Last week, Muckgers sat down with John Connelly, former president of the Rutgers University Student Assembly (RUSA), to discuss his appearance on MSNBC regarding the ongoing debate over healthcare and the growing student debt crisis. After Senator Ted Cruz mentioned him during his 21-hour speech against the Affordable Care Act, John’s phone started ringing.

So @tedcruz used me as an example I’ll have more to say about that after I get back from my ophthalmologist #stillinsuredthanksbiggovernment — John W. Connelly (@jwconn) September 25, 2013

Soon enough, major television networks like Al Jazeera America and MSNBC were calling him to get his reaction to Cruz’s comments about his education, his career, and other pressing details of his life. A few days later, Connelly appeared on MSNBC’s Jansing & Co. to tell the world the how it all went down.

Once everyone had been brought up to speed, Jansing dug deeper. With millions of people across America in dire need of medial care, parents who can’t afford to pay for their children’s operations, and a growing number of people out of work, Jansing wasted no time. She fearlessly shred through layers of complexity and nuance to get to the bottom of issue at hand:

“How’d you even find out that Ted Cruz was talking about you?”

“I take it you’re not a huge Ted Cruz fan?”

“What has been the reaction, from family and friends, to this?”

“And for the record, you’re a fan of Obamacare?”

“For the record,” John said, “I would say that I don’t think that the most pressing issue facing my generation is the fact that this is being funded.”

And the interview continues downhill from there:

Clearly, MSNBC failed to give Connelly a fair hearing. So we’re doing it here.

JOE AMDITIS: My name is Joe Amditis. I’m here for Muckgers and I’m talking to John Connelly. John, why don’t you go ahead and say hi. Tell us about you recent experience with MSNBC, Ted Cruz, and the ongoing debate over the Affordable [Care] Act (ACA).

JOHN CONNELLY: Alright, so, I guess this story kind of starts toward the beginning of September. A journalist from the Wall Street Journal was working on an article about student debt, and how that affects youth unemployment. Apparently, Senator Cruz, or someone in his office, read that article, but didn’t read it particularly well, and used my story about how student debt was personally hurting my ability to find a job at the time to craft a narrative about how the Affordable [Care] Act — known as “Obamacare” — is going to hurt this generation. It had nothing to do with the story either that Mr. Cassleman with the WSJ was trying ot present or that my life actually reflects. So I had kind of tweeted a snarky thing about it saying that ‘I just found out I was mentioned by Ted Cruz last night in his big speech. I’ll talk more about it after I get back from the doctor’s appointment. #Istillhaveinsurancethankyoubiggovernment.’ And MSNBC loves when people get snarky, so they invited me on to talk a little bit about the Senator, and kind of my experience with both student debt and healthcare.

JA: So this was during a, what has been called a filibuster, what has also been called a sort of extended showmanship and a parade of rhetoric. But I want to draw an interesting comparison here between Wendy Davis’ filibuster and Ted Cruz’s filibuster. For the sake of argument, we’ll just refer to them both as filibusters, although that is debatable.

JA: Talk about the difference between… You were the former president of the Rutgers University Student Assembly? RUSA?

JC: Yes.

JA: Okay. Talk about your experiences and how the tactic of ‘supreme delay,’ the filibuster tactic. How does that work, and do you experience that at the student level, and what are your thoughts on that tactic as part of a strategy for political gain?

JC: Right. So, the act of filibuster is a really important tool that should probably be reserved for a last-stop measure to prevent a really awful bill. Wendy Davis was standing up to prevent a bill that she saw as completely at odds with the rights of the women of Texas. And you can definitely tell — just the difference in parliamentary procedure speaks volumes — Davis wasn’t allowed to sit down, she wasn’t allowed to take a drink of water and, more importantly, there was an actual bill on the table.

JA: There was something to debate.

JC: All parties involved kind of realized from out of the gate that Cruz was kind of engaging in what was essentially a 21-hour press conference.

JA: Right. See, MSNBC specifically said — and this is one of the things that kind of irked me — they talked about how ‘Ted Cruz just wants to take shots at people,’ and yet at the same time, they’re talking to someone who, with all due respect, is completely inconsequential to the debate. They jumped on your tweet, so to speak, and got you on the show specifically to parade you around and show how Ted Cruz likes to take shots. I mean, the hypocrisy in that is obvious and expected. But the thing that kind of really strikes me is, it’s a symptom of a larger problem with the way these things are covered.

