Governor Dave Freudenthal, Part 2

(upbeat music) - [Steve] Since 1990, only one Democrat has been elected to statewide political office in Wyoming, it's Dave Freudenthal.

He left office 12 years ago after two terms as governor.

In the second of our two-part interview, Freudenthal talks about how he did it, and what he thinks has been lost from Wyoming politics since then.

Dave Freudenthal, part two.

I'm Steve Peck, of WyomingPBS, and this is Wyoming Chronicle.

- [Announcer] Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities, thinkwhy.org, and by the members of the WyomingPBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.

- [Steve] In researching his new book, titled "The Paradox of Plenty," former governor Dave Freudenthal found that history shows states relying heavily on commodity economics follow a typical three-step progression.

And yes, that's exactly what happened since Wyoming instituted a minerals based severance tax in 1969.

- Let me read three things that you talked about.

They're textbook examples, and actually I believe you found a textbook where someone had analyzed 'em, that characterized what the commodity state is.

And one is an influx of outside capital to extract and support a resource for processing and sale.

- That's us.

- Elsewhere.

We did that.

Another one is, commodity economies has expanded political and economic influence.

So, eventually, before long, the political leadership of the state begins to embrace that, protect it, defend it, and govern according to it almost.

And you could say that -- - We can certainly say that's the case here.

- We did that.

And then when things begin to go bad, and this is what we're kind of seeing now, the same leadership structure begins to, in a way, try to prevent the commodities economy from responding to what normally in an economic cycle might be just general business conditions, try to erect a barrier to that.

And we're seeing some of that now as well, in that we're trying to outlaw coal plants shutting down, or making it mandatory to delay it, or prohibiting competition in some way, or keeping, there was a bill issued in the legislature to make it penalize you if you tried to buy an electric car, or prevent it, even.

- Right.

- And we've done that.

That's, as you say, we have checked, we can check this box.

- We can certainly check that box.

- But the easiest thing in the world is to say, "Well, they should have done this."

And can you -- - I don't know that I'd have done any different.

- Yeah, that's the question.

- Because you know, when you go back and you read it, and obviously, both you and I knew a lot of these people, they were doing what they thought was right based on the information they had.

And part of it was that a lot of those folks were either children of the depression, or their parents had lived through the depression, and taxes are bad.

But now we're in a world where to have a believable community have things, you just gotta pay taxes, and you want an education system.

There's so much different than they were.

So I don't know, the two things that, in retrospect, which is always, you know, 100%, is probably spending more of the money figuring out what's the next economy for Wyoming, and probably limiting the amount of tax relief.

'Cause the other thing that's happened with tax relief is, as you know, nobody got involved with what the school was gonna look like because nobody was asked to do a school bond.

It was all come down, use your legislators, use political pressure to get money to build the school.

So the local involvement in tax issues, that was lost.

But I want to touch on this business about creating barriers.

- [Steve] Okay.

- It is such a contradiction for a state who claims to be free enterprise, dedicated Republican -- - Let the markets decide.

- Let the markets decide.

The first time they decide against us, we create every barrier we can, and as you can tell, it's proving to be fruitless.

I mean the problem with markets is that you can maybe incentivize a market, you know, like they're doing, like they did under George Bush I, where they created the production tax credit.

But you can't really put a lid on it, you can't say to somebody, your coal plant's 50 years old, and yeah, it's run its life, and there are cheaper alternatives, but you gotta keep the coal plant going.

Instead of our thinking about, all right, this is the reality we're dealing with, and there's some realities that are really positive for us.

We got a ton of natural gas, we ought to be figuring out, all right, can we get 'em to convert to natural gas?

Or can we get that natural gas moving in a series of pipelines that gets it into the LNG network, as opposed to spending money suing everybody that is closing down a power plant?

You know, the problem is that most of these plants were built about the time I graduated from high school, or within the next 10 years.

They're old.

- We talk about over-dependence on the minerals industry.

