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Anita Dunn

Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and communications consultant, is a partner in Squier Knapp Dunn Communications, a Washington-based consulting firm. Dunn was communications director and chief strategist for Bill Bradley’s 2000 presidential campaign and worked on the presidential campaigns of John Glenn, Bill Clinton, and John Kerry.

Sara Fritz interviewed Dunn on February 12, 2007.

The usual regimen that we go through for these interviews is, of course, we start out with your biography. But instead of asking you about your biography so much, I just wonder which of all of those experiences — and you’ve had an array of interesting political experiences — were important to your view of politics and your role as a consultant?

Well, there’s no question that the Bradley presidential campaign really, for me, represented why I had gone into politics and was, in many respects, a campaign that reflected my views about the American political system and the changes that needed to be made — something that Bradley and I had spent years discussing and had a huge amount of agreement on. And the failure of that campaign in no way changed my beliefs on what was wrong with this political process. As I watch so many candidates, eight years later, using functionally our message from that campaign, it reaffirms it for me. But that was, by far, the experience that really did capture why I had wanted to be in politics.

Having said that, that was much more a mission or a crusade for me: I made no money on it and left my firm and did all kinds of bad things like that. But in terms of the role of the consultant theme, there are small races and there are big races. Most of them, at the end of the day, present you with the same fundamental challenges that I believe that any consultant in this business faces, which is working with a candidate and trying to get out of them what they want to do, why they want to hold an office, and then presenting that. And it is frustrating, as a consultant, when a candidate doesn’t know and expects that to be my job to tell them. I’m not from the Joe Klein school, which believes consultants are the problem here. I actually have worked with a lot of candidates who would listen to my advice and reject it because they simply didn’t want to run their campaigns that way, or felt like, at the end of the day, they wanted to be able to get up the next morning — [candidates] who had ownership of their campaigns. And I’ve worked with a lot of candidates who say, “What’s my message?”

So your goal is to get them to find what their own message is?

Ideally, my goal — and this goes back to the Bradley campaign — is to go work for someone who has a very clear idea why they want to hold the office and why they’re running for office, what they want to do with it — whether it is Montgomery County executive or president of the United States — but who knows why they’re running and to help them effectively communicate that in a way that’s relevant to voters.

Obviously, many campaigns that you’ve worked on have not inspired you quite as much as Bradley. Talk about the sort of tug between emotional commitment and business. Does that get mixed up in the process?

Well, it can. I tend to get emotionally committed to my clients. It’s a rare client who can’t get a high level of emotional commitment from me because, as my husband likes to say, I’m the daughter of a social worker. So I get very emotionally committed to almost all of my clients and I’m fortunate that the clients who tend to want to hire me are people that I, by and large, am very comfortable with. You know, I love local races, because the issues are very real, extremely real to people. A county executive or a mayor makes a huge difference in people’s lives, whether they do a good job or a bad job. And when I drive around the city of Washington, D.C., I’m continually thinking about clients of mine who would not tolerate construction crews taking out two of the three lanes of a crossroads in a major city, who would just be on the phone screaming at someone, saying, “Get that crew out of there!” And it happens here every day, of course.

But there are also clients who, obviously, you run a business, you have a responsibility to people whose payrolls you need to pay. But for political clients, in particular, it’s hard not to get emotionally committed, because it’s about winning and losing. Edward Bennett Williams said there were only three professions for adults who really loved winning or losing: the law, sports, or politics. And he was a professional in two and an amateur in the third. So the emotional energy that goes into trying to win is something that, I think, consultants have, regardless of how they personally feel about their clients. There’s the competition. I think I’m fortunate in that the majority of my clients, just the people who tend to want to hire me, tend to be the people I’d like to work for.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but I’m going to do it anyway, since we’re there. There’s the whole idea of consultants putting their own stamp on campaigns, the cookie-cutter point of view. What’s your view of that?

I think there are consultants who have approaches to races. There are certainly consultants who are guilty of producing fundamentally the same ad for different races, for a variety of reasons. There may be years in which there are certain national issues that are just so overriding that, functionally, you’re using the same message everywhere. Sometimes it does come down to, kind of, a lack of creativity or lack of time or lack of resources. We do soul-searching at the end of every cycle about what we can do better and what happens in our post-election looking at ourselves. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about October and the fact that, by October, creatively, we feel quite burned out. And, of course, October is when the time pressure for producing ads becomes so intense, especially with technology now, where you can get an ad on the same day, and the tendency is to just kind of say, “It’s more important to get it up than to really . . .”

