Jim Hightower.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: The Progressive Interview

There is no one like Jim Hightower on the American scene today. Clever and impassioned, this folksy populist may be the best advocate for progressive politics in the country.

Hightower began as an aide to the great Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough. In 1972, Hightower founded the Agribusiness Accountability Project. Four years later, he was campaign director for Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris in that populist's Presidential run. Following Harris's defeat, Hightower became editor of The Texas Observer. Ditching journalism to return to electoral politics, he twice won public office as agriculture commissioner of Texas in the 1980s. Touted as a potential Senator or more, Hightower lost his bid to be elected ag commissioner a third time after a certain Republican strategist named Karl Rove engaged in some dirty tricks. Hightower then took to the airwaves, doing a national radio program from the Chat and Chew Cafe in Austin. Today, he still does radio commentaries that air around the country. In addition, he puts out The Hightower Lowdown, a newsletter with more than 100,000 subscribers. He's also a best-selling author. His previous books include There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos and If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates. His latest is Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back. (In Thieves, he mentions a telling comment George W. made at a dinner of his fat cat contributors back in 2000. Said Bush: "This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have-mores. Some call you the elite. I call you my base.")

Most of all, Hightower is an agitator in the tradition of Mother Jones and Big Bill Haywood. Or think of him as Woody Guthrie without the guitar. Hightower goes from town to town, visiting union halls, walking picket lines, and entertaining activists with his humor and his bite. On what he calls his Rolling Thunder Down-Home Democracy Tour, he holds huge public festivals that feature not just political speeches but music and food and beer "to lubricate the movement," he says.

I caught up with Hightower on September 6 when he came to Baraboo, Wisconsin, to participate in Fighting Bob Fest, named after Robert La Follette, a leader of the Progressive movement and the founder of this magazine. (Fighting Bob Fest, by the way, is the brilliant creation of Ed Garvey, who upholds the progressive banner in Wisconsin's Democratic Party.) Hightower gave a barnburner before a crowd of 2,000 people. "Bush has usurped power faster than a hog eats supper," he said. The next morning, I spoke with him in Madison, right before he was kind enough to do a fundraiser for The Progressive.

Q: How are your Rolling Thunder events going?

Jim Hightower: We're drawing thousands of people, almost despite our inept organizing. Our slogan is let's put the party back in politics. Politics ought to be fun. It shouldn't be just boring meetings.

Q: But the mainstream media looks across the land and sees apathy. What's going on?

Hightower: The media's asleep. The media is also corporate. It doesn't get this. When we started Rolling Thunder, the first one we had was in my hometown of Austin, Texas, and the daily newspaper, a Cox tentacle, didn't cover it. They didn't get it. Why would people come to this? But 6,000 people did come, the biggest political event in the history of Austin...