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Wyatt Stewart

Wyatt Stewart, a Republican, is a political consultant and a fundraiser. In addition to working as a strategist for the Republican Party’s campaign committees, he has worked on the presidential campaign of Howard Baker, Jr. Stewart is currently raising money for Fred Thompson’s campaign.

John W. Mashek interviewed Stewart on August 22, 2007.

We are interviewing Wyatt Stewart, who lives in Washington but was raised in Memphis mainly, and born in Mississippi. He has been a long-time Republican fundraiser, both at the presidential and Senate and, I believe, [gubernatorial] level, too. Is that right?

But the National Republican Congressional Committee, as an employee, for four years. And then, when I started my own business, they continued to be a client: the RNC (the Republican National Committee), the NRCC, and at certain times the Senate committee. All three committees, at one time, have been clients of mine, or that I was helping in one manner or the other.

Well, I believe the first time I met you, Wyatt, I think it was in the [Gerald] Ford campaign. Were you active in the Ford campaign?

I wasn’t what I would consider to be active, but I was around. I was there. And when they asked, I was there to be helpful. I was actually, at that time, spending most of my time with the National Republican Campaign Committee, which Guy Vander Jagt was chairman of. Dick Cheney and Ford had helped us enormously in really turning all of the fundraising for the Party around at a time which was desperate after Watergate. As you know, there was no fundraising for Republican Party committees anyway. It was a very difficult time.

Well in those days, even though you were working for a lot of people in the congressional campaign, candidates were pretty much limited to raising money by their own personal phone calls and by direct mail, which was pretty expensive, but useful, I am sure. Do you think that given the Internet now, that direct mail has lost its punch? Or can it still be an effective weapon?

An effective weapon in selected situations. But in terms of the mass numbers and getting large numbers of people to give at the $25, $30, $40 level — $100 and below let’s say — there is no question that direct mail has pretty much out-priced itself. The cost of postage alone, by the time you do the database work and what a package would cost you today, makes it inefficient.

But if you are going to a select group of people for a higher-dollar contribution, which was more difficult to do 30 years ago — people didn’t give through the mail at the thousand-dollar level. They wanted somebody to look them in the eye and ask them for it. Today a check for $1,000 in the mail is not that unusual. So you can go in specific geographic [areas], and in terms of dollar amounts of money given, through the mail can be fairly successful, but not the way it was.

Well, perhaps — and you can correct me if I am wrong here — people like Richard Viguerie would be raising money for a cause. And his mailing list, I am sure, of conservatives was pretty broad. He would tell me that three- and four-page letters, which were all different — I wouldn’t read past the first page — are the most effective.

A note that you don’t know about me was that when I first came to Washington, I was a third-party partner in a company. Robert-Lynn Associates is a fundraising [firm]. I was the third [partner]. But I was the fundraising guy when I first came here, and didn’t get paid for seven months.

First project that I got for the firm was to build the Eisenhower Republican Center. Few people even know what that is anymore. That’s where the Capitol Hill Club, the RNC building, all of those buildings are. We bought all of those houses, and so we are going over to do this. We were going over to make the proposal. And the president of the company, Bob Benatage (ph.), decided what I had put together wasn’t going to work. So he made a proposal. All of these guys, Eisenhower’s bridge partners, including chairman of the board of Truitt Peabody and all of these people are sitting there waiting to hear me say it, because they knew that it was a done deal. Bob gave them a totally different proposal.
I go back. They come back and they say, “OK, why don’t you just leave them and come with us for $100 a day and raise this money.” What I’m getting to is that when that project was done, which was within a year, year and a half, we had successfully done what I had said to build. Buy all of the property there. Build all of those buildings. Get them started. I went to work for Richard Viguerie and was there until ’74.

So you know something about direct mail.

I knew everything there was to know about fundraising, except direct mail. And I learned better than anybody could ever have learned from Richard Viguerie. I know the ins and outs of that operation. In those days I did most of the political stuff, but I also did a couple of the big organizations, Korean Culture and Freedom Foundation.

Well primarily — and I know this isn’t exclusively with him — Joe Trippi and Howard Dean, even though they eventually [weren’t] successful, certainly are given a lot of credit in the media, anyway, for really thumping away on the Internet. Wyatt, can candidates, particularly those running for president, as you say, still look somebody in the eye and raise big amounts which are needed today to run for president?

Probably. I don’t think there are that many candidates doing that, but I think they have finance chairmen who are doing that really well.