Get it right.

Well, you can get it right without having it be wonderfully creative, right? I mean, we get it right here, I think; it’s not hard to get it right.

But they get a little heavy-handed.

That’s when they all start looking the same and sounding the same. And we’re not the only firm that has this problem; there’s no firm that doesn’t have the problem. But there are consultants who have different approaches. Both Bill Knapp and I feel very strongly about not skipping the part of the campaign where you introduce the person. We feel very strongly that, even though it is a rare poll that will show that a kind of personal introduction will test as well as simply the issue battery — they want universal health insurance, they want energy independence — that will always test better than someone’s sort of personal story, except in rare circumstances, where that someone is John McCain or has such a compelling personal biography. However, we feel very strongly that skipping that step — where you kind of tell why are they doing this ad, the foundation for the argument — is a big mistake. And yet it’s one we end up fighting with campaigns and pollsters a lot, because people are looking for the fastest route toward growth.

But there are approaches that firms have. Another Democratic firm really likes to use people on camera a great deal, and some of them are good and some of them aren’t as good, but they feel very strongly about having the person talk directly. We prefer to do that, too, but if the person’s not very good, we’re not going to do it. You can look at an ad and kind of see who produced the ad.

That’s interesting, they have their mark. This time around, we’re talking about a billion-dollar campaign, one in which there will be no limits. Does it change the character of the campaign?

Yes.

And what impact does it have?

I think the character of the campaign has already been changed dramatically because of how exceptionally early everything is happening. You know, I don’t know the answer to this, because on the one hand, we have done campaigns here where people were just on the air for too long. The idea is that people don’t get bored with these folks. I didn’t produce the advertising for it, but I was obviously involved with Senator [Tom] Daschle’s re-election campaign in 2004. The Daschle campaign went on the air in May 2003 in South Dakota, mostly because they needed to tell a story about what he’d been doing. But that meant they were on the air for almost a year and a half. And John Thune didn’t go on the air until July or August of 2004.

What a fresh face!

Yeah, exactly. People got so used to hearing about the Tom Daschle stuff by then that when he came on the air, the numbers just collapsed, which was incredibly striking that all of that building that had happened just collapsed. So I would have a concern. I’m not doing a presidential [campaign, but] I would have a concern about people just getting bored even more quickly than they do in the race and starting to tune out, in particular, paid advertising, of which I think there will be a great deal. I think one of the things that will be driving costs this time, though, is that what we saw in 2004 was a reversal of the trend that had begun in the early ’90s of presidential campaigns basically eschewing national advertising and going into targeted-spot markets. That was a trend that had begun in ’88 with the Bush One campaign. They had been into spot, while the Dukakis people had done all national advertising. By 1992, you had very state-specific campaigns for the Clinton-Gore campaign in the general election.

Because you were looking for that 2 percent, or whatever?

Exactly, and I think almost a total absence. By 1996 when we did President Clinton’s re-election, I don’t think we did national advertising at all. I think it was all spot market. Now, having said that, the pendulum is swinging back for a variety of reasons. So I think through the primaries you’ll see state-specific. I think you will see a much higher level of national advertising from both campaigns, Republican and Democrat, than you have in the past. And that’s just more expensive. It’s more expensive, but you’ll also still have spot market. You will still have state-specific races. But I think that the importance of advertising nationally — particularly as our mantra in the Democratic Party is not to take states off the table now — is to try to compete everywhere. You actually can’t compete everywhere if you’re not doing a national message.

Is this a recognition that going for the base, as they say — finding that 2 percent, 1 percent — is not as effective as it used to be?

I think part of it is a feeling that, as a party, we simply can’t write off huge parts of the country. Howard Dean [the chairman of the Democratic National Committee] took a lot of criticism in the last two years, but there are a huge number of people in this party who agree with him — that unless we do better in some of these places, we’re always, to some extent, fighting these races out on their turf.

Plus, if you’re doing more national ads, are they a little less strident on particular issues?

I think that’s right. I also think that the base, per se, for both parties is something that just isn’t going to win by itself. So I think that, whereas base politics was all the rage in 2004, the revenge of the independent or undecided voter is coming back in 2008. There are people out there, increasingly, who make their decisions based not on political party but on candidate, and candidacy, and issues. That’s the trend here, which is as people have their own sources of information, through the Internet, through their friends, through their social networks, that they’re not aligning. Therefore, you can have base voters by issue, but increasingly just your partisan base is not going to get you there.

