classified stuff as everybody was there. And I thought until I went away to college that everybody's dad and mom worked behind fences and that you couldn't visit them at the office. I thought that was normal because there were probably 15 or 18,000 people working at the government facilities there and they were all secret. - Hmm. Siblings? - I have an older brother who lives in Houston and an older sister who lives in Salt Lake City. And my sister has become, well, over the years, she's been a bit of an activist, but over Prep 8 particularly in Salt Lake, she became a huge activist. - On our side? - Absolutely. Good question! - Okay. You know, you don't know in Salt Lake, I guess, you know, no offense to anyone. People were on both sides of that. So what was your childhood like in Tennessee? - You know, it was really very, very good. It was an easy, pretty easy childhood. I describe Oak Ridge as Mayberry with PhDs. The sort of currency of the city because it was almost a socialist town in a lot of ways, most people made about the same amount of money within some small range. And so maybe the big bosses made three times what the smaller bosses or whatever made. I mean, so there wasn't a big income disparity. And so the currency of the city was actually intellectual capital. And at the top of the pyramid was the theoretical physicists, and then the applied physicists, and then some sort of chemists and on down, and the engineers were somewhere here, and the life sciences people were at the bottom, but that's who you looked up to, you looked up to the theoretical physicists and the applied physicists and it had nothing to do with money. It only had to do with how these guys, and mostly guys comported themselves, what they knew. They were traveling all over the world. People were coming to Oak Ridge from everywhere because it was this scientific city, so a great place to grow up. - So have you had thoughts about it since in terms of understanding later kind of what your dad was involved in? - Yes, yes, I have. And it's a good question because I'm very pro, I'm just very pronuclear in a certain way because I grew up with it. So nuclear plants don't bother me and I know that'll bother a lot of people who see this, but I grew up around it. And I know that there are a lot of problems obviously with reprocessing, and there are a lot of problems with the fuel cycle, but it isn't something that scares me. What scares me is the politics of it and the non-proliferation side of it. And my dad's job, as I later found out at the end of his career was actually as an analyst for the CIA, divisions of these people that would look at satellite pictures trying to figure out who was building nuclear capacity, weapons capacity around the world. So in a sense, he was in involved at a very low level in trying to stop that. - Well, it sounds like a kind of a bubble in a way. Did you stay there all the way through high school? - I did. I stayed there and it was a bubble. It absolutely was a bubble. Everybody went to public school. The city was not integrated. It was, again, built by the government in the '40s and there was a Black section of town. And it's a little more integrated now, I think much more, but there's still a Black section of town even today. However, there was only one high school. And so that was integrated from 1943 onward, which was very strange. And on the other hand, to me, that's how we grew up. It was normal. So it was a bubble. - And did you have any sense about your sexual orientation growing up that young? - I did, I did. I had a sense of my sexual orientation very early on. And somehow, I used to be attracted to, I remember this, to men with hairy chests when I was a little boy. I remember looking up and going, ah. But I only kind of think about that these days in retrospect. But yeah, I did, and I think that really warped a lot of what I did. And I say that because, and it's one of the reasons that I'm so enthusiastic about what you've done your whole life and so grateful for what you've done your whole life. I say that it warped what I did because I was always interested in politics and I was always interested in social movements really, but I didn't think I could be involved in them because I had my big secret, and I didn't know what to do with it. And, well, I knew some of what to do with it. And I thought I should go, and get married, and do all the heterosexual things. And so it really sent me on a journey that I'm happy I went on, but I wish I'd gone on in a different way. - So you mean things that you didn't pursue because you were pretty sure if that information came out, that would be it? - Absolutely. - So were you fearful or how did it feel? - I felt afraid. I remember also getting extremely depressed and I couldn't talk to anybody about that, but I remember just being, even in college, I remember at one time, my mother apparently left a note on the table. I went away to college at Georgetown in Washington. And I remember my mother left a note on the table at home and my brother called me and then my sister called me. They were older, but they'd somehow, I don't remember how the information traveled. Rick is extremely depressed. Call him. But they would say it was very nice, but I didn't know what it all really was. And at least a chunk of it was that I wasn't able to deal with the essential part of myself. - And what was college like? - College was great. I'd always wanted to go to Georgetown. I'd gone to the model United Nations program in high school. And I wanted to go to Georgetown. That's what I wanted to do. And my parents said, oh, apply to other schools. So I did, but I wanted to go to Georgetown. I managed to get in, and I went, and I loved it. I went to the School of Foreign Service, Russian Studies concentration, and it was a great awakening and opening. It's a Catholic school in the 1970s, so not exactly a sexually sort of easy place to be in a certain sense, but in a general sense, I got to meet all kinds of people and listen to all kinds of lectures, and I was in Washington, and