Because they are campaigning nonstop now.

That’s right. Pretty much. They do the fundraising events. And they might be looking you in the eye, but it might be 250 of you giving the maximum amount they can give you when they do it. It’s not like sitting down with four or five people and doing that. But no, it’s not like it was in terms of being able to look someone in the eye and ask them for money.

Now in 1980, you were helping Howard Baker, weren’t you, in that primary?

That’s right.

Senator Baker was certainly well-known here and was a popular figure even across the aisle. But there were many candidates in that race.

Six or seven.

Until he got out, how much [had] Senator Howard Baker raised? Just hazard a guess.

Boy, I am going to say maybe $4 [million], $5 million, something like that. We ended the campaign with $1.5 million – $2 million debt. And at that point, there was speculation that he might be the vice presidential candidate, or at least he was going to continue to be in the Senate. And we were able to eliminate that debt. I stayed until we got that debt eliminated, but I’d be surprised if he raised more than $5 million, $6 million.

Of course, in that campaign, [former Texas Governor] John Connally raised $11 million for one delegate. And the delegate turned out to vote for [George H. W.] Bush, Connally’s mortal enemy.

Yeah, that’s right.

Of course, this has happened to Phil Gramm. This has happened to some Democrats. Is there such a thing as too much money or putting money to the wrong uses?

I’m a great believer in the free marketplace in terms of funding. Someone once told me that there was five times as much money spent on buying popcorn every year than there was being spent to elect the chairman of the board — the president of the United States — of the largest corporation in the world.

I am sure that’s true.

And I have always kind of felt like, if you were able to go out and raise money within the bounds of legality — and sometimes I don’t always agree with the laws as they have been written and would like to see some changes made in some instances — you ought to be able to do that. I think it’s your right to go do it. If you give it to yourself, or however you want to do that, as much as you want to raise.

But within 24 to 48 hours, in today’s time, everybody in the country ought to have access to knowing that. All you have to do is push a button. Put it on the Internet, that contribution, that person. And if you don’t like what they are doing, don’t . . .

Contribute.

Yeah, or don’t vote for that person. Vote for somebody else. I am a free market person when it comes to an individual being able to give as long as it’s equal to everybody across the board.

Well, you kind of gave me a perfect lead-in, Wyatt. You don’t have to go into great detail, but what of the laws today would you like to see changed?

I would like to see, number one, the parties have more capacity to contribute to campaigns. What we have done and where we are at this point — and I am not a lawyer, so legally, I am not an expert on this — we put the ability of an individual, like a George Soros, or it could be a Republican at that same level, we have given them the ability to spend a billion dollars to defeat anybody they want. And in his case, he has probably spent $50-, $60-, $70-, maybe $100 million dollars in the last two or three years with one of these groups. One of these groups that is unanswerable to anybody.

Then you took the ability of the Republican and the Democratic, Independent Party, or whatever the parties, you have limited them to the point that they really don’t have what I would consider to be a major impact on any campaigns at this point. So I think the parties need to be strengthened, and I think individuals need to be allowed to give with clear reporting immediately.

More than the $2,300 now per cycle?

Yeah. Well, as long as you are allowing others to do what they are doing. I think it’s hard to limit you or me or whoever from giving more money.

What was the justification when this law was put on the books? I understand allowing millionaires to use as much as they want. And I am thinking of Ross Perot. I am thinking of others. But what was the theory that independent expenditures could grow and parties were limited?

You know what? You have to ask [John] McCain and [Russ] Feingold that, because in my mind, I can’t comprehend [it]. I think they’d both, at this point, if they sit down and were very honest with you, would say they haven’t accomplished what they thought they were going to do with the law they got passed. I just don’t see how anybody could; I don’t know how you could. Those are two people you should ask that question. Because I couldn’t begin to think why they would do something like that.

Well, five of the six — I hate the words “top tier,” but that’s what they are called — except McCain may go [with] public [financing], since he has run out. Is public financing pretty much on life support now? Or do you think there is still a place for it?

Well, with the laws written the way they are, I don’t see how public financing is going to have a major impact at this point. I used to think if there was going to be public financing, it ought to be put together in a way that would allow an individual running for office to encourage public financing and encourage individuals to participate in the process.

And to some degree, this law you can check off. You get matching funds for a certain amount up to a limit. But I would say to anybody who wanted to give $25 to a campaign, not only can you write it off your taxes, you can do it to 100 campaigns and the candidate will be rewarded with matching funds. And they get matching funds now. But there is a limit to what they can get.