Talk about the impact the push for money has on the candidate and the campaign.

This is not so much the case on the presidential level, just because the amount of money that needs to be raised and the various places it gets raised are so much broader. But certainly the Senate, the gubernatorial, the congressional level, it is fair to say that the drive to raise money in relatively small increments means [a large] amount of time you have to spend talking to people who can raise that money and who can write checks at that level. A $2,300 check is a lot of money to me, but it is a drop in the bucket for a statewide competitive race. The amount of people in this country who can afford to write checks like that and who do write checks like that is relatively small, and they tend to be very wealthy. So the amount of time the candidates and elected officials have to spend talking to rich people — calling them to ask them to hold an event, calling them to ask them to raise money, to share their Rolodex, getting on the phone with 50 of their friends, calling them to ask them for money — skews their perspective. The amount of time it takes is so significant that: a) They have less time to go out and actually campaign with people who don’t have that kind of money, and b) they tend to get a skewed sense of what the issue concerns are. You can always tell when someone has spent a recess on a fundraising swing, instead of spending that recess home in their state. They just come back with a very different bunch of issues they want to talk about: “You know, estate-tax repeal isn’t that bad.”

That’s not as true in a presidential, why? Because they still hang out with rich people?

They do, but not as much. The necessity for doing retail campaigning in Iowa, New Hampshire, and now I would add Nevada and South Carolina, is such that you don’t have the same skewed time constraints in terms of retail. The second reason is because particularly with the growth of the Internet, the amount of money that can be raised without getting on the phone and talking to rich people or going to events that are primarily well-heeled is so significant. There are a lot of people who feel that the amount of money that can be raised on the Internet, which is primarily ideological money, is also problematic because of what they see as the left-wing push. Bill Bradley was the first candidate to raise over a million dollars on the Internet. He was actually the candidate who went to the FEC [Federal Election Commission] in 1999 and said, “Can Internet donations be qualified for matching funds?” Because back then, it was like, “Internet donations?” It’s not just one community of money out there on the Internet. There are all kinds of different communities out there. But I personally think it’s one of the healthiest things in the world: the rise of the “netroots.” And I don’t care if people are worried about left-wing bloggers. I do not care, because I think having individuals participate in getting communities, even if all they ever do is talk to people who agree with them and don’t get any kind of information on the other side, it’s healthier than them not participating. I feel strongly.

The music stopped and your horse got out of the race. That’s a mixed metaphor. How do you feel about that, and does it give you some insight into this musical-chairs game that occurs beforehand? And one more question — do consultants ever advise candidates not to run?

Consultants do advise candidates not to run, but generally they don’t say, “You shouldn’t run.” What consultants, I think as a matter of principle and ethics, owe to their clients is their best — not perfect, because we’re humans — but their best realistic assessment of what a race will be like and what it will take to win, and what the odds are of winning, even if everything goes well. I think if you’re not honest with your clients at the beginning about that, then all you do is buy . . .

Is that kind of honesty the norm?

That is a hard question. There are certainly some consultants who have had reputations for encouraging wealthy clients to run in the face of very difficult odds. On the other hand, if the senior partner of this firm, Bob Squier, were still alive, he would be the first to tell you that he turned down Wyche Fowler, who was running for the Senate in 1986, because he didn’t think he had a chance of winning. And he was the smartest and greatest consultant ever. So the idea that you can sit here and decide who can win and who can’t win is just ludicrous. But you do owe the most honest assessment.

What about this musical-chairs thing?

The people getting in, the people getting out. I think that the decision to run for the presidency ultimately comes down to a very personal decision. No one ever believes that, because they think it is ultimately political. But it’s not. If you think you want to run for president, you’re going to be pretty realistic about what you personally will have to do. It doesn’t matter if you’re a top-tier candidate or a bottom-tier candidate. The physical wear-and-tear on your body and your family, the emotional and stress level wear-and-tear on you and your family, is the same. People say it’s worse for front-runners; I personally think it’s bad for everybody. There’s something very debilitating about waking up every morning and reading you can’t win, or you’re a laughingstock, or people are saying your best friends are questioning your judgment. I think that’s as debilitating as being flyspecked every day. And these people are dumb and usually they want to run for president because they want to make the world a better place. But at the end of the day, it becomes a personal decision — especially if you still have children who are living at home — which is: Do I want to spend a minimum of 14 months away from home? Do I want to spend as much time raising money as I have to? Do I want to have my children get teased at school? Do I really want to go through that? Do I want to miss that many baseball practices or skating rinks or picnics with my family or weeks at the beach? Because the reality is even though you can say to yourself, “Every 13th day is going to be a day off — I’m going to have my 10 days vacation, regardless,” the reality is that 13th day, you may not be on the road, but that does not mean . . .