I got to work in my senator's office, and do all those things. And, you know, they matter. All of those things that when somebody says I wanna be an intern and they do it, it really, at least for me and I watch it with younger people today, it's so important. - So what interested you about the foreign service though? - Well, I wanted to go into the diplomatic core. - [Sheila] But why? - That's a good question too. I don't know. I just always wanted to do, I wanted to do two things. I wanted to go into the diplomatic core. I don't know if I wanted, I don't know if I wanted to do that because it would take me away. I just don't know. And I wanted also to go back to Tennessee and run for governor. - Probably going to Russia though wasn't gonna help you in Tennessee run for governor, was it? - No, it was too-- - We had sort of an attitude, didn't we, about Russia? - We did, and it would've been two different tracks. And what happened was I did take the foreign service exam and I managed to pass it. And then you get to take the oral exam, it's called, which is really a day long battery of tests that includes a series of oral examinations, but also written. The most fun test I've ever taken, by the way, but it's months and months later. Well, in the intervening year or so from the time I passed the written exam to the time I took the oral, I'd gone to work in Knoxville again at the 1982 World's Fair, which everybody who's watching will remember. It was the best World's Fair in the history of the world. And it was the Energy Expo. And I'd gotten to travel. I'd gone to China for the first time in 1981 and to the Philippines as part of my job. And I'd met people in Washington who worked for the Department of State, career foreign service people, and I just thought, those are not happy people. They really didn't seem to be very free to do things. I liked the people I met in the field when I would meet them. And by that time, I thought I don't wanna do that. So I passed the oral. Who knows, they needed people. And I declined to go into the foreign service. - So what was next then? - Well, I knew I was gonna need a job. The World's Fair, I started in June of 1980 and the fair lasted six months from May to October of 1982 and my job ended in November of 1982. And I managed to, I always wanted to work for the CEO of a big company. I really wanted to work for a big oil company and go off to Africa or somewhere and just learn things. And people said, don't do that. Do work for the CEO of a company. My dean at Georgetown was a great mentor and remained so for years. And he said, yeah, go, go, that's your MBA. Go work for the CEO of a big company. So I applied and got an interview at American Express, but then got turned down everywhere else. And I really wanted to work for this guy named Armand Hammer who founded Occidental Petroleum Corporation. And I'd heard about him, and I'd read about him, and I thought he was fascinating, and he had all these Russia connections, and he was some sort of mysteriously powerful guy. And through a series of odd circumstances, I interviewed with him in December of '82 and he hired me on the spot. And I started here in Los Angeles on January 9th, 1983. - Doing? - He didn't tell me. He was 80. - He was a mysterious kind of guy. - He was a real mysterious kind of guy. He was, let's see, 1982. He was 84 and I was 24 when I started working for him. And he didn't give me a title. I remember the salary negotiation was fascinating because he didn't really offer me a job. He had the personnel guy come up who had told me I shouldn't be there at all. He didn't like me 'cause I was this whipper snapper. And he had a whole negotiation with the personnel guy with me sitting there. And they finally said, well, he said, Dr. Hammer said, "Well, have you offered Mr. Jacobs a salary?" And he said, "Well, no, but I was thinking $35,000." And I was ecstatic. That was so much money. I was so ecstatic. And Dr. Hammer looked at me and he said, "Is that all right with you?" And I said, "Well, I was thinking--" "Make it 40!" And so that was that. And I thought, oh my god, I won the lottery. So I came to work. He didn't tell me what to do. He sent me newspaper articles to summarize. They would be delivered to my office and I'd get little notes on pieces of paper. And then one day, one of his secretaries, but his sort of most prominent one, I suppose, came to see me. And she said, I think doctor wants you to go to Korea. And I said, "Well, Florence, what would make you think that?" And she said, "Well, he's written on this piece of paper, send Rick Brown to Korea and we don't have a Rick Brown, so it must be you." Absolute truth. And I thought, well, great, now I'm gonna go, but I don't know why. And I was told by the people in the Occidental Washington office who were sort of my mentors, they said, "Whatever you do, there's this guy named Jerry Weintraub who's a big film producer. And Hammer's trying to do something with him. Stay away from that. It's sure death." Well, I was told to go to Korea to work on this project with Jerry Weintraub. - Oops. - So I went to see Dr. Hammer. Finally, he saw me. I'd been there about four weeks and he saw me on a Friday afternoon and there were two secretaries in there. And I came in, he said, "You each have 30 seconds." And I said, "Well, doctor, I'm going to Korea tomorrow. What should I do?" "Follow the other guy's lead." End of discussion. That was it. So that's how it all began. But we really bonded eventually. All I wanted to do then, since I was running away from being gay and I knew it, was work. That's all I wanted to do. All he wanted me to do was work, so it was perfect. - A meeting of the minds. - So it took me a while to build trust and confidence between us and we bonded in December of that year, of 1983, I'd been there almost a year in Russia because we would go, he would go to Russia twice a year to negotiate the price of a fertilizer agreement between the two countries. And he liked big numbers. He said it was a $20 billion 20 year fertilizer agreement. All