The minerals industry itself is rather diverse, coal isn't uranium, which isn't oil and gas, which isn't treading on by any means, or bentonite.

Now we've got this nuclear plant, we're talking about wind, we talk about rare earth minerals.

Is there a place for growth and further diversification, or embracing diversification that already sort of exists in the extractive industries?

- I think the rare earth minerals things is really interesting, given the federal incentives that have evolved.

I think, you know, it wasn't that we didn't have deposits, it's they weren't economic, now that there's more interest in producing in America, I think that's an avenue for us.

I think that oil and gas will come back.

But another thing is this CO2 storage.

I mean, Wyoming should be out through the university, mapping the storage capacity for CO2 in this state.

We can't make that industry come here, but we can sort of create an information base that encourages.

It's kinda like you do it through on a gas commission, where you've got a huge amount of data for the oil companies to look at.

And to me, I think that tourism is gonna be much more important going forward.

We have to figure out a way to keep people here a few more days, when they're, you know, going back and forth to the parks.

There's some magnificent places in Wyoming, but I suspect a lot of people are like me, I have my favorite fishing place, I really don't wanna tell anybody about it.

- Yeah.

What did you try to do when you were in office, and you were elected in 2002 and served two terms, what was your emphasis at the time?

- You know, there was a couple of things.

I talked earlier about I wanted to revitalize the tourism, which really started under Cliff Hansen, and then -- - Cliff Hansen, Wyoming governor, later, two-term U.S. senator, 1960s in the Senate.

- He kicked it off, Hathaway pushed it, and then we went through a series of government reorganizations, and it kinda fell by the wayside.

I wanted to see that done.

I wanted to do something about educational infrastructure, K through 12, as well as the community colleges and university, we spent a lot of money on that.

And I think it's important because, two things, one is you wanna have an educated workforce if you're gonna get businesses, secondly, you need to figure out a way for our children to have a good life wherever they decide to lead it.

I wanted to figure out a way to try to preserve some things in the state, and that was the Wildlife Trust Fund.

And then we started something called the Business Ready Business Committee Program.

And then we got it funded, but at a relatively modest level, and it still is now.

It's gonna take major investments.

I will say that I've been disappointed, I mean, we did the science initiative, we did the engineering, I mean, the university, the individual faculty members are pretty amazing, but as an institution, it has not grabbed hold of the idea that part of its service is to help build, through innovation and companies, help build a state.

There are some companies that get started, then they move to Colorado.

- I saw you at the dedication of the big new science initiative building, one of several incredible pieces of infrastructure that the state essentially paid for.

At that time, you said something that stuck with me, and you mentioned it earlier today, and my recollection of it was, "We are here today because the future doesn't have a constituency."

So what did you mean by that?

We're standing in this big building, we've invested in it, because we're thinking of today's first grader who one day will get to work in this avenue.

- That's what you hope, is that, in that building, the university can build the kind of program that will make superstars out of the kids from Wyoming, or wherever else that come there, and that those superstars will build not just a better state, but a better world.

But the focus in Wyoming tends to be on the here and now, and those things.

And you know, Phil Nicholas, who was Appropriations Chair when I was in, he and I, we had some difficult moments, but we agreed on that, that we had to figure out a way to set in place things that would make Wyoming the place we dream of it being.

And, you know, we succeeded on some, and I failed on some.

- What makes you a Democrat?

A lot of the things you say, seem to me to be about the same, or to the average person, about the same as what you'd hear, mainstream Wyoming Republican it seems like, why are you a Dem?

- I think because I disavow the extreme rhetoric on both sides of the aisle, it's just absurd.

And so I find myself kind of trying to figure out some kind of a moderate, pragmatic approach.

And it seemed to me, obviously when I worked for Herschler, that being a democrat was more logical.

I grew up in a very Republican family, was president of the Teenage Republicans, all of that, but to me, you make the decision in the context you're in, and it was important that you have the freedom not to be obligated to have your ideas formed by some doctrinaire party.

