Can Van Jones Take on the Tea Party? Last year, you started a liberal antidote to the Tea Party that is now called Rebuild the Dream. You said, "Hold onto your hats" for an "October offensive." Then I didn't hear much else. . . . We were pointing at the possibility of a very explosive populist movement from the left. It happened at the grass-roots level, and it was called Occupy. Rebuild hasn't got the same press attention, but we have 600,000 members and a presence in every Congressional district. Occupy lacked a rational spokesman versed in the issues. Why didn't you join them? You can't really work for Occupy, because it's not an organization. It's a swarm. We did everything we could to support it. I'm not proprietary at the end of the day. I'm trying to make something happen whether it's called the 99 percent or Rebuild the Dream or Occupy. In your new book, "Rebuild the Dream," you discuss your 2009 resignation as President Obama's special adviser for green jobs after your signature was incorrectly reported to be on a 9/11 Truther petition. I don't mind bearing the cross for controversial ideas I had when I was younger, but I can't stand bearing the cross for wacky ideas I never had. I'm a black guy who used to sue police departments for brutality. You don't have to make up stuff to scare people. Why didn't the administration simply deny that you'd signed it? There was a lot of pressure on me from the right and the media. My brain was turning into putty. I said, "I've never seen this language before." But it was like five years earlier, and maybe somebody had tricked me. I resigned on a Saturday night. The next week, we began piecing together what happened. By then, of course, nobody cared. What did the president say to you afterward? Did the president of the United States personally call me? No, he didn't. He calls after a football team wins. Fox News had raked you over the coals for weeks. My decision to resign was horrible, it was painful. But if I live to be 143, you know what's going to be the first line in my obit? I worked for Obama, period. And that's enough. He didn't have to stop whatever he was doing to call me. Glenn Beck seemed to enjoy taking your scalp. Color of Change, an organization I helped to start after Katrina, was the reason Glenn Beck decided to go after me. I don't control those organizations, but that one went after him hard. They initiated an advertiser boycott after he called Obama a racist in 2009. It was the most effective boycott in American history. Rush Limbaugh has lost nearly 50 sponsors right now, but they lost like 150. So Color of Change picks a fight with Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck gets mad and goes crazy on his bizarre show. Glenn Beck is kind of like Mr. Rogers meets Darth Vader: he makes up characters that just happen to have the same names as real people. Is Color of Change why he's no longer on Fox? Ultimately Beck pushed me out of my job, and Color of Change pushed Beck out of his job. Now we're both irrelevant! Environmentalists have soured on Obama, particularly for his inability to enforce even George Bush's modest recommendations on smog. We thought we had everything that we needed when we had the White House - 60 votes in the Senate and Pelosi, the best speaker ever running the House. It turns out that's only one-third of what we needed. We had no counter for either Fox or the Tea Party. Susie Tompkins Buell, a major Democratic fund-raiser, recently announced that she wasn't going to donate to Obama, largely because of the administration's environmental record. Is she mistaken? I don't compare Obama to the Almighty. I compare him to the alternative. I wish we had been able to deliver the goods. You're considered a lefty dreamboat. Were you really a geek as a kid? I had huge glasses, no friends and weighed 89 pounds in ninth grade. Most of my childhood was spent in the woods reading comic books and talking to bugs. I made Urkel look cool.