Looking back, well aware of the traumatic events of the era and taking nostalgia into account, I find plenty of evidence that in certain respects Washington worked better then than it does now. Richard Nixon ended America’s involvement in the Vietnam War—not as fast as he might have, and the fighting of course continued—and he forged a new relationship with China. When Nixon repeatedly broke the law in the scandal wrapped up in the word “Watergate,” investigative journalists discovered and laid out the facts and Republican and Democratic senators enforced the rule of law. Ronald Reagan passed bipartisan tax reform, reached historic deals on Social Security with Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill and on nuclear weapons with the Soviets, and in partnership with other nations took steps that ultimately shrank the hole in the ozone layer.
Reagan’s election mattered to me mostly because it meant my father lost his job running the Agency for International Development, but it also represented a sea change in Washington. Ever since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, Democrats had almost always held majorities in the House and Senate. Until Reagan’s presidency, there had not been a Republican majority in either chamber since 1955, a quarter century earlier. Now the Senate was Republican, while the House remained Democratic for both of Reagan’s terms. The Senate would flip again in the middle of his second term. In his inaugural address, Reagan famously declaimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
I left for college in the middle of Reagan’s first term. I would graduate in the middle of his second, just before he turned the White House over to his vice president, George H. W. Bush. This was a lively time at Wesleyan University, as we protested against what many of us saw as a right-wing domestic and foreign policy agenda. Although many of us worried about Reagan’s overall direction—his cuts to domestic spending and increases to defense spending—there was not a sense that he was destroying our republic. He had said in that same first inaugural address: “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back.”
Reagan had a strong, conservative point of view. That did not stop him from passing major pieces of bipartisan legislation, including the Kemp-Roth tax cut in 1981 (carried by a voice vote in the Senate); the 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act for another twenty-five years (passed in the Senate by a bipartisan vote of 85–8); the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (passed in the Senate by a vote of 97–3); and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (passed by a vote of 69–30). When Reagan’s administration flouted the rule of law, as during the Iran-Contra affair, the Congress, the courts, and the press provided oversight. Reagan himself appointed the Tower Commission—two Republicans and one Democrat—to look into the matter. It produced a scathing report.
Still, in retrospect, it was clear by the 1990s that something noxious was spreading through the political system. Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” had deliberately (and successfully) relied on racially infected messages aimed at white voters. Politicians of many stripes found that religious and cultural issues could be usefully divisive—and instantly lucrative. The advent of dark money and new media placed more power in the hands of ideologues and blowhards—two qualities that often went together. Some people in leadership, notably Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House through much of the 1990s, openly encouraged a politics of division. The result: two government shutdowns and one presidential impeachment.
Shortly after college, with George H. W. Bush in the White House, I moved to Columbus to work for Ohio governor Richard Celeste. I traveled with the governor all over the state. Even though he had been the head of the Peace Corps, Celeste had a very low regard for Washington—not because Republicans were now in charge (although that aggravated him) but because he believed that Washington suffered from “a bicoastal bias” that favored the states bordering the Atlantic and Pacific at the expense of the middle of the country. Today, Dick Celeste is one of my constituents in Colorado, and his views have not changed.4
I concluded that I should go back to school and learn a profession, and since the last math class I took was precalculus in high school (I earned a grade of 70, on the retake), I applied to law school and was accepted at Yale. After graduating, I hustled down a path similar to that of many young lawyers. I clerked for a judge, spent nine months at a private firm in Washington, and finally landed a job with Jamie Gorelick, then President Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general of the United States. Her talented staff was led by a former federal prosecutor, Merrick Garland.
By now, I had met and fallen in love with Susan Daggett, an environmental lawyer who had grown up in Marianna, a small Arkansas town in the Mississippi delta. Neither of us had an interest in staying in Washington. We both thought it would be an adventure to begin our marriage in a new place, and we traveled around the country, visiting potential cities. We spent a wonderful, although uncharacteristically rainy, weekend in Denver. We knew no one there, and it felt wide open. Susan and I applied for jobs, and, naturally, she was hired first, by the Rocky Mountain office of Earthjustice (formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund). She would later lead that operation.
I had concluded by then that if I stayed in the law, I would become the world’s worst lawyer. Unlike Susan, I was not inspired by the practice of law, even though I had had the great fortune to work with some of the smartest lawyers and most decent human beings in Washington, both in private practice and at the Department of Justice. If I could not be satisfied under those circumstances, it seemed to me it was time for me to think about what else I could do.
I sent two letters to Denver, the first to John Hickenlooper, a Wesleyan alumnus who had lost his job as a geologist in Denver and gone on to start one of the first brewpubs between Chicago and California. The second was to Philip Anschutz, an entrepreneur with interests in railroads, telecommunications, and energy. Only one of them called me back, and the next thing I knew I was on my way to meet Phil Anschutz.