I know is there was a lot of fertilizer, but it was a very interesting kind of set piece negotiating strategy. And it always ended with, all these people would negotiate with each other, and then the last meeting would be Dr. Hammer and the minister of foreign trade. So he had nothing to do all week. So he decided he wanted to get the rights to Soviet sports teams to show in the United States. And he'd talk to his friend, Ernesto Gallo or whatever his name is, and he was trying to buy the rights to Soviet champagne to sell here. So he would send me 'cause it was then just the two of us 'cause all these other people were doing real things. And he would send me to these meetings to go negotiate this stuff. I had no idea what I was doing, but he said, "Go, go, I'll see you later." And he turned into, for me, an unbelievably important mentor. I'm actually a little sad thinking about him and I miss him. He's been dead since 1990, but I miss him. He was difficult, he was unhappy, he was autocratic, he was a genius. He really had a deep, deep soul. He cared about a lot of different things. He never cared about money for himself. He was just a force of nature and at a time when, and people have forgotten this, but the Cold War was at its height in the '80s, really at its apex in so many ways. In '83, we'd shot down, the Soviets had shot down a Korean airliner on Labor Day weekend. And lots of things were going on that weren't happy. Reagan was calling the Soviets the evil empire and lots of stuff. And Hammer was the only one literally who was able to fly his private plane into Moscow, fly his private plane into Beijing. We flew, which was not as easy of light, we flew one time from Moscow to Kabul, Afghanistan in 1987 during the war because the Soviets, and the Pakistanis, and the Americans wanted us to go and kind of be able to see stuff that because the Americans had no presence there. And we met with Najibullah, the dictator who killed everybody. I mean, it was just a really interesting time. And I don't think that exists anymore. The world is so much more open now that that doesn't exist. - I don't know, Rick. I think that we'll probably hear in 15 years that somebody else was either a power broker or the back door for information or whatever 'cause we've seen it. But the interesting thing as you talk to me is I know you currently as a man with, you know, a deep social conscience, and deeply engaged in the social justice issues of our day. None of this sounds, mentor or not, like that's an arena in which you would gain that kind of. It more sounded like skills building to a great extent, just learn how to open a door, be present, and do whatever needs to be done. - Yes and no. Dr. Hammer was passionate about certain issues. For example, he was passionately pro-choice, passionately. And he knew the Gore family very well. Albert Gore Sr. was on our board, Al Gore's father, like knew the Gores that way. And when Al gore ran for president in 1988, which people have forgotten, Dr. Hammer and we were huge fundraisers for him. And Hammer used to get livid with Gore Jr. because at the time, he was on the fence about abortion. What he said was that the government shouldn't provide funds, but shouldn't stop people. And Hammer was just livid about that and said, "No, you've gotta do this. You've gotta provide choice." Well, came from his background. His father was one of the founders of the American communist party, and was a doctor, and had performed an abortion that had gone bad. And the mother died. And he was sent to Sing Sing Prison in New York in the 1920s. And Armand, which I never called him, spent years trying to get his father out of jail and did finally. And so he had a deep, that was deeply in his soul. We also spent a lot of time trying to get refuseniks out of the Soviet Union. Again, (indistinct) spent so much of his time on this. And that's how I got to know Zev, by the way, but refuseniks were people, as you know, who were Jews who were refused permission to leave the Soviet Union. And once they applied, of course, they lost everything. They lost their jobs and it was just a something, again, I don't think people can sort of identify with in a certain way. Well, Dr. Hammer, the reason we went to Kabul, the reason we went to Afghanistan, there were two reasons. We had a meeting with then foreign minister Shevardnadze, I'll never forget it, on Yom Kippur in New York in 1987. And Hammer said, "I want Ida Newell, I want Ida Newell!" Well, Ida Newell was this little bitty woman who had become the sort of poster person of refuseniks. Jane Fonda had taken her case on, everybody had taken her case on. She was this feisty person who got shipped off to Moldova, and Siberia, and they wouldn't let her out. So Shevardnadze said, "You can go," as he said, "She's on the shelf," I'll never forget this, "She's on the shelf in Moldova for a little while longer." I want you to go to Afghanistan and I want you to see that things aren't as bad as everybody's saying. And if you go to Afghanistan, I think we can work something out. And he did, and we did. And we took her on Armand Hammer's plane from Moscow to Jerusalem. It was to Jerusalem, I think. And Dr. Hammer was crying in the car. He was in tears. He loved the press and he loved all that stuff, but it was inside of him. And we did a lot of that kind of stuff. He built a college in New Mexico called the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West that brought kids together from all over the world. He really cared. He had a huge social conscience that would've belied what he was doing in a certain way. So he could be literally ruthless in business, but he was a really liberal guy in a lot of ways. - So when you say he was your mentor, do I assume you were not out to him? - I was not out to him. - Or really anybody around what you were doing? - Or anybody around, yes, yes. - And I'm not criticizing this. I mean, it was really the same with me when I was in television. It was just, you just didn't do it. - [Rick] Mm-hmm. - But when you say he was your