A liberal and a conservative travel across the country – wait, it’s not a joke. It’s the true-life pairing of pundit and comedian, who went looking for meaning in the mundane. Excerpt from Inforum’s “Meghan McCain and Michael Ian Black: Two Slices of American Pie,” July 17, 2012.

MEGHAN MCCAIN, Political Pundit; Co-author, America, You Sexy Bitch

MICHAEL IAN BLACK, Actor; Comedian; Co-author, America, You Sexy Bitch

In conversation with JOAN WALSH, Editor at Large, Salon.com

 

Party animals

WALSH: Michael, in some ways you play into Meghan’s stereotypes of Democrats, where you’re kind of down, but not with all of it.

BLACK: The answer is maybe more complicated. I’m – as I think a lot of comedians are – just generally anti-authoritarian. The political parties to me are anachronisms; I don’t like them; I don’t believe in them. I definitely feel like I caucus with the Democrats; I feel like they represent far more of what I believe in than the Republicans do. But as an organization, I feel like both parties are more or less money-laundering operations, and I would just as soon get rid of both of them, and I think we have the technology now to do that. We don’t need them. We don’t need these big machines that are just vacuuming up dollars and giving them to their friends. I look at them like mob families.

WALSH: You each share your strange loves of people in the other party. [Meghan], what did you see in Dennis Kucinich that you loved?

MCCAIN: He was the first politician we met that was happy to be on the record. I was expecting not to like him, because he’s obviously an extremely liberal Democrat. He wasn’t the most impressive presidential candidate. But we met with him, and I asked him, “Why would you meet with us?” and he said, “Because your father is part of the congressional family, and by offshoot, you’re part of the congressional family. And I think we should take care of our family.” I was like, “Where am I?”

He was so excited to still be a congressman. We had this endearing conversation about how he’s grateful that he can work in politics and how much respect he has for my father and how much he loves his wife. He was so kind and so nice. I’m so jaded by politics and politicians, [but] he was warm and friendly and gave us so much time and answered our questions. Two weeks ago, I got a letter in the mail that he’d hand-written, thanking us.

Fight night at the McCains

WALSH: There’s a way in which Democrats are really demonized by the other side. I’ve talked to other Democrats, and even in my own life being on MSNBC and talking to Joe Scarborough or even Pat Buchanan where they’re kind of shocked that I have a family, I love my daughter, I love my country – it’s sort of like we have been demonized. Did you feel that at all on the tour?

MCCAIN: We got in a fight about this issue, actually.

BLACK: Meghan had a kind of epiphany about her own relationship with stereotypes about Democrats. My sense is that Republicans have co-opted the word patriot, have co-opted the word freedom, have co-opted the idea of America in a way that is so destructive not only to Democrats but to themselves, because you end up seeing Democrats or people who don’t agree with you politically as somehow alien. That’s untruth, and obviously it’s corrosive. We see it manifested just today when Governor Sununu said President Obama needs to start acting like an American –

WALSH: Learning how to be an American.

BLACK: It’s that kind of “otherness” language, that makes it very easy for polarization to occur. As a Democrat and as a liberal, I want to reclaim the word patriot and say, “I’m a patriot, and I believe in freedom, and I believe in this country, and I love my country.” And I want that to be okay for Democrats to say and not be self-conscious about it.

MCCAIN: A fight we got in early on in the book – we were drinking in Prescott, Arizona. My brothers were there, as were some of his friends who were in the military, and for whatever reason we started talking about the war in Iraq, and we were discussing why [Black] disagrees with it and why I supported it. I was like, “Listen, Michael, freedom doesn’t come free,” and he laughed in my face – literally laughed in my face. My mom was there, and she was like, “Now Michael, you have to understand what this means for Meghan and our family.” For me, when my brother deployed, I remember sitting on the tarmac in Camp Pendleton and feeling like this is the cost of freedom, seeing my brother maybe for the last time as an 18-year-old, hysterically crying. This is the cost, and that’s what “freedom doesn’t come free” means to me. It is a rallying cry, and it’s something I used to say to myself when he was deployed, and Michael laughed at me!

So that was when this conversation started about what it means to be a real American and what freedom means to me versus what freedom means to Michael or to liberals, and I found out through our writing and through our experience on the trip that I was stereotyping a lot of people as well. I consider myself a pretty open-minded person, but I was still projecting my feelings, like Michael couldn’t possibly understand America in the way that I do because I come from a military family and I know what the cost of this is – and it’s wrong, and I was guilty of doing it.

Other voices

WALSH: What is the next step in bridging the boundaries between Republicans and Democrats?

BLACK: My fear is it really isn’t about Democrat versus Republican. I’m one of those Occupy people, I guess, who feels like what we’re really fighting over is an ever-shrinking slice of a pie, and that there’s a small group of people for whom the pie is ever-expanding. That’s why we’re fighting so much. It’s like the walls are closing in, and we’re all fighting for elbow room. I do think that we have to figure out income inequality in this country. Whether that’s through taxation or whatever, we have to figure out a way to grow and strengthen our middle class, because otherwise we’re doomed, we’re a banana republic.

MCCAIN: It’s more of a culture war than anything else. It’s more about people having such a basic misunderstanding of one another. If you’re Republican as a journalist or commentator or politician, if you bridge the divide at all – look at Olympia Snow – you are ostracized and demagogued and seen as somehow weak. I remember Mike Huckabee said I was part of the “mushy middle.” That’s a really rude thing to say about my political beliefs. It’s scary to me that compromise is seen as not having a backbone.

GOP evolving

WALSH: When will the Republican Party support marriage equality for all?

MCCAIN: Once they realize they’re going to continue losing elections until they start supporting it. It’s that simple.

WALSH: With global warming, why does the Republican Party insist on the one dissenting scientist out of 100 that’s right?

MCCAIN: [Black and I] agree on this. I don’t understand, with all the things going on and weather patterns this summer, how you don’t think something is happening to our planet. It should be a human issue. It scares me to death when I see the polar bears drowning, and I start getting really scared about the future of our culture. All that being said, the PR for climate change has been so poorly conducted to Middle America; it’s sort of become this Hollywood elite issue.

BLACK: You don’t want Leonardo DiCaprio teaching you science?

MCCAIN: No. I don’t want Leonardo DiCaprio teaching me science.