And you go on vacation and end up on the phone. I assume you were disappointed?

You mean when Evan [Bayh] didn’t run? I thought Evan would make a very good president. I totally respect his decision. His twin sons are the age of my son. We’ve known Nick and Beau since preschool, and they’re great kids, very different, too. He’d worked as hard as anybody in the run-up to this and had really spent two years balancing his desire to run for the presidency with his greater desire to be a good father and a husband who was at home, and to have a family and a normal life. His decision was based on, at the end of the day, those calculations about: “I’ve talked to enough people to know what it will take and what the chances are. Is that worth it to me? Is it worth it my asking all those people who support me to make those sacrifices?” Because I think for Evan Bayh, it was as much a question of his friends, his closest supporters, the people who’ve been with him for so long — his network. And those people, they were his donor base, but they are all people who care deeply about him and he cares deeply about them, too. And asking them to make those sacrifices was huge, for what he regarded as a limited chance of success. And, of course, he’d seen his father go through this.

That’s interesting. I’m surprised Mitt Romney doesn’t have that. But what do you know? People react differently.

They really do.

My godson was on the same basketball team as his kids.

And you know Evan; he’s there at those practices and those games.

Well, he coached.

Yeah, and he shows up at the soccer games on Saturday morning and he hasn’t shaven. It’s funny, I had two friends who were on the travel team with Nick two years ago, neither of whom knew Evan was a Senator. They had no idea. I was like, “Yeah, he’s a client of mine.” They were like, “He’s a Senator?” He was just like, a dad. It’s one of, I believe, his great strengths. It’s why he would be a good president, but not necessarily a good candidate.

The money we’re talking about goes largely to consultants, or a lot of it, and the industry has thrived. As this money has expanded, this has been, I would say, probably the major economic result.

Let’s be honest: The money goes to TV stations. The people who make a lot of money off of presidential campaigns are the television stations in targeted states. I’ll give you an example: Alaska Senate race 2004. At the beginning of the Senate race, it cost $25 a gross rating point to be on the air in Anchorage, Alaska. By October of 2004, it cost $500 a gross rating point, which is more, or comparable to the city of Philadelphia. No, that wasn’t me.

I know; I did write a book on campaign spending. Now some of it goes through, some firms move the money through their accounts to the stations, and some don’t, so it’s hard . . .

It’s very hard to tell.

But when we did this book, we did call people and say, “What is your billing arrangement?” And you’ve got to admit, consultants do OK.

For the amount of work you do? First of all, a presidential campaign — unlike a Senate or a gubernatorial campaign — takes as much from the consultants as it does from the staff or the candidate. It’s a 24/7 thing. When we did President Clinton’s re-election at this firm in ’96, we had to go out and hire a huge number of people to do it correctly and that wasn’t anything the client was going to pay for. You’ve got to do a lot of stuff. I’ll tell you, the people who by and large overpay for consultants are Senate, gubernatorial, and congressional campaigns in expensive media markets that do percentage-of-the-buy [typically, a 15 percent commission of the total advertising buy]. I mean, I can totally justify percentage-of-the-buy at a pretty high rate in a cheap state, where I’m going to end up producing 35 or 40 ads, have 18 debates I’ve got to be prepared [for], and just work a huge amount of time for a relatively small amount of money because TV is inexpensive. On the other hand, if you’re doing a New Jersey Senate race, you’re going to produce five ads for a $15 million media buy; you’re not working that hard.

And so the standard percentage is a little skewed.

Businessmen make the best candidates when it comes to negotiating with consultants because they’ve hired a lot of consultants. They understand exactly what they want from their consultants, they understand consultants should earn a decent amount of money, but they also understand how to negotiate an intelligent contract that works for both.