mentor, do you mean in these matters as well and those social justice issues? - I hadn't thought of it as carefully until right now, but yes. He was for nuclear disarmament, complete nuclear disarmament. He tried for, I mean, he spent most of his time when he wasn't doing business stuff or he'd weave it all in together trying to get Reagan and Gorbachev, or first trying to get Reagan and (indistinct) and Reagan and whoever wasn't dead, and trying to get Gorbachev and Reagan. And he really, yeah, he wanted to be in the middle, and yeah, he wanted publicity. That's all given. Those were huge motivators for him. He really wanted peace between the Soviet Union and the United States. And he would give speeches. In Russia, he would say that as soon as you buy a car, you're not a communist anymore 'cause you own private property and you care about that private property. And he would give speeches there and elsewhere. And he would say that ideal of communism is terrific. It just forgets one thing, which is human nature. So he was a very complex guy, and again, extremely difficult. But I haven't had this conversation in ages and I'm very sad in a way. I miss him. - Well, I think that this is why I like to do these shows, you know? I mean, sometimes our audience will think, well, what's this got to do with being gay? And the answer always is, this has to do with being who a person is. I mean, it's so random in a way. We make a choice and our whole life changes in a way that we really don't know. So how long with Dr. Hammer and then what next? - About eight years, about eight years. I kept trying to quit because I wanted to do operational stuff. And he wanted me to be, I was vice president assistant to the chairman, and you know, blah, blah, blah, but I kept wanting to quit. And I finally did the third time, which is a whole story, but I'll leave out. And the way I resigned was I agreed to stay on as a consultant 'cause he was very angry with me, which I did, and which meant I did the same job for a third of the pay, and then he died the end of the year. And so that was '90. And then I moved to Washington in 1991 and a fellow named Howard Baker who's a former United States Senator whom I'd gotten to know during the World's Fair who was the US Senate majority leader and was Reagan's chief of staff and I put a business together that was advising and investing in the former Soviet Union. The time we put it together, it was still the Soviet Union, in fact. The coup was that summer. - [Sheila] Right. - And so I then spent half my year in Moscow and half my year in Washington for the next seven years, six years. Came out. I'm the only person I've ever met who had to leave LA to come out. So I did that in Washington. I met a guy at a bar, JRs in Washington, the first time I was in a gay bar by myself, and we stayed together for eight years, and we're still very close friends. And I still wasn't very happy, not very fulfilled. - Was your life sort of your business life separate kind of from that? I mean, in those years, a lot of people were pretty categorized, you know? - Yes. I never quote unquote came out to Senator Baker. I mean, I'm sure he knew that I was gay. I know he does now. I'm sure he knew that I was gay. He didn't care. I cared that he might care, I suppose. The bigger issue for me though was in Russia where being gay was not a good idea no matter what. And I remember with my business partner with whom I'm very close still and we still have a business together who's a Russian national who's, I guess he's now a US citizen, straight guy, we had long conversations at times about whether I should be out or shouldn't be out and how that would affect our relationship. And I didn't. I mean, there was one business relationship or several of them where I just wouldn't touch it because it didn't feel like the right thing to do in the business relationship. Now, I can criticize myself and say, I should have said this, that, or the other, but that's where I was at the time. - So what were you thinking looking then sort of from the outside at an incipient or kind of new gay and lesbian movement or gay movement? - In Russia? - No, at home. - At home? Well, I was disconnected. I didn't know what to do with it. My kind of gay mentor through all of this was a guy named Howard Bragman. I'd met Howard in maybe '86 or seven. And Howard was really very good to me. Howard never pulled me or pushed me, but he was really very helpful to me as a friend. I remember he came to Washington when I was living there and we did one of the marches around the White House together. And so I would kind of get my feet wet and I was appreciative, but I think also still a little scared in some ways. - Mm-hmm. So what next? - Well, so Russia closed for business in 1998. I was really not doing what I wanted to do. I would try to get involved. For example, I remember the first time I met Elizabeth Birch of the Human Rights Campaign. I had this sense. I thought, we were at some thing at her house. And I said in Washington, and I just thought, "Well, do you know who I am?" Well, of course she didn't know who I am 'cause I didn't know who I am, but I thought I have all these skills, and don't you know that. And I thought, well, how? I mean, now, I look back and I think, well, you fool. You have to go do something. So I moved here in January of '99. A fellow that I'd known through Dr. Hammer, an East Tennesseean who's a non-financially challenged gentleman at a certain age had kept trying to get me to come to work for him. And I said yes finally. He made me that offer, proverbial offer you can't refuse. Came here in January of '99, beginning of '99, had hated living in Los Angeles in the '80s mostly because of me, I think, not because of Los Angeles. Didn't think I'd wanna stay here. Stayed with Howard Bragman again. And my then partner, David, moved out here and I sometime in '99 decided I was staying forever. And I love it here. And I'd met Torie Osborn in the early '90s in Washington. I was on the board of an organization called Food and