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Bob Dornan

Robert K. Dornan, a Republican, was a U.S. representative from California from 1977 to 1983 and from 1985 to 1997.  In 1996, he was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.  Dornan is currently a congressional liaison for the American Life League, a 501(c)(3) organization working to oppose abortion, contraception, and euthanasia.

Josh Israel interviewed Dornan on May 21, 2008.

You were a congressman from California from 1977 to ’83 and then again from ’85 to ’97. Is that right?

Yes, a 20-year run with that two-year gap in the middle from reapportionment.

Then in 1996 you were a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination?

That I was.

Can you talk a bit about your experience in the ‘96 Republican primary?

In looking at all the dynamics, and as the Pentagon likes to say, the metrics of this year’s run, it’s like two different worlds, two different universes, two different countries. The money was just such a different order that it’s hard to comprehend how marinated in millions of dollars the process is today compared to ‘96.

Now in ‘96, the few similarities were we had a large Republican field, larger than the Democratic field as it was last year with the Republican race. I think at our high water mark we hit 10 or 11 and they hit eight. It was as varied a field but it had the senior guy, which would have been Bob Dole, as the preemptive winner, and he was. The Republicans all had this kind of expression that simplified it all, “Who’s next up to bat?” It’s a terrible policy because a lot of times, if not most often, a person who never takes risks and who never really speaks out for a philosophical cause, in this case, conservatism, because Bob Dole started out as a very true blue conservative.

Over the years, it became a survivalist game, and still is, in the Republican Party. He gets to serve longest in the House who makes the least waves, who doesn’t stand for anything. That’s why I knew Dole could not beat [Bill] Clinton, even though I think Clinton could have been had if someone got the nomination who was willing to take on Newt Gingrich and his disastrous and eventually fatal idea to a majority of closing down the federal government and expecting the blame to go to Clinton instead of to the speaker of the House.

I just came in to try and bring forth conservative issues. Pat Buchanan was great at that also. I knew that Pat was crippled by circumstances not his fault. He had never served in the military and, in those days, Clinton was the only person who had no military background who had served in the White House going all the way back to [Herbert] Hoover, if you consider [Theodore] Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy. Everybody else was a naval officer. Ronald Reagan was in the Army, and then an Army Air Force officer. Everybody was not only of a military experience, but they were all officers: Jerry Ford, naval officer; [Richard] Nixon, naval officer; [John] Kennedy, naval officer; [Dwight] Eisenhower, five-star Army general; [Harry] Truman, a captain in the Artillery like my dad, who also was an artillery captain in World War I.

Here we had Pat with no military experience, and again, a great uncle to dozens of kids, but no children of his own; God’s call, not Pat’s. I thought, Pat doesn’t have my back race. He’s never been elected to anything. I have 22 years in the Air Force, if you include the Reserve time, and I attained captain in the Air Force. I was a jet fighter pilot. Pat, with no elections, never had run at the local, state, or congressional level, not even for a Senate seat, and here he had no family experiences to talk about. So I thought, “Pat cannot do this.” He already had a shot in ’92. Because of his frankness at the convention in Houston, I was in the auditorium when he spoke, and he coined that great phrase, “Clinton and Clinton: We’re going to get two for one all right.” Look how that played out.

He mentioned homosexuality, which was fine, but he mentioned it three times. I left the forum. I was up in the press room. I watched them licking their chops gleefully, “We’ve got him and we’ll wrap him around the party’s neck.” I got the written transcript of his speech and reread it slowly after. The only thing I excised to make it a much better speech was the second and third reference to homosexuality. One was fine but by doing it three times, they were able to, in their evil, unfair ways, to nail it as a speech of intolerance. So that whole ‘92 experience with Pat, I said, “Pat cannot do this in ’96.”

I was in to get a message out, and I did. I bumped into a person at the airport just this weekend who told me they probably had a “Dornan for President” sticker on their car. I had next to zero money and I was so busy with the first two chairmanships of my life, subcommittees — one in intelligence and one was Military Personnel. The second biggest budget in the military after procurement of aircraft, carriers, and submarines is Military Personnel, bumping up against $90 billion. It’s way more than that now. I was chairman of Military Personnel. I resurrected the POW-MIA portfolio that [John] McCain had deliberately, and I think almost criminally, buried. In ‘92 and ’93, I resurrected that and had 14 hearings, one of them 12 hours long, all in secret in the intelligence room. All of those hearings during that ’96 election, period.