Last time around, I recall one consultant on the Republican side was working for the presidential campaign and working for several 527s at the same time. Is that a normal kind of thing and what do you think of that?

I think, legally, we’re not allowed to produce television for a 527 that’s operating in a state where we’re doing a Senate or a gubernatorial race.

But for the presidential race, I don’t think there’s any restriction.

Well, no, because this firm was actually producing media for The Media Fund, which was the 527 that went on the air in March, and we dropped our representation of them in order to join the Kerry presidential. So, I don’t think we’re allowed to do them simultaneously.

Oh, okay. Well, there some people — Republicans — who don’t know about that.

Well, the Republicans by and large — and you know this — are far more aggressive in their interpretation of federal election law than Democrats.

And they also create these companies.

Right, they create for-profits.

Does that happen on the Democratic side, too, where you’re creating a consulting company just for this campaign?

Well, that generally happens for presidential campaigns, because you have multiple firms coming in. So, you create a separate corporation that has only one client, which is the campaign. But it’s a way to make sure that the money is made by that. Everything gets distributed. But what the Republicans do, which is more interesting, because they are much more aggressive under the law, is they actually in the past have set up for-profit companies that don’t make any money. They’re not 527s. But the Republicans take a very different attitude toward election law, because they actually don’t believe in it. By and large, our clients believe in this law.

A number of people have told me that in the ’96 Dole campaign, a lot of Republican consultants got in simply because they knew he wasn’t going to make it but they knew they could make a lot of money at it, and they just sort of milked it. Is that the general perception?

There are all kinds of reasons you get involved in campaigns even if they have no chance. If one of your clients is close to that candidate and asks you to help, you actually can’t say no, or it’s very difficult. I don’t know what people’s motivations were. The fact is somebody was going to do that campaign, regardless. He had a bad track record going back to 1980 with being able to manage a campaign well and putting together a coherent team. The dysfunctionality of the Dole campaign in ’96 just struck me as his total inability, at the end of the day, to function well.

If you were going to change or make improvements in the system, what would you do?

Well, the first thing I would do, if I could wave a magic wand, I would give free television time. I can’t speak for everyone in my business. I would far prefer to be working for a fixed fee, which increasingly some campaigns are looking at. It’s a gamble on my part about how much I’m going to have to work. But at the end of the day, I would not like there to be an issue about how much money I’m making off of a recommendation.

You do do percentages, though?

Yeah, and I was saying, I think the inherent conflict of interest is uncomfortable. But I also don’t feel, at the end of the day, that we actually are the ones making that much money, because candidates now are smart enough and informed enough to do a sliding scale. I will say that the failure of Congress to be able to stand up to the broadcasters, when they did McCain-Feingold [in 2002], and to actually enforce lowest-unit rates, [perpetuated the problem]. Now TV stations will tell you that the political ads drive off all their commercial clients, which is true, because who wants their ad in the middle of a bunch of political ads? That I understand. But their commercial clients were not going to be paying 10 times or 25 times the market rate for an ad, and the profits that these local TV stations make off of political campaigns are enormous. I believe public airwaves have a public responsibility. I understand that there are problems with this with third-[party] and independent candidates and how you do this during the primaries and all kinds of things like that. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that if people are serious about wanting to bring down the costs of campaigns, reduce the amount of money that people need to spend, that giving free airtime is the biggest line item. Even if people say the money will go to other places, well, you know what? At the end of the day it’s impossible to spend that much money on field. I mean, how many pieces of mail are you going to send?

You think that would actually shrink the impulse to raise as much as you can, where you can?

I think, at the end of the day, if you know [that] no matter how much money you raise you’re not going to be able to have more airtime than your opponent, then you buy up every piece of radio that possibly exists, which is the next thing you’d do, and cable you’d buy up heavily. But at the end of the day, if the broadcast airtime is going to be equal, regardless of everything else in a campaign, there’s only so much money you can spend. There’s only so much you can spend.

It’s kind of getting it on the demand side. Is there something else, before we move from that, that you would do, in a perfect world?