Friends. - Right, and she was the head of the task force. - She was. - Or she had left the task force. - She left and she was the sort of interim executive director, and coach. - Right, right. - She and I hit it off and I really liked her. - And Food and Friends kind of like Project Angel Food or other kinds of organizations like that around the country. - Yes, yes. - Uh-huh. - And so when I moved here, I remember I called Torie and I said, "I'm here." And I was surprised she remembered me. And we had breakfast at (indistinct), and she told me about the Liberty Hill Foundation. And I got more and more involved, and eventually went on the board of the Liberty Hill Foundation. And got deeply involved in the Dean campaign in the summer of 2002. I'd met Governor Dean. He did that Jimmy Carter thing where he'd spend the night at people's houses and we stayed up talking. I told him I was interested in him, but if Gore ran, I'd wanna work with him. And then in December of 2002 when Gore announced that he wasn't gonna run, the next morning, Howard Dean called and said, "Okay, you're on!" So I joined up really early. There were maybe four employees then. And I started out as Southern California finance co-chair, but there was no structure, so we built one. By the end of the year, I quit my job and became chair of the campaign in California and never wanted to go back to that kind of work again. I'd done what I needed to do there. - Now, you're fully out, and gay, and everybody knows. - Totally out, totally gay, although I had to come out twice. I came out once when I came out the first time when I was 33 and then moved back to LA and had to start all over again 'cause I'd known all these people. - I know, it really is one person at a time. - It was so funny. I mean, my ex-girlfriend, I mean, I had to-- - K Clinton used to say, "Can't we just put all my friends on a bus and as it's driving by, I'll just go, "Hello, I'm gay." - [Rick] Right? That would've been great. - So much easier. - That would've been great. So I did all that and kind of lived my twenties and my forties when I was in LA. But I was able to do what I loved. I quit that job with no pay. I took a huge, well, I mean, not 100% cut in pay, but it was a very lucrative job and haven't been happier. You know, I've never been happier. I do fine. I still have a couple of friends as people I work with in the financial slash philanthropy world. - Well, we all gotta support our social justice habit somehow. - Exactly. And I've chosen, for my own reasons, to live. I live fine, no complaints. I don't want to take any money from the Courage Campaign or from many of that part of my life. That may change. I may have to sometime, but I just don't want to. And I'm conflicted about that because there's another side of me that says, well, if I'm good at what I'm doing, I should get paid for it. But I don't want to right now. - Well, let's talk. We need to bridge the gap between the Dean campaign and the Courage Campaign. So finish out sort of the Dean piece of it and then tell me what happened next. - So that changed my life. It was as though I woke up. And again, because it was a totally entrepreneurial campaign that was never ever going to win, especially when we started. Nobody heard of the guy. I remember, I think you and he had lunch or a cup of coffee. - We had a cup of coffee in Westwood Village, right. - [Rick] In February or March. - David Bender brought us together. - And he was so, I think he was exciting to you also, wasn't he? - Oh, totally. I mean, it was so wonderful to talk to him. And it was, you know, it was exciting. Politics is exciting in the way it makes you feel about the possibilities, especially a person who's gonna be president. And I think that, I don't think there's a person left in the United States that can't resonate to that now because people got so excited about Obama, they got very excited about Hillary. They had to fight about that for a while, as you know, but it was kind of like, I can see that whoever's president matters. And of course, you know, we knew that, and it was very, very wonderful to talk to Governor Dean. The ideas that he had and the approach that he had to equality especially. - And so he's a model, I think, for all of us in the following sense. He was what, a sixth term, I think governor, two years at a shot. So he was governor for around 12 years of Vermont, a little bitty state, as somebody pointed out to me, about the size of Santa Barbara County. And yet, he had gained all this experience and that medical doctor who was a no nonsense governor, pretty much of a fiscal conservative, by the way, not this big liberal that everybody came to think of him as, and I think we all ended up seeing him through the prism of the time. But the modeling that's important is that he caught fire because he told the truth. His speech, he used to go around and he used to say, "As I go around the country, I find that people are angrier. The only people at home Democrats are angrier than Republicans is the Democrats in Washington who keep caving." And he said that. It didn't make him very popular, I'm sure, with a lot of people, but he said it. And I was really privileged to be. I mean, I was his schlepper, I was his driver when he would come to LA. We'd go do everything together and a lot of stuff in California. And I watched this snowball. We went to a house party in Santa Monica right before the war started in 2003. And he was supposed to be, there are gonna be 10 people there, there were gonna be 15. We got there and there were 150 or 200 people in a little tiny house. And he was like a rock star. And it was really funny to watch him deal with this, but he did deal with it, and he turned out to be a really good speaker, which I was concerned about the first time I did an event for him. I didn't know if he would be, but he turned out to be, but he told the truth and he built the platform that brought us Obama. He built it by his own character and by accident because he said to people, "If you want to stop the war, if you want to show