So I was unable to campaign even at the pace I had promised myself. I literally put first among all things my work as chairman of Military Personnel on the MIA-POW issue, not to mention battling the Clinton family and administration on no abortionists in the military, bringing back my Dornan Law forbidding it, and working hard with Duncan Hunter, former chairman of Armed Services now, then just a couple of chairs senior to me. We worked hard to keep homosexuals out of the military, which now 12 years later, both [Barack] Obama and Hillary [Clinton] plan to [invite] on the first day open hand-holding homosexuals so we can do to the Marine Corps what was done to the Catholic Church through the corruption of the seminaries.

From what I saw, you were able to raise roughly in the vicinity of about $300,000 for that race.

That’s about it. That can’t get you elected to the House these days.

It seems like a large amount of money to me. I think Bob Dole in that race raised 10 times that.

Oh yeah, which, again, would not get you through the early primaries today.

Steve Forbes [used] $37 million of his own money, which, even by today’s standards, seems a little low. With that sort of playing field, did you feel like you didn’t have enough money to do the sorts of things you needed to do to win?

Absolutely. I wasn’t able to get out literature in the primary states. The fact that I was able to hang on to every debate and shine in the debates, objective people whom I respect would tell me, “You won that debate, hands down.” One on Bosnia was particularly sad because [Dole] said, “We’ve already got troops in Bosnia.” I said: “No, we don’t. We have a few Air Force pathfinders,” these guys who set up instrument landing systems and so forth. Dole looks at me like, “Bob, you’re hurting me.” He says, “Well, I heard what he did.” This guy’s going to be the torchbearer here and I’m just hurting him. I kind of backed off on Dole.

Dole, it was always nice of him and he knew he couldn’t beat me at debate, particularly on that issue. That was an early foreboding of the mistakes going into Iraq without taking into proper importance the Islamic factor. Even in Bosnia, because I’ve been over there three times, I knew the Islamic factor was going to play big, and it has here with NATO. With NATO help, Clinton proceeded to ethnically cleanse areas of the Balkans of all Christians — an irony.

But he was able to beat you on the fundraising front?

There was a commercial that kind of simplifies “Who’s next up to bat?” into one word. I can hear it in my mind. I can’t remember the product. The commercial rhythm is “nexxxxt.” Do you remember what that commercial is?

I don’t, but it sounds very familiar.

Sure. It’s like, I don’t know if it’s an insurance company, but “nexxxxt.” It’s sarcastic, but that was the Republican Party. In a way, McCain has prevailed this year using Charlie Black’s strategy when he took over, that if you have no money, the only thing you could do is be the last man standing. Now, it worked in McCain’s case.

In my case, it would have had to be Dole pulling out for, let’s say a health reason, and Forbes being a [Mitt] Romney. Let’s say Forbes belonged to a small religious group of 1.7 million Americans, like the Mormons, with all of the downsides of being a Mormon. That would have checked Forbes. Maybe I could have prevailed in the last man standing scenario, but it had to go all the way to the convention, and then it’s open up to anybody. Then there would be a lot of other next-one-up-to-bat people involved. The last man standing worked this year. It usually does not work.

With the rise of the Internet as a fundraising tool, it not only helps the Barack Obamas on the left side, but also people like Ron Paul on the Republican side find a strong base of small-money donors. Do you think someone like yourself has . . .?

That might have clicked. I just thought of another thing that really was an impediment to my campaign. I’ll tell you that in a second. Yes, the Internet was not discovered until Howard Dean, two cycles later, actually three cycles later. Actually, if there had been an Internet then, that would have given me a chance to have more money to do what I wanted to do. I used the Internet to raise funds two years later in a ’98 comeback attempt that was torpedoed by Gingrich for my old seat. They even kept all the illegal voters on the voter rolls. The Republican Party allowed that to happen. I was facing the same voter fraud in the next election in ‘98 that had stolen my seat in ’96.

Here was the other impediment I forgot about. I went through the candidates, but there was one person that always shined in debate. When somebody would tell me I didn’t win the debate, they’d usually say, “It was a tie between you and Alan Keyes.” Keyes was able to say things I could not. I discussed it with him. It’s kind of like what Geraldine Ferraro was unfairly attacked for saying about Obama. If he wasn’t a black man, he wouldn’t have had all of this uniqueness from the early part of the campaign and he never could have pushed away Hillary, who not only had the most money except for Obama, but she had the Republican prize of who’s up to bat next. She had the seniority; she had the uniqueness of being a woman; she had the best fundraising operation. But he was the only black in this field of eight.

