Dana Gioia: evaluation

Transcript context

…Seven years. What is it you think you understand about Congress that maybe outsiders would not, given all that experience? One thing you were very successful at doing was appealing to Congress for what you wanted to get done. When I was appointed to this job people said, “Go there and fight the good fight.” Everybody just told me, “Just to go there and fight. Don’t give up.” I knew instinctively that fighting was the wrong metaphor, that my job was to reconcile. They went, “How can you deal with so-and-so, he’s such an awful, evil person?” I said that, “I believe everyone in Congress is the valid elected official. They are the person that their people have sent to represent them in a democratic republic. Therefore, they deserve the respect that the system itself deserves.” I met with everybody. In fact, I took meetings with people who only took the meetings so they could yell and scream at me. I had the people that supported me, the people that wanted to support me and the people that I would convince to support me. Within a year, because I traveled every week with people back to their districts, to their states, I had created a bipartisan, bicameral majority. It was because I also changed the NEA so that we were representing, for the first time in the history of the agency, all of America. We were reaching every community, every population, versus an institution that was largely serving the artistic elite. The arts world was very angry about that, but that is the best thing that I did in my chairmanship, was to make this institution, which reflected America. Should we send 40% of the NEA budget to the state arts agencies?…

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