Well, that’s the first thing I would do. And the second thing I would do would be to have candidates and campaign managers — and, increasingly, this is happening — who really do think through what they want from their consultants and how much time they are going to want from their consultants, and who are willing to pay a fair amount for that, but who negotiate intelligently for themselves. So, for instance, I had this conversation with a friend of mine over at EMILY’s List. She and I agree on this. A congressional candidate in, let’s say the St. Paul-Minneapolis market, where you’re going to be on the air — it’s not a cheap market, but it’s not a super expensive market, and you’re going to end up doing a lot, and you also have to walk them through that wonderful, democratic caucus process they have — you’ve got so many things you have to do for that candidate before you ever put an ad on the air. Figure out how much of that you want from your media consultant, how much time are you going to want, through that organizing process. You’ve got 18 forums, and are you going to want your media consultant involved? And [you have to] be willing to structure an agreement that works for both of you, where you know you’re paying for the time of that person and that you’re going to be able to get that time, and so the person feels they’re going to be compensated for spending a lot of time on that campaign.

You’ve made a point of the upfront negotiations being so important. When we see a dysfunctional presidential campaign, are we seeing one that didn’t bother to do that right?

Yes, a lot of the time.

And these last-minute, pull-in-somebody-else [fixes] are probably not going to improve the situation then, are they? Unless you could go back to ground zero and renegotiate?

Well, a lot of times, when you have a change in campaign management — often in presidential campaigns you’ll have one either at November of the odd-numbered year or March of the even-numbered year — they will renegotiate the contracts. I’m actually a believer in people. If I were managing a presidential campaign, which I will never do, I would negotiate contracts only through the primaries. And if we win the nomination, we’ll figure out the general then.

Oh, usually it’s planned ahead?

A lot of times it is. Or just there’s an assumption. But I actually would negotiate through the primaries because the amount of money for the general, under the old system when people took public financing, was a very finite amount and it was easy to figure out. Also, if you were using the same consultants, it would have made more sense to figure out what was fair for the general election, in the context of how much money they’ve made in the primary. Let’s say, for instance, you worked for someone who didn’t raise anything during the primary but got hot right there at the end and somehow wins — a kind of almost John Edwards situation from 2004, where he had a cash-starved campaign most of the time. I don’t think anybody made any money off of it. But let’s say he’d managed to come in first in Iowa. It had been a week later and let’s say by some fluke he’d won that nomination in 2004, then I think those consultants who’d spent a huge amount of time on that race and had made no money off of it because they gambled, could have gone in there and rightfully asked for a fairly decent payoff for the general election. Whereas, on the campaigns like the Dean campaign with the consultants, basically the campaign manager was negotiating with himself for how much the firm should make. To me, it’s such a huge conflict of interest.

That’s interesting, and certainly not good for the candidate.

No. Educated candidates who really have campaigns sit down and figure out what they need from their consultants. When I worked at the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee], before I became a consultant, I used to say to the campaigns: “You pay them a consulting fee. Make them consult. You pay them a fee, make them consult; that’s what that fee is for.” It used to drive me crazy that they wouldn’t use their consultants properly.

There’s a lot of personal stuff going on here.

A huge amount, yeah.

And so there are all kinds of reasons for dysfunctional campaigns.

And they almost always start with the candidate, by the way. Let me be honest.

The candidate’s not managing?

The candidate’s dysfunctional. The candidate hires a staff, but then listens to their 20 best friends from law school.

What does a real big donor get out of a campaign?

They get to go to debates. The real big donors, for the amount of money they spent, they could almost certainly get much better deals anywhere in the country. They go to debates.

Is it mostly vanity?

You call it vanity, I would call it commitment. Big donors are very committed to these candidates. And part of it is some of them have been friends or have been committed to these folks for years and genuinely care about them, and they consider them friends. So it is a friendship that is magnified by the celebrity. [That] is what they get, more than anything.

I once had a story in which Jerry Brown was still the governor of California and was running on a campaign reform platform and was selling judgeships in California. To what extent do people buy judgeships or ambassadorships or that sort of thing?

I don’t know the answer on ambassadorships. I know that certainly donors seem to get them. On the other hand, they tend to be people who are fairly accomplished, so how can you say, “Because they’re a donor, they’re disqualified.” [With] judgeships, that is not the case. It might be so, on the state levels.

Jerry Brown was the pioneer in that field.

Federally, that does not happen.

It would only happen where you’ve got a situation where a governor is running. But I always remember that; that is one of my favorite stories. I used to give speeches, long before Enron, saying that if I were an investor, I wouldn’t invest in Enron or I wouldn’t invest in some of these companies that really get way too involved in presidential campaigns or any kind of campaigns. Do you have any experience with that? Do candidates, when they see a donor who’s too aggressive, who wants to be identified with them too much, do they worry about that?