Alan Keyes was able to say things. Again, I used to love to go up to the press room immediately after a debate. If I had already spoken and it was a sequitur thing where we’re all going to be on the stage at the same time I’d go up, and the beat in the press is, “If this guy weren’t black, we’d be comparing him to Mussolini.” That was a quote I heard in Iowa once. Alan Keyes’s oratory was great 19th century style of oratory, early 20th century style. He could orate. He could speak in centurion tones. He could crank up the volume. The press was afraid to criticize him for that, for not being the modern, cool conversational person that Obama started out as. Alan Keyes was like Bob Dornan, a fiery pro-lifer, and, like Bob Dornan, a staunch defender of the 10th Amendment, which Bob Dole picked up and carried around a little card with the 10th Amendment on it: What powers are given to the government belong to the states and to the people. He had three of us talking about the 10th Amendment.

Alan Keyes really crippled my reach out to an audience because we were going after the exact same Christian-based, Orthodox Jewish-based, and pro-life based, both of us targeting that area. Although Alan had never won a race, he had run twice in Maryland and won the primary the second time. He had no military background in the period of history where it’d only been broken by Clinton four years earlier. He had a great family. He had three children who would come around, a beautiful wife. He just completely blocked my outreach in many areas where we had debates and where we both campaigned. He was a terrific campaigner.

He’s, I think, now running as an independent candidate, having not succeeded in the Constitution Party nomination.

I’ve told The New York Times: “Look, in this country, you have to run once if you’re not a multi-millionaire. You have to run once to get on the map. It’s just my once.” It precluded my ever doing it again because in the year 2000, here came a governor who had not only the next-up-to-bat claim and was not elected governor, George W. Bush, but he had what I called the “avenge me” factor one forum. That’s why I said, before the first debate: “All of this is an exercise in futility. My friend Alan is back. My friend Buchanan is back. McCain is in here. But this is Bush.” This Republican Party so loathes Bill Clinton and his wife and his scandals, their scandals, that they’re going to give the son a chance to pick up the sword and avenge the father. That was a big Bush factor. 

Then they got the first debate. I said, with the exception of Keyes, Bush is a better debater than McCain. I remember he said this on TV, radio. He’s better than Terry Bower. He’s better than Oren Hatch. It seems hard now when we see how limited the president is as a communicator. He was better in that field, with the exception of Alan. Alan was back for a second go and Bush a third go.

To come back to your question about Alan, I didn’t know he was in this race until he popped up in a debate and the whole news media were scratching their heads. I’m flashing in my mind to get a mental picture of Brit Hume going, “Where did he come from?” Do you remember where that one debate was?

I think it was the values debate. It was right after he jumped in.

They had already lost a couple of candidates, so there were like six and there he was. The others are going, “What’s going on here?” I’m a news junkie. I watch everything and I’m a channel changer. Sometimes I will have one TV on, with the sound off, monitoring what’s going on with another network, a little tiny one. I never reached LBJ’s height of having three networks on in the Oval Office. The reason I say this, by being an aficionado of all of this, I’ve never heard or seen from Alan since. I’ve never seen him on a talk show but once recounting how he got into the debate. I can’t believe he is back in this with the danger of hurting himself because nobody in the media is acknowledging his existence in this race.

He switched from the Republican Party to the Constitution Party.

That’s the first time I have heard about that.

Then he lost the Constitution nomination. I believe he is now trying to mount, on his own, an independent candidacy for the general.

Wow. That’s the first time I heard that. He could have done what Pat Buchanan has done, become a great media commentator. I remember when his show wasn’t getting the highest ratings. MSNBC was probably low to fire their only black commentator. I think they have some good ones now, left and right. They offered to move the show to 11 o’clock from its 10 o’clock slot. He walked out on them. They put Joe Scarborough in that 11 o’clock slot and the rest is history. Scarborough is still there after all these years on a morning show. His show never got ratings, particularly against Fox. I can’t believe that. Alan raised more money than I did because he hired a professional fundraising operation. He really pounded hard at it. He must still have that operation going and be making enough money to enable him to make that double switch.

Talking about this election, we’ve seen, with the primaries, just about every candidate has opted out of the public financing, matching funds. The very latest, it looks like both campaigns have given some thought to opting out for the general as well.