And the Democrats were the least doctrinaire of the two parties in Wyoming.

And so it was a place where, and as you know, when I ran in 2002, the allegation in the Democratic primary was that I wasn't a real Democrat.

- A DINO.

- Yeah, a DINO, I guess.

But in the end, I am who I am, I'm not particularly comfortable, I'm not comfortable at all, with the language on the two spectrums of the party.

- You're not Bernie Sanders or -- (Freudenthal scoffing) - No.

And you know, Bernie Sanders, or the former speaker of the house, I can get along without her.

I mean, but on the other hand, I'm not Marjorie Taylor Green.

I mean, you know, and I think most people want to figure out how do we pragmatically make this a better place, for ourselves, for our children, for our grandchildren, and have some hope for the future, and I don't know that the extremes of either party are focused on it, they're busy with outrage, and demonizing, and all the rest of it.

If you think about it, that was part of the gift that Hathaway had when he was governor, he became a little more acerbic in his later years.

And Herschler, there was a kind of, "Yeah, I don't agree with you, but we'll fight about it, and maybe we'll go have a drink."

Whereas now, we're just gonna fight about it, and I don't like you.

- And we're not gonna go have a drink.

- Yeah, well, (laughs) that's right.

- How did you first come to know Ed Herschler?

- By accident.

I had gone got my undergraduate degree at Amherst College, and one of my economics professors, a guy named Chalmers, had married a girl from Thermophilus.

He had gone to University of Wyoming, knew some of the people who were in Herschler's transition team, but he was also, I had come back from Amherst, he was the Staff Economist, the DPAD under Don Brock.

- [Steve] I see.

- And so I was supervising these contracts about population projections and all that, Chalmers was doing those.

So then Chalmers gets asked by some of the people on Herschler's transition team for some names of some bright young people to interview.

So I go in, and got lucky, interviewed with Herschler, hadn't met him, didn't know him from a bucket of bolts, but he hired me.

And the end of this, or the end of that particular story, is that after a few years are working for him, and I got to know him, I said, "So why did you hire me?"

And he said, "Well, you know," 'cause I came in with my Amherst economics degree, I mean, I was big time.

He said, "Well, you know, I thought you were kind of a smart," blank, and frankly wasn't that impressed, but he said, "You've been Boys State governor."

And he was big in American Legion Boys State.

- [Steve] See, I was in Boys State, and he came to speak to us that day, I remember asking him a question at a press conference we had.

- And he said, "So I figured anybody who had been Boys State Governor deserved a second chance."

- [Steve] Interesting.

- And that's how I got hired.

- [Steve] Well, lots of higher level elected officials, we count on smart, young people with energy to do a lot of work for them, don't they?

I'm sure you did as well.

What did you do for him as time went by over his three terms?

And you weren't there, a part of the administration that whole time, but.

- I'd come back to work to pay off my college debt so I'd go to law school.

So then I'm working with Herschler, and it was an exciting time, we did the Industrial Siting Act, we did land use planning, the big mineral boom.

And so I did everything from, you know, frankly, write speeches, write policy papers.

I'd send him these really learned memos, and he'd call me and, you know, he'd look at me and he said, "So, what makes you think that's such a good idea?"

I mean, he was fairly candid.

And then in '77 he said, "Well, you need to get to law school.

And if you go to law school and you get on law review your first semester, you can come back to work."

So I did.

So then I went back to work, and I did the campaign in '78 and '82, was part of that sort of kitchen cabinet.

- [Steve] Right.

- And then when Herschler went out of office, he came and practiced law with him.

- Ed Herschler had been a legislator, I think what people might forget is that he ran for Congress.

- He did.

- And was defeated, and bounced back from that to build this, I'd say that's not an exaggeration to say, a legendary career in Wyoming, the only governor ever to serve three terms, and was a Democrat.