people in Washington that you want real change, click and stand up." And so by September 30th, I remember, 2003, we had an event at Union Station here in LA, end of the third quarter, he had raised more money. I'm gonna guess now it was about 40 million bucks. He had raised more money in an off-presidential year than any Democrat in history or maybe anybody in history, any non incumbent. Now, Obama raised that in the day, it seemed like. It was transformative because here was a guy who was willing to say the Democrats were wrong for caving and voting on the war the way they did, wrong in voting on the appropriation in September of 2003, wrong in not standing up for healthcare reform. And he said it, and he was not obviously the right candidate at the right time, but he sure laid the foundation for a lot of things. - Well, it's interesting, Rick, because your story is a lot about other people. And I think in many ways, that is the truth for all of us. Who have we met along the way who imprinted us, who inspired us, who made us kind of who we are? But I see that you have transitioned really from being the person who was schlepping, was listening, was. Your learning hasn't stopped, I'm not saying that. But you made a leap to take some leadership around what you saw, for instance, in the online work that the Dean campaign did and how connected it could be in a second to so many people who, what I found when I was running is when people would give me money, it wasn't that they wanted me to run off to Mexico with their money and they were just giving me a gift. I was an agenda and that's what any candidate is. You're really, somebody wants to believe in you. And that yearning that really sort of culminated in Obama's election I think, was already beginning at that time. And I guess the next piece of your story is really a transition for you, it seems like, to take leadership to make that go somewhere. So tell me a little about that transition, and when Courage Campaign kind of started, and how. - Well, it started about four years ago, almost exactly four years ago, but I want to just make a point about this transition, which is to say that you've been a big part of that. You said something to me as we came back from a Liberty Hill retreat one time that has, I've told you before, but it's worth repeating that stuck with me, which I didn't feel comfortable. I was always behind the scenes. That was my job. I was pretty good at it. I think I was really good at it, in fact, and I could enable other people to do things that they were really good at too, but I was good at getting stuff done. And I was very uncomfortable actually making a transition to being a principal. And you, as we say in French, (speaking in foreign language) me. And you said, you know, I remember, you said, take up a little space, go ahead, say something 'cause you have something to say. And it took me a while, still takes me a while to realize that that may well be true. I think I sometimes do have something to say. And so what's happened with the Courage Campaign, its simple germination was I watched what happened with the Dean and the Kerry campaigns, all this energy in California. We always export labor and capital. We never keep political infrastructure here. The term limits of devastated the state so that we get really smart, great legislators, such as yourself. And you're probably very happy right now that there are term limits because you didn't have to deal with this last mass, but Karen Bass is another example. Karen's good news and bad news about term limits, right? She probably wouldn't be where she is without term limits and she's gonna be gone by the time we finish saying her name. - The speaker of the California assembly. - Thank you. - For these two years. - And a tried and true progressive liberal. So we have no political infrastructure here, none, on the progressive side. So I thought, well, let's try to build it and made a lot of mistakes along the way. Finally figured something out, mostly found the right people who know how to do really effective online communication and organizing. And we've gone from, so now, August of 2007 is kind of when we restarted things and we had about 27,000 on our list. And as you mentioned at the top of the show, we're a little over 700,000. We now have nine full-time employees all over the state. We, thanks to Torie Osborne, and Mike Bonin, and Lisa Powell, we have this marvelous thing called Camp Courage, which is a direct descendant of Camp Obama, which is a self-empowerment training program. We've done it in LA, in Fresno, in San Diego, and Oakland will be soon. And it's something that people just are hungry for. It's just training, and it's empowerment, and it teaches you to be able to go out and not in an hour, but in a couple of minutes understand your story of self and where that power comes from, and be able to go talk to people about why it's okay to be for marriage equality. And so our job and the thing that I love the most at the Courage Campaign is giving people their own voice and their own power. And the other part of it that I love and what I've always cared the most about is I love, I don't even like the word coalition, I love the LA that we don't get to be in very often. I love the LA that I was just at a meeting happily at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Headquarters near Leimert Park. And I got to be with people that I don't get to be with most of the time. And how much fun is that, and how rich is that? And there was a connection made there about somebody who may run for office in Fresno. And well, we just did a Camp Courage there, and we can connect up some gay folks in Fresno with this straight African American guy who may run for office there. And that excites me because I hate living in ghettos. I hate it. And I see that now that there's this opportunity using the internet, but using real live real world techniques to empower not just gay people, but progressives, because we're all part of one movement to get rid of the silly, silly barriers like equality