Forum Moderator Olbermann: Union Card May Have Saved His Broadcast Career

by Mike Hall, Aug 3, 2007

Keith Olbermann says he’s not surprised that “an informed audience like the AFL-CIO membership” has responded overwhelmingly to next week’s presidential forum. He also says a union card may have saved his broadcast career.

The host of MSNBC’s “Countdown,” Olbermann is set to moderate the AFL-CIO’s Presidential Candidates Forum in Chicago on Tuesday evening. The response from union families has been so great that the forum will be held at Soldier Field, where as many as 15,000 union household members are expected.

The forum will be broadcast live on MSNBC starting at 7 p.m. Eastern (6 p.m. Central) and on XM radio. (Find out how to host a Watch Party here.) There also will be up-to-the minute commentary and coverage on the AFL-CIO Now blog.

Some of the questions Olbermann will ask the seven Democratic presidential hopefuls will come from the more than 2,200 submitted by union members at the AFL-CIO’s Working Families Vote 2008 website. You have until Sunday at midnight to vote for your favorite among the final 10 questions.

Yesterday in a phone interview from New York, Olbermann talked to me about his emergence as a political commentator, impressions of previous debates, the role of unions in politics, his early career and the one question he would ask President Bush if he was guaranteed a truthful answer. Here are some excerpts.

A year and a half away from the election, and we have had an overwhelming response to the forum–15,000 expected to show up, more than 2,220 questions  from union members. What do you make of that?

An informed audience like the AFL-CIO membership is naturally going to respond to this….The focus on this election is not being diminished because it is starting so early, but probably increased. I think people understand how important an election this is and my sense is that it is going to grow.

There have been quite a few of these debates and forums so far this year. What drew your interest in the AFL-CIO event?

Aside from being asked? I have unexpectedly carved myself a niche in the media political coverage world. It was certainly not one that I sought. It was one that I thought could have been better filled by a lot of other people, but it didn’t happen that way….Coming with that is a responsibility to stay involved and be connected to the people I am covering, and to merit asking people to listen either to my commentary or coverage of events.

I think this is exactly the sort of venue where I earn my stripes, if you will. If I am out there participating in this in some way–in an appropriate way–not as a commentator, but as an instigator perhaps or an irritant to the candidates, it’s another responsibility that goes with the territory of speaking in a political or societal sense in a commentary way.

You’ve watched the other debates, I’m sure. Your impressions?

The Democrats have largely been useful in terms of their answers. I think we have seen a lot of gradation of opinion–the most obvious ones being between Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton on the matter of Iraq, national security, dealing with unfriendly powers. I think we’ve seen gradations, we’ve seen subtleties without, for the most part, the kind of bloodletting that usually accompanies disagreements nowadays in politics. If two people are not in total agreement, no matter where they sit down on the political spectrum, you sit there thinking, “I wonder when they are going to pull the knives out.” That’s how tempestuous a political time we live in. I think the Democrats have largely kept that under control and I think that’s a wise strategy.

The Republican ones that I’ve seen–there have been as many on the first occasion as 10 guys acting as if they have just fallen off the boat and are trying to get into a life raft that only holds two of them, and a couple of the guys in the water already have the oars. Those have been really tense, I thought. It’s a little reminiscent of watching local sportscasters, say, 20 years ago, who can yell the loudest?

What’s your take on the role of unions in politics?

The symbiosis if you will, or certainly the hand-holding between unions and political organizations, is one of the reasons–and people always look at this kind of backwards–that this country became the economic kingpin of the world. Economists will often, and certainly political scientists will often view that as “we did it in spite of the unions.” It is the other way around.

Unions, after all represent the people who are coveted by and boasted of by both political parties and every kind of politician–the proverbial average American. Unions gained a political voice through a form of collectivism. It [union political action] has always been entirely appropriate. It is essential to the welfare of the people who are represented by unions and it is a terrific way to let politicians know what large groups of the public want….The union base might be the last organic collective interest in American politics.

In your various stops, you’ve carried a union card. Tell me what that’s meant to you.

One anecdote from early in my career sums that up. I was 21 years old and in my first professional job in this business, with a radio network that used to be attached to United Press International, back when UPI was the rival to The Associated Press….It was quite a break for me to be working in New York.

I had a boss who treated me very well and we used to have these animated discussions–I won’t call them arguments, but we’ll call them animated discussions–about what I should and shouldn’t be doing. He was willing to listen to my point of view even if we started to raise our voices. One day our voices got raised and his boss came back from a liquid lunch and walked in on the tail end of this. Then my boss went into this guy’s office, which he often did to cool down and say “oh, that Olbermann….”At this point the boss’s boss…came in and fired me on the spot and said “you don’t give the managers no lip. You get your stuff and get out of here.”

I had the next days off anyway, this was Monday and I was back at work on Thursday. He had received a reprimand and had been sent home. I received a letter in my files that said, “Don’t yell at the managers.”

He basically fired me because he was drunk and didn’t like me. And it’s as simple as this; if that had not been a union operation, if there had been no Wire Service Guild (now the News Media Guild), if we had not set certain brakes on the unilateral nature of what employers can and cannot do, I don’t know if I would have ever gotten another job….I was up for a local job in New York…I know they didn’t seriously consider me for the position afterwards…if that firing had held I might not have been able to continue in broadcasting.

This might sound a little odd, but if you looked up from your notes on Tuesday and saw President Bush behind one of the lecterns and had one question to ask–and as implausible as this sounds, he would answer truthfully [laughter]–what would it be?

Oh boy [10 seconds of silence]….Who convinced you to go to war? I think the “who” would precipitate most of the answers regarding the “why,” rather than the other way around. I could ask the question either way, but I think “who” would give us a full outline.

That’s something we’d all like to know.

At this point I wonder if he even knows.

Olbermann also says he has pondered opening the AFL-CIO presidential forum with a question that “might push them a little off guard.” But we can’t tell you what that is–don’t want to ruin the surprise.  

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