This shows you the absolute failure of public financing. The one thing I’m proud of in that ’96 race is I’m the only candidate that I know of that reached the matching funds standard and didn’t take it. I felt that if you’re a long shot, you have no right to ask public financing, taxpayers, even in a check-off system. “We’ll give you matching funds for your quest.” That’s just not right. Now that we see the power of the Internet, it’s kind of nasty to have people claim they’re going to limit themselves, which kind of tells the donors, “Come on, you small donors, help me out here until I reach the matching funds point, and then I’m not going to pay myself, wallow in money.” Then you don’t do it. You turn around, which it looks like McCain is going to do. 

So I think public financing is an absolute joke and has a very negative effect. I was so cause-oriented, then and now, that I would have come in on a self-funded operation and not take matching funds anyway. Now, if the matching funds stay around, it’s going to bring in people who are only in it to get matching funds and to assuage an ego when they’ve never run for Congress, not even run and lost like Clinton. Run and loss for the House is a big category: the head of the CIA, Bill Casey, Gore Vidal, Clinton, the current president. Just run for the House once, lose, and then you get a break somewhere else. I’m missing one or two other big ones here who have only run for the House once and then went on. John Kerry ran for the House. Well, one and a half times. He deferred to [Robert] Drinan in one and the second time became Drinan’s campaign manager.

And Barack Obama actually ran against Bobby Rush.

That’s the biggie. Barack and Clinton and Kerry, all three standard bearers, have each run once and lost. This matching funds thing is going to turn out to be a nightmare in the future. Instead of a debate between obvious five or six frontrunners in both parties, they’re going to have 10 people, four or five more in each party, eating up time, destroying the focus of the voters, of people who have never run for office, who say, “If I put in a chunk of my own money,” say $300,000 or $400,000 or $1 million, “to run a fundraising operation, direct mail or Internet, it will get me enough.” I used to know the number. It’s very small. I think it’s $5,000 of donations under whatever the new limit is. I got it. It’s 20 states, $5,000 each state in donations $200 or smaller.

So it’s $100,000 total?

Yes. So if a guy puts in his own money to run a direct-mail operation and gets that, what did you say that total was?

I guess it would be $100,000.

That’s it. Then he won’t get back his own money, but he can take his own money back. He can always pay off campaign loans of self to the campaign, like my congressional campaign is clear, but I think my Senate campaign owes me tens of thousands, the White House one. That’s the irony of it all is that it will drag people in out of nowhere who have never even done the Clinton, Kerry, Obama, Gore Vidal deal of running once for Congress and losing, and Bush.

Would you get rid of the public financing entirely?

In a heartbeat. I spoke against it and I tried several futile attempts to get rid of it in the House but I don’t think I ever wrote up legislation. I’ll tell you one thing. I was always selfless about it, but now I am an absolute zealot, and that is term limits. Term limits is the only way we could ever get rid of Teddy Kennedy or Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton will now stay in the Senate. Term limits is the only way. Let me broaden the field. The only way we could have ever gotten rid of the person who was literally blubbering in the Senate yesterday, Robert Byrd, indulging in coffin-side — let’s give him sincerity — what a person does with his hands on a coffin kneeling, next to the coffin of a friend, you don’t duplicate it or do it on the Senate floor. All the more pointing out that he is accepting, as most commentaries have said, that this is a death sentence for [Ted] Kennedy.

How else can we get rid of a Kennedy, a Byrd, or a Hillary other than term limits? How could we have gotten rid of a non-speaker speaker, a speaker who couldn’t speak, Dennis Hastert, except by term limits? Who picked Hastert? Who inflicted Hastert’s eight years on us? The four-year speaker, Newt Gingrich. By the way, I just wonder, are you aware of that? That Gingrich and Bill Paxton, who was leaving in a cloud of scandal, picked Hastert? [They] got Bob Livingston, who was leaving in disgrace, went to the floor, and admitted that he had committed adulteries. He put an ‘S’ on adultery, plural. The three of them handpicked Hastert, a man who never had given a speech on the House floor that was memorable for one second, let alone a day. They made him, one of the worst speakers in the House, speaker with a capital ‘S’. How could we ever get rid of Hastert except by term limits?

Now, a guy like Henry Hyde was my biggest impediment in pushing term limits in the House, and I didn’t know why. Later, we all found out why. I said: “Henry, I want you pushed out of here. I want you to be the senator from Illinois or we’ll end up with [Dick] Durbin.” How’s that for a prophecy? “I want you to be the governor of Illinois and run for president. I want you out of here. You’re always telling me, in one of my impassioned speeches, you’ll say, ‘Bob, you’re casting pearls among swine, but it was a great oration.’” I said, “Well, I’m telling you your presence here is a pearl of precious price among swine.” Well, why didn’t Henry ever run for the Senate or governor or dream of the presidency?