for gay people. I mean, if you step back and think about it, I mean,, it's just a crazy idea that there should be inequality. It's crazy. We shouldn't have to vote on it. So that's moving and it's thanks to you, and Torie, and Cleve Jones, and Harvey Milk, and all kinds of people who did stuff when I was afraid to say I was gay. It's thanks to you that I and others are able to be where we are. It's our job to take your wisdom capacity lessons and to take it home. - Well, thank you, Rick, and I always feel a little uncomfortable since this is my show being praised because it's kind of like, well, yeah, but she's got a show anyway, so why should she be praised? But I never want to turn it away either. I think that's a very good example. You know, take it in. But I'm not so sure I really understand what the Courage Campaign is because it's not just about gay stuff. It seemed like your notion when you were presenting it early on to get people to kind of help figure out what it was and kind of sign onto it that there wasn't enough really, and certainly in California, enough of a voice or a place, a virtual place where people could come together with ideas to support a progressive agenda like the way people think about Move On nationally. - [Rick] Right. - But nobody was paying attention very much to what was going on in California, except often, they would say, well, they're trying it out in California, et cetera. Though we're being lapped these days by other states, no question. But would you say a little bit about what the Courage Campaign is and what your vision and what the vision really is? - Thanks for asking and the opportunity. So the elevator pitch in a way is it is the moveon.org of California. I think I am a huge admirer of what Move On has done and how they do it. It's an amazing organization. And I know people get tired of a lot of emails, but it is an amazing organization with some of the smartest people in the country, political minds operating it. We wanna be more than that because we can be 'cause we're focused on a state, although it's a country size state. So we wanna organize people online. What does that mean? It means we want to give people enough information about progressive issues and about making this state governable so that they become interested in the state where 90% of their lives are affected, right? It's not all this federal stuff. You mentioned earlier that it's exciting to meet a presidential candidate. Of course, it is, and he's off in Washington and I hope he brings world peace, I really do, and he might. In the meantime, the roads don't work and on, and on, and on. So the Courage Campaign is designed to build an independent force of progressives in California that can bring pressure in Sacramento, that can lead, that is beholden only to themselves and itself that can, if we need to at some point, which is what I really wanna do, take on the fundamental tax system of this state. I mean, let's call it a name. You're not allowed to talk about Prop 13 because Prop 13 is the third, fourth, and fifth rail of politics. Prop 13, which people may remember in 1978 started the conservative revolution across the country and put a cap on tax increases, property tax increases, and made sense in the political context of 1978. And frankly, I think with a lack of leadership by then governor Jerry Brown. So the Democrats are complicit in this. So this initiative passes and what happens? Well, libraries stop being funded, schools get messed up. I mean, we can go down a list. We have to change the way Californians think about California. And that's what the Courage Campaign is here to do. We're here to be a forum, we're here to organize, we're here to change the way we think about this state so that when it comes time, maybe people will realize that it would be a good idea to protect homeowners with a Prop 13 cap, absolutely, but let businesses pay their fair share because the way the tax system works, they don't right now. So again, the Courage Campaign, to me, is a very, very simple idea. Organize and empower. And I don't see another organization in the state that does that. - Well, I think that it's also, as an aspect of empowerment, something that I found enormously basic to empowerment, which is information. I mean, one of the incredible things about online communities now is that you get instant information. One of the difficult things is you don't know what to make of it. You know, is it true, is it not true? Is it one of those viral things that people start up and then it turns out the whole thing is a phony set of non-facts? But with the Courage Campaign very much I think like Move On, when you see that you've been sent something from the Courage Campaign, it builds more credibility because the information is put together, I think, in a very responsible way. That's my feeling about reading the information. The pitches are also, in terms of supporting the Courage Campaign, I think it makes you feel like the money is actually going where you say it's going to go. I mean, you may say, well, maybe I should take a salary from this, but I think one of the interesting things for the startup of it is, I mean, you've been a businessman most of your life, you've worked for very high level business people. You choose to earn your money somewhere else, and it's not these days a whole lot of money, so that this can have a life of its own, which I think is a very good and a trustworthy notion. A lot of people don't know you and they would always, of course, since you're the founder and director think, well, the courage campaign is you, but it's gone beyond that really. The hard part though is getting people not only interested in California, but to kind of understand it. This whole thing, for instance, about a two thirds vote to pass a budget. People just started to say, doesn't that just give like one or two people the opportunity to hold up the whole thing and make it worse, which is why the schools, you know, are crumbling for lack of money because it had to all be cuts, cuts, cuts even