And he was succeeded by another Democrat who served two more terms.

And then there was two terms under Republican Governor Geringer.

Then you come along, the red shell around Wyoming was pretty well established then, we weren't a majority democratic state, and I don't know when we ever were, when that might have been.

It certainly wasn't true in Herschler's time.

- No.

It wasn't even true in the '40s.

- Yeah, I mean, I know that there's been one presidential election once in 80 years, 90 years, has a Democrat carried Wyoming, and that's now been 60 years ago, so.

And yet here you came again.

When Governor Sullivan retired and tried to run, he ran for the Senate, I remember thinking, if Mike Sullivan, a well-regarded, pragmatic, two-term governor just leaving office with solid approval couldn't get elected to the U.S. Senate, then we'll never see another Democrat elected on a statewide ballot again.

Eight years later, here you come.

How'd you do that?

I've come to think that you, particularly, were an outlier as an individual, maybe more so than you were still at a time when Wyoming was considering someone with a D after his name.

What do you think?

- Yeah, well, I think they liked my wife and kids.

- [Steve] It's important, isn't it?

- It is.

Yeah.

But I think, more than anything, I wasn't particularly strident about any of it, I just sort of thought we ought to do things different.

And let me say that when Nancy and I decided to run, we didn't exactly hire a moving band in anticipation of moving.

But I had some thoughts about how I thought we ought to do some things, and do some things differently, and I wanted to have my say.

- Very close election against a highly qualified candidate that would seem to have checked every single box.

- I mean, I just happened to catch it when people were interested in being pragmatic.

That's the item that I think has evaporated from politics.

It's now Facebook clips saying outrageous stuff, can I get in the media.

I mean there's some pretty decent just sort of substantive bills going through, they get no attention.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And both parties have become remarkably committed to social engineering my private life.

And I don't think it's any of their business one way or the other.

And that used to be the attitude in Wyoming, as you know growing up here, it was fundamentally live and let live.

You know?

I'm not gonna violate your space, and you stay outta mine, and we can be friends.

- Yeah, I often, I remember my father saying he really didn't know what some friend or business associates politics were, didn't know, didn't come up, and he didn't care.

Didn't wanna know, and maybe better not to know sometimes.

- Well, and people made judgements about other people without labels.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- I mean, you either earned the respect or the disrespect based on what you did, not on some preconceived label.

It's created a really kind of timid atmosphere for people who are thinking about stuff, and so they don't want to risk taking a big initiative unless they can figure out "how do I turn it into a Facebook thing?"

Or whatever it is, I don't do Facebook, but it seems to be what everybody's obsessed with.

And I think we have lost the key ingredient of Wyoming, which was our advantages were small, and if we can figure out what we want to do, we can move quickly, which most states can't, and we should be taking advantage of it.

There are a lot of things you do, but it's incremental.

And it's like baseball, once in a while you get a home run, but most of the time you win with base hits.

- But you can't plan for the three run homer in the bottom of the ninth.

Great when you get it.

- Yeah.

(laughs) It's a gift when it comes, but don't count on it.

- Yeah, not a good way to do it.

You couldn't have been elected without a lot of Republicans voting for you.

Your second term, a lot of Republicans must have voted for you, you won by a big margin.

What do you think about this legislation to keep Democrats from voting in the Republican primary, or vice versa?

Because sometimes that happens too.

- It's a symbolic fight over the last war.

I mean, if every Democrat in the state had voted for Liz Cheney, it wasn't gonna change the outcome, but it gave people a chance to be outraged, it's sort of like election fraud.

I mean, county clerks are really serious about what they do, and they're really good at it, you know, and so the notion that they were tolerating fraud, I mean, you've taken the sort of bombastic national issue, you bring it to Wyoming, it has no application in Wyoming.

I mean, it's like all of the anger about "we can't have drop boxes."

Well, two weeks ago, Trump came out and said, "Yeah, we should have drop boxes."