I don’t know if candidates worry about it; certainly staffs do. As a general rule, a good staff’s rule is if a donor seems to be trying to do too much or pushing too hard, you’ve got to ask yourself why. It really does raise red flags. Your perfect donor is a person who’s clearly committed around issues, committed to the candidate, does what they say they’re going to do, works with your campaign’s lawyers and your fundraisers to make sure there are no problems, and does everything properly and basically e-mails you all the time because they’ve read The New York Times and have an idea for a speech. That’s you’re perfect donor.

They can evidently be a pain in the butt too, but at least they have your best interests at heart.

And that is, I’ve got to be honest, the majority of donors. The presidential money is so big, and there’s so much of it and from so many different places, that I don’t think people who do the money [on the presidential level] are as much looking for the ultimate access. Certainly not in the Democratic Party, [where] presidential money is so much more ideological or just relationship-driven. It might be that way in the Republican primary. I remember, when George [W.] Bush was running in ’99, somebody telling me that the number of people who were donating to his candidacy under the rallying cry, “We’ll control the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] again,” was enormous. I don’t know that for a fact. Somebody made a joke like that, but Democratic money is so much more ideological.

It would be an understatement to say the media is changing?

Yes.

What effect is this having on presidential campaigns?

I think the best example of how the media and communication is changing is John Edwards’s decision last week to keep the two bloggers on his payroll. I think four years ago, or eight years ago, they would have been gone in a moment — as they probably should have been — because the Edwards campaign would have been very concerned about what this did in what we now call the mainstream media, but what we used to call the press. And the fact that they are now more concerned about what the reaction would have been from the blogging community, the progressive blogging community, shows you how much of a change there has been. While I think the so-called mainstream media is still incredibly important to a campaign, it is not as important as it was. The ability to go around it and outside it and actually make them the target for fundraising is extraordinary. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but I’ve yet to talk to a reporter, including some very progressive reporters, who haven’t had the experience of saying something that the “netroots’ decided they don’t like, and just getting bombarded with the hate e-mails.

[Some journalists have] had entire blogs set up attacking [them].

Right. And it’s a very intimidating kind of thing. The Dean campaign pioneered this; they used to actually go tell their people, “OK, go after this reporter,” as far as I can tell. I think that the relationship continues to grow more cynical and, I think, less respectful. When I started being a press assistant way back then, everyone respected each other. We respected the press, the press respected the people, and they respected the candidates, and I think that there is a lack of respect on both sides that is so corrosive, it really is.

And why is that? Just because of the general cynicism about politics?

I think that’s part of it. I think that there is a generation of journalists coming out of a relatively cynical, skeptical generation to begin with, the post-baby-boomer folks, who also learned their journalism school in the post-Watergate [era]. There is a whole ethic around just assuming these people are corrupt. I have to tell you, everytime I see someone go introduce a piece of legislation that they’ve struggled with and worked to get just right and worked on for like two years, the first line of the story is “because they had to” or “because they were worried about this” or something as opposed to, “Hey, they cared about the issue and they’ve worked on it for two years and busted their butt.” As opposed to always having to find the motivation and there’s a dark motivation. And, on the flip side, because of the way reporting has changed that . . .

It’s hard to have respect.

It’s that they increasingly are seen as the enemy. I don’t think that’s fair, either. Reporters work very, very hard.

I always come away from a conversation with you having learned a great deal.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these things because I really do feel bad things are happening in politics. You know, Diane Dewhirst [a media advisor to Speaker Nancy Pelosi] and I were both interns together. She was an intern at the DNC; I was an intern at the Carter White House. We have known each other longer than anyone else. We’ve been friends all that time and we’ve both dealt with the press. And she and I are spending a lot of time talking about this because we just remember it was very different, and much better.

I think that, on the press side, you don’t deal with “Oh, so-and-so is assigned to cover you for The New York Times.” Every stop, they’re a different array of faces. I think that also is part of it; there’s no consistency.

That’s right. The fact is, reporters who covered a campaign for a while got a very good sense of a candidate, got a good sense of the people around a candidate, and who to trust, who not to trust. At the end of the day, I never lied to a reporter and I think they knew that. I would be honest and say, “I can’t talk about this,” but I never lied to anyone, and I think that kind of relationship is important. Also, I knew which reporters never lied to me.