JA: There was a guy — I think his name was George Will, he’s a columnist, long-time conservative columnist, I think for over forty years, yeah, George Will — who, kind of off-handedly, in reference to the fact that the ACA is the law, and the argument is that ‘Well, the law is not always right,’ and he used a reference to — I think the quote here — he said, “ I hear Democrats say, ‘The Affordable Care Act is the law,’ as though we’re supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate-but-equal was the law, lots of things are the law, and then we change them.”

JA: Now, there is an entirely different discussion [to be had] on the merit and absolute appalling nature of that argument. But the two things that I want to specifically address are, one, the equation… the ability to disassociate from the horrors of something like slavery, for instance, and compare that on the same level and equate it with increased healthcare. And while there are problems with the healthcare law — for instance, two thirds of poor blacks and single mothers are not afforded access to this health care plan. So, there are problems with the law. But to equate it with something as egregious and disgusting as slavery, separate-but-equal, [or] segregation, to me that is an issue of, one, hyperbolic conflation, and two, it’s a symptom of the way they frame these debates, as if those are two things that we should discuss in equal terms, one is a fight for justice, [the other] one is a fight for justice, as if they’re the same thing.

JA: Talk about your experience with, number one, the things you’ve studied [throughout] your career, and two, the way… how we should go about combating that type of rhetoric. How can we steer the discussion toward a more substantive and legitimate discussion?

JC: Right, so I think one of the things that I really appreciated about both MSNBC and then Al Jazeera reaching out to me was that I don’t think there is enough conversation in national media where the average person affected by a policy actually gets to speak on that policy. Very often it’s just, you know, it’s the George Wills of the world, who are living in a much different world than the person who actually be affected by [the Affordable Care Act].

JC: I will also say, just in reference to Mr. Will making a comparison between the Fugitive Slave Act and the Affordable Care Act… umm… gosh, I don’t even know where to begin. Back when I… I mean I’m still a student here and I am currently taking a class with a professor in the American Studies department, Louis Masur, about the development of different ideals of Americanism. And in we spend a lot of time talking about Lincoln’s response to the looming threat of Southern secession. And it does seem to me that if there is a Civil War analogy to be made of the current political climate, there is much more to be made in people who didn’t like the outcome of an election and didn’t like the outcome of policy that they saw coming down the pipes. And rather than stay in trying to change those outcomes, took their ball and went home. That seems much more to be the modern Tea Party than anything else to me. I wouldn’t compare the slave drivers, personally.

JA: But that sense of brinkmanship is really present in most of these debates, and increasingly so, obviously linked with the tying of the political legitimacy, candidacy, coverage, is also tied to obviously advertising revenue. Clicks mean a lot more than actually reading the article nowadays… I mean, it’s all about getting people to click on your article. You see that with the Miley Cyrus thing… whatever it is, the subject tends to lean towards the extreme, that kind of… vulgarization of media to draw a reaction from people and it almost is counter-intuitive to my own argument to even talk about it, but thus is life, and thus is the job of someone [who seeks] to mesh out these issues.

JA: Talk about.. I want to go into a little bit into your time as president of RUSA. What were some of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make, and times you’ve had to compromise, or have withheld any concessions in the interest of principles or what you believe to be the common good of Rutgers? I mean it is a microcosm of… it’s a very, very… there are a lot of parallels between the way you must’ve led and the things that certain officials deal with on a daily basis.

JC: Well, I feel like, obviously, as the president of the student government I have a much easier job than the president of the global superpower. What I will say is, the members of the Rutgers University Student Assembly tend to legitimately be coming from a place of trying to figure out what is best for Rutgers students. And, for that reason, I think tend to be more willing to sit down with one another than a lot of Washington types. We are not really worried about reelection. At most, you’re in the organization for four years, so you’re trying to get done whatever projects you are working at a relatively quick pace. There were definitely things that I think were contentious at the time, where long conversations had to be had between people and bills had to be written and rewritten, and a lot of that happens well outside of the meeting.

JC: I think probably the best example for my term as president was coming up with a student labor bill, a change to the bylaws of RUSA that explicitly had RUSA working on issues related to student employees of the University. There were so many different contesting ways that people want to see that done, but, the interesting thing to me is that everyone wanted to see that done. There were no students there that were saying, you know, “No, screw the people working at the dining hall,” which, again, I think makes my job much easier than the President’s… or, rather, made my job easier. I’m no longer… I’m just some putz now.