And you look at it and you think, couldn't we spend that same amount of time and energy figuring out how to make this a better place, as opposed to figuring out how to beat up on people about stuff that, frankly, (sighs) it doesn't improve things.

- And when you were Governor, the Capital Renovation Initiative was being talked about, and that took a long time, a huge expense, and it's mostly finished now, we're in the capitol, there were years when the legislature couldn't even meet here while it was being done.

This is a historic room, do you know much about it?

- Well, what I do know is it was once the seat of the Wyoming Supreme Court.

And in fairness, I have to say that I vetoed the first proposal.

- [Steve] You did?

- I did.

It was in there, they buried it in the appropriations bill, and the idea of spending 6, 700 million, and we're still not done, didn't seem to me to be the most important thing in the state.

So, there's parts of this that are absolutely beautiful, on the other hand, if you've tried to find your way around the Herschler Building, that's a trick in itself, (Steve chuckling) and you may wanna leave cookie crumbs if you're gonna find your way out.

And I think the other thing that has been lost is that sort of, used to be, people could visit Cheyenne, and four of the elected officials were on the same floor, and you could walk into their office, and they did it all the time.

It was great fun.

- So you're saying when you were governor, as recently as then, someone, it wasn't impossible to just walk in unannounced.

- Oh no.

- And get 10 minutes of the governor's time?

- No.

And, as governor, it was just a hoot.

I mean, people are so interesting.

But yeah, and then you could walk down the hall, and walk across the hall, and there's the treasurer, and down the hall, there's the auditor, and then the Secretary of State, and it was very much the same.

And to me, what we've lost in this building is two things, the communications between the elected officials, because they need to learn to get along, which isn't always easy, and the user-friendly nature of government, it's become very, and we had security, and she had a panic button, and once in a while they had to use it.

- And I'm not saying that no one could do that with Governor Gordon now, but I just, I'm interested to hear you talk about what your experience was.

- Yeah.

Now, well, look at the physical structure he's behind.

You know, you got big policemen sitting out there, you got the glass doors.

I mean, it's not Gordon, it's the edifice.

I mean, I do think that part of that distance is a part of the reason that people can vilify each other.

It's hard to vilify somebody you know.

- How is the governor's relationship with the legislature changed?

Was the governor a more powerful office when you had it, do you think?

- The governor makes that decision, and that I learned from watching Hathaway and Herschler.

They firmly believed that the job of the chief executive was to set the agenda.

Now, do you get it all, what you want?

No, you know?

But you learn that when you're about 18 months old, you don't get everything you want.

But it becomes the basis around which the debate is formed.

So, I mean, every year, I followed the same pattern that those two had, you had a set of things you wanted passed, and certain things you wanted done, you highlighted some of them, then you had the little attachment to your message about this bill needs to be done, this bill needs to be done.

- [Steve] Sure.

- And you didn't ever leave, you didn't ever fail to fulfill your responsibilities as a co-equal branch for government, and the legislature didn't fail to fulfill theirs.

I mean, I remember being up in front of the Appropriations Committee for eight hours, and, you know, they wanted to ask questions, and I thought I had answers, and it was everything from soup to nuts.

And they were all, you know, as Al Simpson would say, they were of the other faith.

And, you know, I described it as eight hours of "stump the governor."

They didn't get it done, and from then on, we got along great.

But the individual who holds the office, what you really have is the bully pulpit, the opportunity to try to advance what you believe is important to the state.

You have to accept that you're gonna win some, you're gonna lose some, but at the end of the day, you hope that the state's a better place than when you started, and that doesn't happen if you're passive.

- And for someone who wants to know a lot about the mechanics of a really, really interesting, and as we're learning now, important part of Wyoming, this is a great place to start.

So, I thank you for this, and very much appreciate you being with us today on Wyoming Chronicle.

Governor Dave Freudenthal.

- I enjoyed it, thank you.

- Thank you very much.