Sheehan Speaks

We had a chance to sit down and talk with Cindy Sheehan about why she decided to run against Nancy Pelosi and how she feels about the ideological spread in the Democratic party.

Stand Up: First question, what was the tipping point when you decided to run against Speaker Nancy Pelosi?

Cindy Sheehan: Um, the tipping point was early or late June or early July when George Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence. And of course the Congress said nothing about that, even though Scooter Libby, the vice president’s office, and the president’s office were all involved in outing Valerie Plame for her husband’s part in saying there was no link between Saddam and Niger with the yellow cake Uranium. So when that happened I had been talking to John Conyers back in May and he said that if we really wanted a true change and if we really wanted the Administration held accountable we’d have to vote the enablers out. So I just decided that if Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t put impeachment back on the table and if she wouldn’t hold George Bush and Dick Cheney accountable, that I would run against her.

SU: If you were to win though, you would take office after George Bush and Dick Cheney are out of office. So, are there other concerns or platforms that you really want to bring to the table past the Bush Presidency?

CS: Of course, I have a lot of other issues that I am concerned about and involved in. Accountability is only one of them. If Nancy Pelosi won’t hold George Bush and Dick Cheney accountable, then she needs to be held accountable. Running against the Speaker of the House puts all of the Congress on notice, I think, that they are elected to represent the people and not special interests or not to totally fold to the Administration every time the Administration demands something. So that’s one of the major things. But of course, there’s the funding of the war issue; she keeps allowing the funding of the war to go forward. There’s so many things in San Francisco that concern the residents of this district, such as the environment and unions and having good jobs and affordable housing and she has been very poor on these issues. So we need to bring back true progressive representation to San Francisco. And George Bush and Dick Cheney will still be in office for seventeen days when I am sworn-in in January of ‘09. So I will introduce articles of impeachment, but then also make it very clear that just because they’re out of office doesn’t mean that they can’t be held accountable for what they’ve done for the past eight years that they have been in office.

SU: I know that there is also a woman in your district that is challenging Speaker Pelosi through the Democratic primary. Some progressives would point to successes like for example in Maryland a progressive Democrat Donna Edwards defeating Al Wynn in their primary there. What made you decide to do an Independent route instead of maybe challenging Pelosi within her own primary?

CS: Well, first of all I’m not a Democrat. So I couldn’t challenge her within a primary. I have a moral opposition to the two-party system. But we have been involved in encouraging a Democrat to run against Nancy Pelosi. So we are supporting that – Shirley’s primary run. And in June she’ll turn around and support our independent run against Nancy Pelosi for the general election.

SU: How’s the campaign going? You recently moved into the San Francisco district, is that right?

CS: I moved here the first of the year.

SU: What’s the reception been among people there? San Francisco is considered, especially coming here from Georgia, it’d be considered a very liberal district.

CS: Right.

SU: But then there’d probably be quite a few people who have some sort of attachment to Speaker Pelosi because she’s been the incumbent for so long.

CS: Well, you know, we’ve had our office open since October, and we opened our office in December. Our office was a sex shop massage parlor so we had to knock out walls and take stages down and repaint it and things like that. There are two different kinds of progressives in San Francisco. There’s what some people call the “Downtown Democrats” who are part of the establishment. But then there’s all kinds of political, environmental, peace, justice activists who are very, very progressive and I already have lots of contacts with those people coming into San Francisco. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for fifteen years, and since my son was killed. Much of my activism has been focused around here; I lived in Berkeley for a year after summer of ’05 when we were first in Crawford. I already have an attachment with those people. They’re working very hard on my campaign. There’s also a lot of very exciting other races in San Francisco – for Supervisor, where a lot of Greens and a lot of other liberals are running and have very good chances. It is a very liberal and progressive city and we just have made a lot of good contacts working with other people here. I don’t know how much [inaudible] we’ll be able to make with the Democratic establishment, but we are working on a very exciting endorsement right now that I can’t really talk about until we get it.

SU: I know that you’ve also been doing a lot of other things in the past few years in activism besides your congressional run. You were recently in Egypt, is that right?

CS: That is correct.

SU: What were you doing in Egypt?

CS: I was there because there are forty members of the Muslim Brotherhood – that’s an international Muslim association that wants to promote democracy through elections and nonviolent means – it’s an outlawed organization. And in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood has been taking a lot of seats in the Parliament not as the Muslim Brotherhood but as independents and their voices are becoming stronger against the Mubarak regime. And so, he just has them arrested and tried on made-up charges or trumped-up charges. And these forty who were arrested were being tried in a military tribunal even though they’re civilians. And even though civilian courts have exonerated them four times. So we went there to protest civilians being tried in military courts.

SU: Over the past few years, especially in activism against this Administration or against the war, or just in the new progressive activism of the 21st century we’ve seen a number of different movements. What would your critiques be of these movements? What would you say we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong as one of the leaders of these movements?

CS: That’s very hard to say when you’re still in the middle of the movement. But what I see is that political activism or any other kind of activism has to be an ongoing process. We can never let up on our leadership, locally or nationally, we have to keep our activism going and keep very persistent about it. I see in the 80’s, it seemed like a lot of people were lulled into a false sense of security. So that’s what enabled the Bush regime to enable what they have done in the Middle East. Many Americans not even connecting the dots of what our country has done around the world for these decades with what happened on 9/11 and George Bush’s response to it. A major critique of the movement that I’m involved in today is that it seems like so many people who are concerned about the occupation, they’re concerned about democracy, they’re concerned about the lack of accountability in our government, they’re concerned about environment, and they’re not able to leave their comfort zones to stretch themselves to go out in the streets, to maybe change their lifestyles to make it easier for them to do activism, to do physical activism, Where they might think best to think at home and sit behind the computer and write blogs, and write critiques of the people who are out in the streets doing these movements. I see the movement for gay rights and for immigrant rights, I see that those are more energetic and out-in-the-street movements because so many people feel like they have a personal stake in the issue. Whereas maybe in the peace movement people don’t think they have a personal stake if they don’t know somebody in iraq or Afghanistan or if they don’t have a solider in the family or if they haven’t been touched tragically like my family, they don’t think they have a personal stake in the issue and that doesn’t get them motivated to make the sacrifices necessary for true change.

SU: What advice would you impart to activists like those of us at University of Georgia who are trying to put a personal face on a lot of these issues and reach out to people?

CS: Well, everybody is touched by what our leadership is doing. I hate to put all the blame on the Bush Administration, because they didn’t invent lying and murder-for-profit. They just have exalted it and made it almost institutionalized in our country. But I think that the economy is getting ready to tank; that’s a big issue that effects University students. The environment is very precarious right now. It’s teetering on the brink of disaster. If that doesn’t get people out in the streets, I don’t know what will. Even if you don’t think that you’re being touched personally by it, our government has codified torture, it had codified using pre-emptive war as a foreign policy tool, and that compromises the safety of everybody in the world. It compromises the safety of everybody when we allow our government to codify things that are against humanity.

SU: Thank you.