JA: Of course, just ‘sleeping on couches in Brooklyn.’ You ‘used to be on the right track.’ That just got me, I keep wanting to go back to that, because it is so… It is enjoyable to relish in the rhetorical deconstruction of someone’s statements. I mean, he had been talking for a while, so there are certain slips that occur, but I really do find it interesting. I mean, the way that you describe RUSA, it seems to be more of a means to an end, or — a means in itself — to accomplish something, rather than a sort of… I mean, the term ‘revolving door’ almost has no meaning nowadays because it’s so cliché. But the idea that ‘I’m in government so I can make it better for me when I get out of government’ seems to be absent from RUSA, and it seems to be more ‘I’m in the student government because I want to better the lives and experiences of the students, so they can have a similar experience to what I was afforded.’ Because I think a lot of the time people tend to talk about these experiences as if they are all self-earned and say, “I got this. I did this…” and I feel like that sense of individualism is necessary to a certain extent, but in a lot of these discussions, the situational circumstances and constraints that people are working within tend to be left out. Specifically, when he talks about you being ‘on the right track,’ and then for some reason when Obama care is passed, and now you’re derailed from this track. I thought it was interesting that you brought up the point that it was the education cuts that derailed you, if at all. Can you talk a little bit about how that ties into this, and what is going on in the state of higher education, and what are the changes that are taking place?

JC: So, the article that he is kind of misreading… or misread in the speech I think is actually an incredibly important one. It is certainly the best reporting on student debt I’ve seen in the Wall Street Journal, ever. Essentially, the point that is made in the article is that crippling levels of student debt loads are holding this generation back in a unique way, especially coupled with the unemployment that comes out of the recession of 2008. So, there’s a lot of things going on there. There’s the rise of corporate behemoths like Sallie Mae that make millions of dollars in profit off of student loans, there are, as you said, kind of the education cuts, such as what Governor Christie pushed through in 2010, which lower things like the Educational Opportunity Fund (EOF) program, or, on the national level, lower things like the Pell grant. There is joblessness because of a shifting global economy. There are many, many important factors there leading to this generation’s historic unemployment. I think only a little over 50% of us actually have a full-time job. Youth unemployment right now is somewhere around 15% as of August. These are incredibly scary ideas that, if we had sensible people in Cong… or rather a Congress controlled by sensible people… I’m not trying to imply that every member of the House of Representatives is a raving lunatic. Certainly a lot of the ones that end up on MSNBC and Fox News and CNN are.

JA: They certainly seem to get a plenty of air time, yeah. Now, you talk about education and obviously that is, from what I understand about your positions, education is a fundamental, core principle of what you believe makes this and any country prosperous and progressive and to be able to move forward and grow, whether that is in a particular direction is up to the content of education, but the access to education is a big thing and, specifically, you talked about your unwillingness, on principle, to compromise, and you don’t think we should compromise on things like education. When is… Talk about what compromise really means. Because I think everybody uses that word, “compromise, compromise,” and again it goes to the point where it really loses a lot of its meaning. Talk about what compromise means to you, and how, as a student leader, how your experiences with compromise have shaped your perspective on both education and then, in the larger sense, with health care as well, you can draw parallels there. Obviously they’re different subjects with their own intricate nuances but…

JC: Right, so you’re actually referencing an article that I had published with The Nation my sophomore year at Rutgers where I talk about the ways that students were fighting back against austerity measures related to education. I think it is up to students to agitate for a world where higher education is a free, provided, public good. I don’t think that’s a notion that is impossible and utopian. We used to have public funded higher education in the state of New York. I also don’t think it’s out of line with what American tradition has provided historically. Things like the Pell Grant, the G.I. Bill, going back to the writings of the founding fathers, it’s very clear that there is a long tradition of education being something that is seen as a public good. And I think that the kind of cuts to higher education that you’ve seen in the past 20 years are a really disturbing break with that tradition. And when you couple that with the rise of private student loan providers like Sallie Mae, I think it’s no accident that you see Sallie Mae starting to privatize in the 1990s, and then between 1999 and 2011, you see student debt increase 511% in this country.

JA: Right… Wow…

JC: These are not… The problems currently facing this generation didn’t happen by accident. These are not forces of nature. These are very much man-made, and it’s very much possible to go and fix those trends.

