Just outside Lou Dobbs's office at the new Time Warner Center on West 58th Street in Manhattan, you pass a bumper sticker on the wall that proclaims "Lou Dobbs for President 2008." The office has a huge window with a fantastic panorama of Central Park and Columbus Circle. The pillared statue of Christopher Columbus seems almost to reach into the office to shake your hand. Dobbs is running late because he has just visited his two-day-old granddaughter and readily admits to being "so excited" about the new edition to the family. This gushing Dobbs is in stark contrast to the man who has become a lightning rod of American politics. Every evening on CNN, he spends a good portion of Lou Dobbs Tonight relentlessly exposing—critics would say inanely hammering—what he calls the "war on the middle class," which just so happens to be the title of his new book, out from Viking on October 9.
But Dobbs is not just another talking head with a television show. He has been dissecting the war on the middle class—equal parts about the outsourcing of jobs overseas and the influx of job-taking illegal aliens, mostly Mexican, into this country—for years. A recent Gallup Poll found immigration, at 13%, to be among the most important problems facing the country today (almost as high as concern about oil prices, at 17%). Love him or hate him, Lou Dobbs has earned America's attention.
My first question to Dobbs concerns the bumper sticker. Has he ever seriously considered a run for office? "Not for a second!" he says with a wry laugh. "You know, it's funny"—he turns serious—"we get literally hundreds of e-mails each day asking me to run for president. But I'm the wrong temperament, the wrong fellow."
Unlike Congress, which in his book he says "has turned its back on its core constituency," Dobbs continues to question America's priorities. Told that some of his positions—on the loss of American jobs; his opposition to the recently passed draconian bankruptcy laws; his opposition to Congress's hike in interest charges on college loans; and Congress's inaction on the stagnant minimum wage—make him sound like a closet liberal, he is quick to reply, "Not even a little bit." He adds, "As a matter of fact, I have grown to be contemptuous of people who define themselves as liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, because their ideologies and their partisanship have taken them in a direction so far removed from reality and the important, fundamental issues and values of this country."
In War on the Middle Class, Dobbs laments "a national ennui" and urges Americans to stand up to "our unrepresentative Congress." When asked why so many Americans view their political representatives in Washington as being beyond impotent—gutless—Dobbs has a quick one-two punch for an answer: one, too many lawyers in Congress. "The second reason," he says, "is they—whether Republican or Democrat—are so beholden to the same slop-trough of contributions in lobby money. And that slop-trough is filled in almost every instance by corporate America, and they don't really care whether it's a Democrat or Republican dining in that trough. As a matter of fact, they want them both, and they both have been quick to oblige."
The outsourcing of American jobs—be it furniture manufacturing in the South or customer service jobs handled from Bombay—doesn't seem to faze politicians that much, but it absolutely infuriates Dobbs. In War on the Middle Class, Dobbs takes on the head cheerleader for globalization, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who once called Dobbs "a blithering idiot." "Tom is the leading advocate of free trade at any cost," says Dobbs. "He told Tim Russert in an interview not long ago that he never read a free trade agreement, but if it says 'free trade' on it, he's for it. So I think he's remarkably dangerous. I think he's dangerous because he's such an energetic, enthusiastic tool of corporate one worldism." (Requests for a response from Friedman went unanswered.)
The federal minimum wage is also one of Dobbs's battles and the recent GOP attempt to tie a boost in the minimum wage to cuts in the estate tax did not bypass Dobbs's political antennae. "Have I already used the word obscene?" he says, laughing. "The idea that [Congress] could vote themselves eight pay raises [each senator and representative makes $162,100 per annum] while denying an increase in the minimum wage is wrong-headed politics; it is faith-based economics; it is indifference to the well-being of millions and millions of Americans."
Dobbs is a hard man to pigeonhole. When he speaks about outsourcing, he sounds like a populist; when he sounds off on illegal immigration—and his support of such vigilante groups as the border-patrolling Minutemen—he sounds like a demagogue. Only Dobbs could unite boththe White House and the leftist Nation magazine in opposition to his stance on immigration.
"When I talk about the outsourcing of jobs, I think I sound like a rationalist," Dobbs counters. "When I talk about illegal immigration, I've been called a demagogue, a racist and a xenophobe. We have inundated the airwaves with facts on illegal immigration now for three years. Facts. It's the facts that the illegal alien lobby and their supporters and the amnesty supporters find so uncomfortable. They are the ones that used ad hominem attacks, and I don't think many people are fooled by that."
Whatever you want to say about Dobbs and his motives, there can be no denying that his defense of American workers has done wonders for his ratings, which have increased 33% in 2006, averaging approximately 815,000 viewers nightly. Asked what he attributed his ratings surge to, he didn't miss a beat: "Just demagoguery!"
Don't people have the right to come to America to make a better life—as Dobbs's own ancestors obviously did? Dobbs remains adamant. "They have a right to come here like any other people come here now. We have an immigration policy. We have immigration laws. I would like to see greater immigration into this country—lawfully. Who the hell gave George Bush the right to simply say we will not enforce our laws? This is madness."
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