Los Angeles Times Interview : Maxine Waters : Veteran Legislator Makes People Angry--but She’s Never Ignored

Irrepressible is the word for Maxine Waters. Making her way though the crowded bungalow in South-Central that serves as her congressional district office, she chats it up with gang members about a jobs program, college scholarship winners and “just some older folks.” Then on to judge a Compton student art show. The day ends with a late dinner at a Santa Monica restaurant. Waters, accompanied by her husband Sidney Williams, a former football player for the Cleveland Browns, spends much of the meal grilling a waitress from Poland about the effect of shock therapy on the Eastern European economy.

A second-term congresswoman, Waters, 54, has already left her mark on the Congressional Black Caucus. She was an early backer of Bill Clinton and now serves as a powerful broker between the President and the Democratic Party’s left wing. As an active member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, one of her current passions is redressing the shabby treatment of female veterans.

Waters is also on the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee. And it is urban poverty, as exemplified by the inner-city core of her district, that obsesses her. The blocks radiating from her office provide a bleak landscape of despair and neglect. In the past, Water’s response has been, as she puts it, to “rant” about the glaring inequity of the life of her constituents. She has been judged “abrasive” and laughs that some of her advisers tell her to stay off TV lest she “scare white folks.”

Rhetoric aside, Waters was an effective legislator for 14 years in the state Assembly and found funding for a series of innovative programs that dot her district. Three years ago, she moved on to Congress and seems in the process of evolving a more subdued style. It won’t last.

Question: Where do you come down in the Los Angeles mayoral race?

Answer: The mayor’s race is a very sad event for me. I feel no connection. I have no passion. And I don’t feel compelled to do anything. Many of us are guilty of having allowed Tom Bradley to do whatever he has done without really challenging him, without making sense out of what was going on in City Hall. And so now we are confronted with a situation where we have two candidates and we don’t know who they are really and what they care about.

Q: Who would do a better job of lobbying Washington for money for L.A.? Does it help to have a Democrat in office?

A: I don’t think it’s important. I think it can be done by either one of them. That’s what mayors do. They lobby Congress to provide resources for their city.

Q: Does it matter that one candidate, Michael Woo, is a Democrat who supported Bill Clinton, as you did? Presumably he supports Clinton’s urban agenda.

A: How does he support Clinton’s urban agenda? He doesn’t know what it is.

Q: Does anyone know what it is?

A: The urban agenda, from my point of view, is what we are going to all help make it. I see myself as helping the White House forge an urban agenda.

Q: Presumably there is a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans?

A: Presumably. If you ask a young man in South-Central about the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, he can’t tell you. As you evaluate that whole discussion about what must be done to bring whites back into the Democratic Party, you can see why there is no urban agenda.

Q: So why aren’t you angrier with the leadership of your party and this President?

A: I don’t understand people who say, “Aren’t you disappointed with the Democrats, or Clinton?” I knew that Clinton’s campaign was geared toward bringing whites back into the Democratic Party. For those of us who understood what was happening politically, we understood that we had very few choices. Clinton never said, “My Administration is going to pour resources into the poor community.” But I really do believe that Bill Clinton is more liberal than oftentimes his politics. He’s practical. But I think his heart is decent.

Q: Maybe you’ve made it too easy for him. Can he can take people like you for granted because you’re not going to break with him?

A: It is a complicated game of trying to get something out of them. I don’t think it works to just be mad at them--Maxine Waters out ranting and kicking down the doors. It would be so easy to dismiss you and marginalize you.

Q: The fact is that people are talking about L.A. as a dead city. Not just South-Central.

A: But they are correct, aren’t they? Really, it’s a bad time here.

Q: So this is not a question then of helping out poor blacks as opposed to the middle class? This is a question of Clinton having a program to save one of America’s most important cities? A: If I had my druthers, I would simply have appropriations to deal with correcting some of these problems. But it’s not going to happen that way. Clinton is going to try to utilize a combination of resources already in the pipeline. They are going to try and blow out whatever is there in HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) and EDA (Economic Development Administration) and places like that. Clinton can’t get a $16-billion stimulus program passed. What are you talking about?

Q: How significant is Hillary in this?

A: I think Hillary and Bill are really liberals at heart. I think that, in addition to being liberals, they are very practical. They have made some decisions about what it takes to win. They are capable of reinventing themselves many times over to keep up with it. They may be the best political analysts, that couple, that you will ever see in American politics.