I was waiting in Phil’s reception room when he and his lieutenant, Craig Slater, arrived. They were wearing clothes from that morning’s dove hunt on Phil’s ranch. I had shot a gun only once and never killed a bird. We had a conversation, and within fifteen minutes I knew Phil was sold. I think he liked the idea of having someone from a Democratic administration—it upset preconceived notions of his politics. Slater would be harder to convince, for good reason. I confessed to him that I had never read a balance sheet or an income statement. Trying to be kind, Craig said sometimes people are just good at math, even if they have no formal business training. I referred him to my shabby high school mathematics record.
Over the coming weeks we traded calls. I had the sense Craig was dodging me, hoping I would give up. My wedding drew closer. The prospect of showing up in Marianna, Arkansas, to marry Susan without a job was not what I might have wished. Just in time, Anschutz agreed to hire me. I would have to take some business classes at night, and learn the fundamentals of how companies make payroll. If it didn’t work out after six months, he and Slater would provide a recommendation to a Denver law firm.
During my first week, I joined a meeting my colleagues were having with a group of investment bankers from New York. As the hour wore on, I began to realize that I had no idea what anybody was talking about. It was like listening to a foreign language. It occurred to me at that moment that there was a vast aspect of American society that I knew nothing about.
Three or four nights a week I went to class to study business valuations and accounting (a class everyone, including every liberal arts major, should take). I was charged out-of-state tuition, steep even then. I did my homework at the student union on the Auraria campus in Denver and ate Taco Bell for dinner. In time, I began to understand something about an entirely new language, one involving balance sheets, income statements, and risk assessment.
Just before my six-month deadline, Craig and Phil ass
igned me to study Forcenergy, a small, independent oil-and-gas company with assets in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. For months, investment bankers had been coming by our office to peddle equity deals in oil and gas, but commodity prices had fallen so low that a sizable number of companies were facing bankruptcy. In many of these companies, the equity was now worthless. Forcenergy was one.
We did not trade debt. Phil Anschutz was interested only in making long-term investments. In general, we looked for well-run companies with terrible balance sheets. And it was important to us that once a company was in bankruptcy, we were able to get it out as fast as we reasonably could. A company in a long bankruptcy can become a wasting asset. We started buying Forcenergy’s debt when oil was $11 a barrel. By the time the court approved our plan of reorganization, oil was at $18. Thanks to commodity prices I did not control (and never would), I was off to a good start.
The last transaction I worked on with Anschutz involved the bankruptcies of three different movie theater companies: Regal Cinemas, United Artists, and Edwards. Their owners, mostly private equity and hedge funds, had borrowed catastrophic sums of money to build stadium-seating theaters, prematurely cannibalizing existing locations, on the theory that as a result attendance would grow. It didn’t. Cash flow per screen plummeted, and the companies’ debt began to trade at distressed levels. In the end, we saved the companies by restructuring the $3 billion of debt the prior owners had borrowed into a manageable $450 million. We created what was then the largest movie exhibition company in the world—Regal Entertainment Group—and also built a new digital advertising business. My daughters often bemoan my small role in the latter when we are sitting through twenty minutes of commercials before a movie starts. I assure them it was worse when all you could see were static slides of boring trivia questions and ads for the local muffler shop. They remain unpersuaded.
Years later, when I became superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, critics would say ominously that I was going to try to “run it like a business.” I would remind them that I had made my living helping buy distressed companies and getting them back on their feet, saving jobs and investments, and that I knew private institutions could fail just as public ones sometimes did. The years at Anschutz were a crash course in why some institutions succeed and others don’t. As my years at Denver Public Schools later would do, my experience in business gave me a new, more tangible understanding of our economy and our democracy.
III. “Let the Public Proctology Begin”
I would soon draw upon that understanding, because John Hickenlooper, who was by then a friendly acquaintance (and returning my calls), asked if I would help him in his campaign for mayor of Denver. Now a real estate investor, successful restaurateur, and philanthropist, John had waged a winning effort to keep the words “Mile High” in the name of the Broncos stadium. Out of the eight or so candidates running for mayor that year, our polls had him starting the race in last place. Naturally, I was happy to help out.
John began making headway by stressing that his business experience could help Denver’s battered economy grow. By now I knew how to build and analyze spreadsheets. In just a couple of hours in my friend David Kenney’s office, I was able to see that the city’s revenue projections were way off and that Denver faced a budget deficit. John knew that this finding, which Denver’s then mayor, Wellington Webb, usefully later confirmed, gave him a great additional issue for his campaign.