Well, you mentioned — and I think I used the analogy, too — that there is more money spent on deodorant ads and erectile dysfunction [ads] than there is [on presidential campaigns]. Yet the public expresses shock that people like Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, are just raising these huge sums, and I wonder if that may be a turnoff to a lot of voters who don’t recognize the comparison there about what we advertise for, and what people are running in the democracy. And you say you are a free-market guy, so I assume you would like to have the lid [lifted]. Does it bother you?

Tell me a campaign in the last 10 years — take [George W.] Bush, take [Al] Gore — at that level. [They] have spent amounts of money that you would never thought would have been spent.

Tens of millions.

How has it affected them in terms of them being elected? Do you really think that people voted against Bush or Gore because they raised too much money, $200 million or whatever the heck it was? Or in Senate races, like [Jon] Corzine, some of the big Senate races, [or Arnold] Schwarzenegger, where they raised $20-, $30-, $40-, $50-, $60 million for a campaign.

In California you have to raise that much.

Well, but proportionately speaking, in other states they have raised enormous amounts of money. I can’t think of a time where it’s played a major role in determining what the outcome of the election was.

I think — and I just throw this in, because South Dakota’s my native state — everybody was shocked out there that Daschle and Thune spent a couple of million, maybe more, each. And they tried to use it against each other, but it didn’t work.

To no avail.

I mean people recognized that he was the Senate [Democratic] leader. And people came in from the outside for both candidates.

Yeah, I think that proves my point, or it goes a long way to. I think people are concerned about it, and they say, oh, how ridiculous it is. But I think when they vote, they don’t vote based on the amount of money that was raised. I mean maybe if it was a really close election and less than a half or a quarter percent, or something, or less than that. But I doubt if anybody ever goes into the booth and votes based on how much money the candidate raised or how much they gave to their own campaign.

Next February 5, unless everybody is totally cockeyed, we are going to know who the two nominees are. There could be a question about it, but most people don’t think so. That means there is going to be a six or seven month hiatus until the conventions in Minneapolis and Denver. And most of us think that’s going to be a period in which independent expenditures and candidates are just going to target each other with negative ads. That’s when these guys jump in.

Now the primary system, we won’t get into all of this hopscotching, but it does have a bearing on the amount of money that’s going to be spent when there is such a long period between [the time] we know who the nominees are until they are actually nominated. And I have no answer for it. But I do know that’s when millions are going to be poured in. It won’t be the parties. It won’t be the candidates so much. It will be independents. But both candidates will be in the swim.

Yeah.

Just for the sake of argument, negative advertising has to work, or why would candidates do it?

We know it does work. And this is probably not in the real world, if you had two candidates that got the nominations, who really were able to say “we are not going to do this” and stuck to it, I suspect it would last as long as one of the two realizes they were slipping. And the only way they were going to stop that slide was to bring out two things that they knew about the other candidate that would hurt them in the election.

I just don’t think you’ll be able to prevent it. Is it right? I don’t like it. I personally don’t like to see it, but I can’t think of a campaign that hasn’t used them. I don’t care how much they say we are not going to do negative campaigning if they felt that was going to be the thing that made the difference. And we found out that in close races, that makes a difference.

Yeah. Doug Bailey, a Republican, and Jerry Rafshoon, a Democrat, are forming this Unity08, which they say will be a convention by Internet after the two parties have named a candidate.

I get everything they send out.

And [New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg has pretty much taken himself out now.

Yeah.

[Former Georgia Senator] Sam Nunn has sort of tweaked an interest, and [Nebraska Senator] Chuck Hagel. Is your feeling that a third-party candidate is a fool’s errand? Because you’ll see polls — everybody can take a poll and say you hear this — where people can say, “Are you satisfied with the candidates?” [They answer], “not very much.” “Could you vote for a third party?” And I think a majority — that’s what Bailey and Rafshoon are selling — say yes. But when it comes down to November of election year, that number [may go down]. Is a third party, financed either by a guy’s own money or by money raised, can he or she get in the ball game?

I think he or she could get in the ballgame. Do I think they would be able to get to the point that they could win an election? It would take, in my mind, a very unusual time. And events would have to be, I would think, almost catastrophic. I have heard two great speeches about the two-party system — one by Howard Baker and the other by Gerry Ford, who impress me so much — by saying that the heart of this country revolves around a two-party system, and the importance of maintaining it, continuing to have it. I have tried to get a copy of those two speeches. I have never been able to. But I was kind of tingled when I heard these two great men, in my opinion, talk about why we had to keep the two-party system in place.