Q: So when is the moment of truth? We’ve got the new Democrats in there and at what point do you say, “Hey, you guys aren’t any different? “

A: This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We’ve had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty. There are those who say there was a backlash from white, middle-class America that didn’t want to fund a war on poverty. It’s no secret, Bill Clinton did not campaign on a war-on-poverty idea. He talked a lot about the middle class, which a lot of us didn’t like. But we didn’t have a lot of choices did we?

Q: But still he’s supposed to be a Democratic President. He’s supposed to represent an alternative to a Republican President. Shouldn’t we expect a new beginning?

A: I certainly do. I don’t accept that the first 100 days of his Administration somehow is an example of what his entire Administration is going to be about. I can see the seeds of new policy. We need to give it a little time.

Q: You sound like we have a lot of time. Yet just weeks ago I was in this very office with you. And we all felt a great sense of panic at the possibility of a riot over the verdict. Are we once again slipping into a feeling of, well, there was no riot, there is no big problem?

A: No, we’re not slipping into that feeling, but if you take a look at what has not happened over the past 12 years or more, you can understand for many of us who are anxious to have resources, to have these problems addressed, that none of us felt that it would be done in the first 100 days. It takes time.

Q: Very understanding of you.

A: I don’t think anybody that knows me would think that I’m so understanding. Most people say I’m too pushy, I’m too aggressive, I’m too assertive, I’m too confrontational. That I ask for too much. I’ve never been considered patient, or even conciliatory in most instances. But I don’t think anything happens in a short period of time. Particularly when you’re talking about dealing with Congress and government. It just doesn’t happen.

Q: Any insights into Congress?

A: You try to manipulate the process. In Sacramento, I was very good at it, at getting legislation passed. And when I came to Washington I thought that I was going to approach it differently. That the conventional wisdom was such that you had to not be confrontational, not challenge too much, but understand that there was great tradition. But that’s a bunch of crap--you know what I’m saying? It’s all designed to keep people very much intimidated and not challenging the power. And I found the same old tactics worked in Congress too. I mean, you know, just kick some ass. (Laughing)

Q: It must seem an incredible distance from Capitol Hill to the harsh reality of your district. Back there are the people who can do a lot for this district, but just driving around, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot is being done.

A: I’ve been in this struggle for many years now. I understand racism. I understand that there are a lot of people in this country who don’t care about the problems of the inner city. We have to fight every day that we get up for every little thing that we get. And so I keep struggling. Whether it is getting a Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center on the corner of 109th--it took me years to get, but it’s a beautiful brand-new facility. That’s an accomplishment.

Q: Do you ever feel that you’re losing touch with your own community?

A: I ask myself that every day. There are times when I feel not. I had a wonderful experience recently in anticipation of the second Rodney King verdict where I decided to do a letter to the community about how I really felt. It’s times such as that, that I feel that I’m connecting. And there are other times I’m shocked by what I see and what I discover. And when I’m shocked by it, I think, God, I’m losing it, that I don’t really understand what’s going on out there.

Q: Is the media only interested in South-Central if there is the possibility of a riot?

A: Yes. I don’t have them down here asking me what my urban agenda is. I don’t find them really doing in-depth stories on community-based organizations that have been struggling for a long time and who are out trying to get funds. They aren’t interested in those stories.

Q: Do you have a program that you have presented to Clinton?

A: Yes, I have an urban agenda that includes job training, it includes sports and recreation facilities, it includes one-stop centers for health care, the community development bank. All of those things, yes, I do. I’m struggling.

Q: How much would all that cost?

A: Billions. Billions is what is spent all the time. But it’s not spent on poor people. You know, we are now just about 40 members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The largest number that it’s ever been. Policy, for the most part, has been made by white people in America, not by people of color. And they have tended to take care of those things that they think are important. Whether it’s their agricultural subsidies, or other kinds of expenditures that are certainly not expenditures for poor people or for people of color. And so we have to band together and keep fighting back.

Q: Finally, how do you sum up the Tom Bradley era?

A: The fact that Bradley ends his career with 52 candidates filing to run for the office of mayor is the most telling description of what did not happen. It speaks to a lack of leadership. Bradley enjoyed a romanticizing by both the liberal white community and the black community--we hesitated to criticize him because we were proud of this first black mayor. And the white liberal community kind of romanticized this tall, black, modest, non-threatening, black man because they felt comfortable and safe. Until they had a rebellion, and then they thought he didn’t do what he was supposed to do. He didn’t keep them quiet.