As the campaign progressed, John took the lead in a field split among veterans of the city’s Democratic Party leadership. When he won, he asked me to be his chief of staff. I helped John recruit a great cabinet, balance the budget, and create a new system of police oversight. Two years later, Jerry Wartgow, superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, stepped down, and the independently elected school board appointed me to take his place.
Denver’s schools suffered from many of the challenges afflicting urban districts around the country. Enrollment had been declining for years, we had too many schools for the kids who remained in the district, and our academic achievement was among the worst in the state. Over the next five years, with the backing of a courageous school board and teams of talented principals and teachers, we led a community-wide effort to improve the schools.
In the past decade and a half, Denver has become the fastest-growing urban school district in the country. Thousands of families have returned to the public schools and thousands more have moved into the city in part because the quality of the schools has improved so significantly. The overall number of high school graduates going to college every year has doubled, with the greatest growth in college enrollment occurring among students of color. With renewed confidence in their schools, Denver’s voters have approved ballot measures that provide dedicated funding for preschool education and college scholarship assistance for low-income families. Teacher salaries, still woefully inadequate, are now competitive in the Denver metro region, and the Denver Public Schools have the country’s largest and most vibrant teacher-leadership program. A final area where Denver leads the nation, and for which I can take no credit, involves the implementation by my successor, Tom Boasberg, of an innovative apprenticeship program called CareerConnect, in which juniors and seniors work two days a week in paid apprenticeships in fast-growing areas of the economy (such as web design, health care, and high-tech manufacturing) and earn credits toward their high school diploma and community college during their three days a week at school. When they complete the program, they have earned their high school diploma and partial or full completion of an associate’s degree, plus they have three years of valuable paid work experience building skills in a growing profession.
We have a long way to go to close the achievement gap in our school district, but thanks to students and their families, teachers and principals, and the people who work for them in Denver, we continue to make progress. This is where I was working when Governor Ritter approached me about filling the seat left vacant when Senator Ken Salazar became a cabinet secretary.
There was one intervening episode. One of my roommates at Yale Law School was John Belcaster. We spent those years cramming for tests, watching Thirtysomething (at least it wasn’t Alf), eating dinners from Modern Apizza (established in 1934), and playing tabletop hockey and speed chess. Our third roommate, a theoretical math major who had grown up in Germany, Daniel Halberstam, almost always won (the chess—not the hockey).5 After he graduated, John returned to Chicago and went to work for a civil rights law firm there. Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland was so small it had only two associates. One was John. And another was Barack Obama.
I had heard of Obama. I remembered reading about him in the New York Times when he became the first African American editor in chief of the Harvard Law Review. Now he was John’s colleague, and I heard story after story: about a beautiful book—Dreams from My Father—that Barack had written and I had to read; about Barack’s announcements that he was running for a seat in the state senate (improbable), and then for a seat in the US House of Representatives (impossible), and then for the US Senate (crazy). Now, he was running for president, making the announcement in Springfield, Abraham Lincoln’s home.
I was sitting at my superintendent’s desk in Denver when the phone rang. Senator Obama was on the line, and he told me that Belcaster had passed along my number. By then, I had taken my measure of the candidate and had come to understand how meaningful his election could be to the children for whom I worked. Obama asked me to serve as an education adviser to his campaign. I said that I would. Throughout the course of the campaign, I participated several times in conference calls to try to refine candidate Obama’s education policy. In those days, I spent most of my time in schools or traveling between them, and I found myself listening on my car radio to Rush Limbaugh, worrying every day about what damage he and people like him might do to Obama’s candidacy.6
Just weeks after Obama’s election, his transition team invited me to Chicago to interview for the job of
education secretary. I knew the job would likely go to Arne Duncan, another school superintendent and a friend from Chicago, but still I went. After our meeting, the president-elect said, “I like what I’ve heard; let the public proctology begin”—by which he meant an FBI background check. My wife and I and our friends and neighbors came to understand what the vetting process entailed. It was indeed public proctology, though without anesthesia—and in the end the job went, unsurprisingly, to Arne. But the process revealed to me an important element of Obama’s character. On the day Arne’s appointment was announced, I was talking with one of my school board members when I received a call that I let go unanswered. Not long afterward, a reporter called asking me how I felt about Arne’s appointment. I told him Arne would be great, and then I looked at my phone and realized that I had missed a call from the 312 area code. I listened to the message: “It’s Barack, call me.” I called him back—voice mail!—and left a message telling him he had made a great choice, offering my help to Arne, and saying there was no need to return the call. Fifteen minutes later, he returned the call anyway to explain why he had chosen Arne and not selected me. In a world in which most politicians do almost anything to avoid giving bad news, Obama had called me twice to deliver it himself.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 2