What the Clintons and Terry Lenzner did to him — and I was very close to both the Hydes. His wife Jean became a friend. We used to go out to dinner. Jean mercifully had gone to heaven when the scandal that she forgave her husband for broke. Hyde’s scandal with the Republicans would have been a career stopper if he tried to move up to the House or the Senate or the governor. In other words, Congress people can overcome scandals form their past once they’re elected but they can’t ever move upward.

On a slightly different topic, what was your thought when the McCain-Feingold bill passed? What do you think its ramifications have been?

Hated it from the get-go. It was conceived by [Russ] Feingold for Democratic Party advantages against skill and advertising and talk radio, against his party. It was conceived by McCain, and this is in irony, to cripple pro-lifers or any other issue-oriented group — immigration was not that big then — from running commercials against him in [30] days before a primary and [60] days before general election. It was all because of personal peak on McCain’s part against some spots that had been run against him.

It’s on its face an unconstitutional bill. When Bush signed it, I thought it was one of those flaws in the Bush background that the opposition can use against him. Who signs an unconstitutional bill and says while he’s doing it, “This is unconstitutional but I’ll sign it anyway”? Actually, in all of my verbosity here, we covered three things that are crippling American politics: no term limits at the House and Senate levels. The state can do what they want. Most of them have opted for term limits like the state of California. No term limits hurt us. Federal matching funds hurt, and McCain-Feingold hurts. There are three crippling things. One would be a positive step and the other two are negative in presidential politics and all politics at the federal level.

What would be your magic wand solution to the presidential campaign process? What would you do to really make it fair and more effective?

I’m reaching way back in my brain to when I first got to the Congress and was on the inside of the federal government looking at the presidential races. There had to be a way, I thought, to put these candidates on the publicly owned airwaves. So I began to become an expert of sorts on the FCC rules and the ownership of the airwaves by the American people. I remember, once I said, “The American taxpayers own these airwaves collectively the way we own Yellowstone National Park, held in trust for the people.”

Those strange words in the FCC baptism laws, the public convenience, interest and — I had this so well memorized and now I’m forgetting the most important one. Using that founding legislation, I said nothing is more important to a presidential race as our nation’s population grows, as we’re now a transcontinental nation, taking back some of that air time from the networks to allow debates. 

I’m trying to think of how I set the bar for lesser-known candidates to come in and how I’ve tried to help with a multi-millionaire buying his way into a race. Whether he’s a good guy like Forbes or someone else, like say a Bill Gates, who I know to be pro-abortion, who could flat out try to buy one of the networks and then put himself on it. I do remember saying there should be, with increasing intensity as you get closer to the primary — actual first primary or caucus date, Iowa, New Hampshire — a way to have unlimited, cross-questioning debates.

In other words, let me simplify it: real debates, high school debates, college debates, Oxford Union debates.  How do you get real debates instead of joint press conferences with sequential questioning of a field of 10 over either? Ridiculous. There has to be a way. Anyway, that was the only way to get people known. Here is the outcome.

Necessity. I just pulled it up on the Internet.

Necessity, that’s it. Convenience brings the election into your house. If you care that much, you drive to a debate or look for it in a column in the newspapers. So convenience is the weakness. Necessity is a powerful word because it’s necessary to our survival as a republic that we elect the best people. Talk about public interest. That’s the same thing as necessity. It’s in the public interest, the common good, the welfare of the state that we elect proper people.

So here’s what is so weird; just take my speech or lecture schedule in the last eight weeks. In the last eight weeks, I’ve spoken at Beaufort, South Carolina, three appearances at Indiana — Valparaiso, Chester, and somewhere else — three ethics classes at Loyola Marymount out in L.A., and a speech Saturday night at Rappahannock County. Everywhere I go people say to me: “How did it come down to these three people? What is it?” I say, “Well, make your agony worse.”

People are always comparing us to Norway, the Nobel Peace Prize, 5 million people; Switzerland over 8 million; Sweden pressing 9 million. Well, we have already picked up the entire country of Norway, Ireland, or Israel since the census in October a year and a half ago when we passed 300 million. We have already added an Israel or an Ireland or a Norway or half of a Sweden. We are now about 305 million people, and we come up with these three. Something is horribly wrong.