JA: Right, and I agree absolutely. I mean, the parallels between the way the deregulation and over commercialization of, not only public goods like education, and obviously healthcare is another issue, but you can see a stark difference between programs that are currently in place… I mean the Medicaid system took, what, eight months or something like that, eight months? It was a very short period before it was adopted… it’s a single-payer system. They talk about how… people… I think Amy Goodman, on Democracy Now! recently, was talking about how, yes, there are issues with the adoption of certain programs, and the sacrifices that are claiming to be made by various class groups and different sections of the population, they tend to be either exaggerated in certain ways to make it seem almost apocalyptic. When, in fact, I think we lose sight of what we’re trying to accomplish here. The quote… I think one of the quotes George Will said was that, he referenced Madison said the government is supposed to be difficult, and I disagree, to a certain extent. I understand the necessity for a conservative pull or drag to prevent unrestrained growth in these kind of areas — and the same could be said for financial trade and commercialization — but is there too much [drag]? And what is an appropriate amount of balance? How do you find the balance in your own decisions when you make leadership decisions? How do you weigh those… the conservative pull… the need to at least provide a slow and smooth transmission that everyone can follow, and balance that with the need to move forward in a rapidly changing atmosphere? What are some of the ways that you’ve had to deal with that, and how do you deal with that?

JC: So, I think I would like to start by saying that, while the Constitution kind of creates a US government that is difficult to make radical change within, there’s a difference between having an appreciation for that level of nuance and seeing the federal government shut down over a policy dispute for the second time in my lifetime. The fact that there have been 17 government closures in the history of this country, and two of them have happened in the last 17 years, I think is incredibly telling — and all of them have happened in the past 40 or so after some changes happened in the 1970s. I think that, obviously, with any policy, not everyone’s going to be happy and with most policies everyone’s going unhappy about different thing. You have to be able, as a leader, to appreciate and anticipate that. When I was president of the Rutgers University Student Assembly, I always tried to create an environment in which people were encouraged to kind of air their disputes, to hash things out one-on-one, to a varying degree of success. I think a lot of the time, especially newer members of a student government, are going to be reluctant to actually step up and say no this is BS.

JA: Speaking of new members of the student government structure, can you talk a little bit about President Barchi?

JC: Where would you like me to start?

JA: How do you think he is handling the transition? How do you think he is handling… how is Rutgers in general under his administration? What are some of the strong points, what are some of the weak points that you feel need to be addressed going forward? Just briefly, you don’t have to get too into it, obviously.

JC: Sure. What I will say is, the thing that personally troubled me when I was president of the Student Assembly, and the thing that still kind of troubles me today is, having heard the president repeatedly… openly embrace the idea of continued privatization, kind of accepting it as a given. At the very least, when McCormack was president… although I also disagree with a lot of his policies and participated in occupation of his office at one point… so, he and I were not exactly always on the best of terms. But at the very least, he would always make references toward, you know, ‘Students should go fight for funding in Trenton,’ um… ‘Maybe we can reverse the trends of disinvestment.’ Whereas, President Barchi seems kind of resigned to it, having remarked at one of the structuring meetings that I had attended that he doesn’t care if the University remains public.

JA: Oh. Wow.

JC: Yeah. So, that certainly unsettles me. And then obviously there are other things… certain racially-insensitive remarks that he’s made, people were unhappy with the way that he handled the AD scandal…

JA: The AD scandal?

JC: The Athletics Director scandal. Personally, I did my best not to pay too much attention to that. Partially, because I was transitioning out, and I wanted to let the new members handle a crisis, and also because I felt like it was not as important of an issue as the media seem to want to make it.

JA: I see. I like that answer. You bring up a good point. You had a similar answer to the question posed to you about, on MSNBC, about Ted Cruz and Obamacare… But you bring up a really interesting point about… I think a lot of people when they hear the words… again, this goes back to what we were saying earlier about the loss of the meaning of a word… What are some of the problems that you see with increased privatization? Because I know a lot of times there tends to be a split: You either are on one side of the debate or the other — and that’s the fallacy of it: that there’s [only] two sides — but, most people tend to either agree with privatization on principle of the word alone, or disagree with it on principle of the word alone. They don’t really get some of the basic problems with that tends to arise and have been arising. What are some of those, a couple, maybe two or three of them, that you see are the biggest issues?

JC: Sure. So, as a public good becomes more and more privatized, it becomes less and less accessible to the average person. So, to take higher education for example, has funding for it is cut, it makes students who come from a lower socioeconomic background, like myself, or, like a lot of Rutgers students… I think… I forget the statistics, but a majority of Rutgers students are on some sort of financial aid. The average student debt load for us is about… I think… never mind, I can’t remember the average student debt load for a Rutgers student.

JA: I know I have close to $30,000, somewhere around there, anywhere from $20,000-$30,000.

JC: Right. Nationwide, the average is about $21,000. My point is just that, as public goods become more privatized, they become less accessible. They also become more… you know, there tends to be a lot more shady things that happen as the new private corporations in charge of what was formerly a public good follow the bottom line…