though, of course, the emphasis is on the two year tax increase that they managed to get through temporarily. So I guess in terms of how the information is put together for Courage Campaign, how do you decide what goes out to your subscribers or your members? - We try very hard to understand where people are in their minds. And so we do surveys, we do pretty comprehensive surveys, and we ask people what they're thinking. And so we try to give people information in areas that we think they want to know. We do lead people and we lead them in the following way. We lead people because everything we do ties back to California. There is nothing we do that does not have, or putting it in the affirmative, everything we do does have a California angle. So on the two thirds vote, for example, we know that if we send an email out, 'cause we've tried it, and try to get people interested in the issue of changing the way that works, it won't do very well. I mean, we test things and it won't do very well because it's obscure, and it's process oriented, and people don't get excited about process. So we try other things. We do videos, have some funny videos about, for example, Arnold Bucks, which we put out in January when the governor was holding the budget up. And I still think he has. And we had a very funny guy named Andy Cobb do a video. And he created these little coupons and he tried to spend them at Burger King and elsewhere 'cause we were gonna get vouchers. And so we try everything we can to meet people in a place that they wanna be met, first of all. We listen to our list. We do not. If the Courage Campaign quote unquote endorses something, it's because people in the Courage Campaign voted to endorse it. So it's not something that I say, "Oh, I wanna do that, and therefore, we're gonna do it." We test it, we survey people. And so we do a ballot guide. And the ballot guide sometimes is controversial, may be very controversial around the May election. We'll see. But it's all people powered. And so long way around Robin Hood's barn of answering your question. We have some very smart people. There's a guy named Robert Cruickshank, for example, who is our public policy director, who's one of the best bloggers and writers on what's going on in state politics. Very liberal, very much from a certain bent. Robert knows his stuff. And we talk to a lot of people. We're in touch with the leading politicians in the state, but we, even with Democrats, go against them sometimes. - Well, last five minutes coming up. For a guy who was in the closet and then kind of, you're not the only one, let me just say, kind of afraid of what would happen if he came out, and then did it, and are fully in the world now, and living your life, have a good private life, personal life, work life, et cetera, the thing remaining for us at the moment in California has to do with Proposition 8. At the moment that we filmed this show, the Supreme Court has not yet said whether they're going to uphold Proposition 8, which amended the California Constitution to say that a marriage is only between a man and a woman. If the Supreme Court says, well, it's your own fault, California. You allow a majority of people to amend the constitution and that's what they did. We still think it's an equal rights issue and a fundamental rights issue, but you didn't give us a good choice in the law. Then Prop 8, for that moment, will stand, and the next thing is overturning it. And the Courage Campaign, I believe, among others is in a good collaboration on making plans to do that. Can you say just in the last couple of minutes what you see that being like for Courage? - If we have to go back to the ballot, we have to do a few things. First, we have to know, as somebody said to me, getting a yes vote in California on an initiative is a very hard thing to do. Getting a yes vote on a controversial social issue is extremely hard. Gotta climb the mountain, hard to climb a steep mountain, so we need to know the pathway. So we've gotta learn. First thing we've gotta do is research and we're doing that in collaboration with a lot of other people, and we have pushed and succeeded in trying something revolutionary, literally revolutionary, which is the polling will be shared with the community, meaning it'll be public or a large part of the polling will be. Why? Because people need to gain trust. And people need to make a decision together about when to go back to the ballot and how. Courage Campaign's roles in going forward are online organizing at which we're really very, very good. We'll do online communication and we will do offline organizing. We have, now, I think we've had about 4,000 doors knocked on already as of this date. We are training people across the state to be able to go out and canvas, to make phone calls. We've created an online organizing hub that is directly that's the same thing as my Barack Obama. It's the same software. We've paid the money, we've adapted it, we've got a voter file attached to it. Our job is empowerment, empowerment, empowerment, and that's what we're gonna do. And whatever campaign comes up, that's what we will do. That will be our role. The other piece of it is back to what I said about ghettos. We are gonna be ghetto busters. We're going to make sure because that's who we are and that's where we live is in a great big world. We're gonna make sure that the next time we go out to win a proposition, we do it with all of our progressive friends. - Rick, thank you so much for being with us. It was really a pleasure. I do this show because I like to get to know more about people that I work with and know. And I want you to, of course, know them too. Rick mentioned the Camp Courage, which is going on all around California and possibly the country in a couple of years. Who knows? We're gonna do our next show on Camp Courage, and you'll get to meet Torie, and Lisa, and Mike who are running it. But for now, you have a lot of opportunities to get involved, Courage Campaign being one of them. So you better get used to it. (upbeat rock music)