Well, it’s easy to sit down and say that you are in danger of balkanizing our system if we had third and fourth parties.

Well, I think the right to have the third and the fourth and the fifth party is fine. But I think the American people, at this point, although there are a lot of them, like you say, that say they are mad, and they are mad as hell, and there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, and we are going to vote independent. When they walk into the booth, they don’t do that — rarely.

Now former Senator [Fred] Thompson of your adopted state of Tennessee is — and I think I heard you tell me earlier that you thought it was humorous that the media minimized the fact that he had raised $3.5 million — an unannounced candidate. The theory is, though, that Fred can’t wait much longer. Thompson can’t wait much longer. Not because of the money primary, although the media will fasten on it once he’s a candidate. I am thinking of the lateness of getting in. I think it has positive things and maybe negative. What’s your theory on Thompson’s ability to raise money if he gets in, as we think he is going to do, after Labor Day?

I think it’s very positive. I think he can raise the money. I have specifically asked that question of [campaign manager] Bill Lacy and Senator Thompson on a conference call. And there is no question, in their mind, that they have the ability the minute he announces, with the troops on the ground, to get organized and get on all the ballots that he has to be on, have everything in place to allow him to do that. And I think there is a feeling, although they have not said, that they are very comfortable with that at this point.

There are those who are very nervous about it, at the same time, who are great supporters of Senator Thompson’s. But they feel comfortable that every day that goes by, they are not being hurt in terms of the polls, in terms of the opinion. And maybe there is a feeling out there, although I have not heard them say that, that the minute they announce, everything is going to change to some degree. It’s like John Connally, the day he announced, all of those things . . .

He peaked the day he announced.

That’s right. That’s right. So I think the feeling is that they will be able to do what needs to be done. And it’s not going to be politics as usual jumping in and spending all of the time and the money on the front end. But once they announce, they are going to go get them.

Just a couple more questions. It interests me, Wyatt, that you have raised some money for congressional campaigns, and the stats bear this out that incumbency is so strong that it’s damn difficult to defeat an incumbent. Now I assume that you have done work both for incumbents and challengers.

Yes.

When you go out to raise money, is it much easier when your horse is in the race? If a candidate was elected with 55 percent or less, he is targeted. Both parties seem to go on that scale. I think it’s proven right sometimes and very wrong sometimes. So maybe you could just expound on that.

Yeah. Let me just say this: When I was with the Viguerie company, Richard had a theory to go to five or six states where it’s only going to cost a million dollars to run a campaign. Now this was [in the 1970s.] We went to New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, maybe Nevada, one of the Dakotas. And these were all challengers.

So I have done a lot of help with challengers. We did raise the money that we needed. But what we said to these candidates is that they needed to be prepared to lose that race, but not to give up the ship and spend six years with a program that we would help them have and win the second time around. I am not 100 percent clear, but I think we might have one of those five seats. But guess what happened the next time around? We picked up three more of them.

Because you laid the groundwork.

Because we laid the groundwork. And so in the Senate, that’s a little easier to do than the House. But I am still convinced that if the races are fairly close, and you have an opportunity and convince the challenger to stay in the race for two more years, if you have a good candidate to start with, which you did in all of those cases, you do have a shot at beating them. But like you say, the perks of incumbency are overwhelming. So there has to be more than a single term commitment, and you have to go beyond that first election.

Newt Gingrich took three times. It was three times before he won. But fortunately, somebody like Guy Vander Jagt, who was funding the campaigns at the congressional committee, stuck behind him. As far as the party was concerned, he gained control of the House, anyway. It took three times. So if you have the staying power, and you want to do it, I think you can do it. But that doesn’t happen as often as I would like to see it happen.

Well, Vander Jagt was chairman long time.

Eighteen years.

And had a pretty good track record.

Oh, very good.

And that’s why he was able to stay on. And I assume his theory was, if a challenger can run a fairly close race — it may not be the percentage — and is willing to hang in there, he can make a case for himself by getting support from the national committee.

Guy Vander Jagt, interesting, there is a guy who never encouraged negative campaigns, but always built up the candidate that we had running, not tearing down.

That was the Bob Teeter, John Deardourff way.

And Doug Bailey. All of whom I worked with on any number of campaigns for years, and different causes, different things we did. But the bottom line was, he thought that you could win a lot of campaigns by building your candidate up and not tearing the other one down.