Countdown

Home > Interviews > Bob Kerrey

Bob Kerrey

Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, was a U.S. senator from Nebraska from 1989 to 2001. He was a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination in the 1992 election. Prior, Kerrey was governor of Nebraska from 1983 to 1987. Since 2001, he has been the president of The New School, a university in New York City.

Josh Israel interviewed Kerrey on July 10, 2008.

Senator, you were a Navy Seal, Medal of Honor winner, governor, a U.S. senator, and now president to The New School in New York City. What would you say is your most significant accomplishment as a public official?

It’s actually a whole list of relatively small things. In general, using the power of the office to help somebody that needed it. These offices have a lot of power. It could be as simple as a problem somebody is having with a large government bureaucracy or a large private sector bureaucracy. It could be something as simple as just needing to transport a child who is sick. The reason I’m stammering with your question is because I hadn’t really thought about it that much, recently anyway. I would say in my case, because I had been helped so much myself with small acts of kindness when I was recovering from injuries, it was going to a hospital or a rehabilitation center to visit somebody who had been, themselves, traumatized or changed by an injury, those sorts of things.

When you got into the presidential race in late 1991, looking at some of the news stories from the time, by about February at the New Hampshire primary, you had raised something around $2 million. Senator [Tom] Harkin raised just over $2 million. Then-Governor [Bill] Clinton led the pack with about $5 million. February of this year, Senator [John] McCain raised about $12 million, and stories were being written about how he couldn’t compete financially with Senator [Hillary] Clinton and Senator [Barack] Obama. What’s changed in 16 years?

I don’t even know what the acronym stands for now, but the blogs were created in the early part of this century; 2001, I think, was when they first came out. It’s technology. Technology has opened up vast amounts of individual contributions so that you don’t have to go to fundraiser after fundraiser. It’s increased the capacity of individuals to give directly.

You raised, I think, something around $4 million in individual contributions. How, way back in 1992, did you go about it?

To show the difference between 1992, unfortunately, I don’t have a ’96 example but I’ve got a 2000 example and I’ve got a 2004 and a 2008 example. In 1992, the former governor of California Jerry Brown dazzled people by holding up his 1-800 number in a debate. I could give a 2000 example but it’s not as poignant. In 2004, Howard Dean dazzled people by his use of the Internet. It’s dark ages compared to the way the Internet is being used in 2006, certainly, and 2008. It’s not just fundraising. It’s other sorts of things as well. It increased the capacity to reach people and to allow them to contribute directly with credit cards.

I don’t know if you’re on the receiving end of these things, but toward the end of the filing season, the next one now is September, it’s relentless, the e-mails that are coming in from people. “Help put us over the top. Your $10 can make all the difference in the world.” It’s huge. Another way of putting this is, when John Kerry went back to the Senate, he had the most valuable thing, which is an e-mail list that could return a couple hundred thousand dollars in 24, 48 hours. A $100,000 fundraiser today is as difficult as a $100,000 fundraiser was in 1992. It’s still difficult, in some ways more difficult, because the rules have changed. You’ve got to make phone calls.

I won’t even name them. I have a meeting today, in 20 minutes, with a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He’s a friend. I know exactly why he’s coming. “I just want to stop by and talk to you.” He wants me to do a fundraiser for him in New York, which is a popular place to do fundraisers. I know what he’s going to ask. He’s going to ask me to do $50,000. I’m going to have to say, “I don’t think I can do $50,000.” It’s just as hard to do a physical fundraiser, and for the candidate it’s brutal.

I remember doing a fundraiser in the presidential campaign here in New York City. A very well-known individual who is still involved in fundraising, his now former wife was livid because I was two hours late for the fundraiser. I was two hours late for the fundraiser because I was coming in from St. Louis. It was easier to get here from St. Louis in 1992 than it is today. It was still difficult. They had rain. I couldn’t get in. I was late. It didn’t matter to her that the event started at nine o’clock and I got there at 11. It didn’t matter.

The good news is, in ’92, she couldn’t post it on Huffington [Post], something that I had said. If I dropped a B-word on her or something like that, it would have been on Huffington Post. “Bob Kerrey called the people in Nebraska clutching to their religion.” What was it that Obama said at that San Francisco fundraiser?

It was something along those lines.

It gives you the capacity not to have to go to those fundraisers, because they’re just as hard today as they were before. To call somebody up and ask them to contribute $2,300 is not easy. There are people who love doing it. I’m not one of them. I might have when I was running for Senate and running for president, but it’s very difficult. This is a very long answer. The simple answer is, it’s not just the Internet but the capacity to, for lack of a better word, mine the data, to know who’s likely to give and what’s likely to cause them to contribute. If I was running for president today and running the data for any presidential candidate, I have the capacity to know at least 100 times more about you than you have to know about me.

That was before microtargeting?

I’m talking now, today. I didn’t know you were familiar with that. Microtargeting is what’s happened over the last three or four years. What I would say to people, the good news is the Democratic primary went on forever. It was in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. The reason that’s good is [because] the thing that’s most valuable to the candidate is it’s still the voter file. It’s just that the voter files have become more sophisticated as a consequence of the decline of the cost of storage and transmission of data and analysis of data. Moore’s Law has changed everything from 1992 to today.

You said that much of the money you raised in ’92 was fundraising events. Did you use direct mail significantly?

I don’t recall. I think we probably used direct mail. I can’t imagine it was significant. By the time I was running my third campaign in Nebraska, direct mail had gotten effective for me. It takes time to develop so that you can get more than a 2-percent return rate or something like that. It’s very low. Direct mail was effective but it takes time to develop your capacity. I didn’t have that kind of a list. [Bill] Clinton probably did because he was chairman of the NGA [National Governors Association] and the Southern Governors’ [Association] and the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council]. He was a master at both networking and taking advantage of those networks.

Do you think if you had more money in that race it would have made a difference?

Yes, sure. Do I think I could have won with more money? Probably not. Having lost New Hampshire, I still believe that it’s very difficult to finish third as a Republican or a Democrat in New Hampshire, unless the rules change. I personally hope they do. I’d like to see Congress take the rule writing away from the political parties.

Let me use Paul Tsongas as an example. Tsongas won New Hampshire. Money mattered to him. He ran out of it. He wasn’t ready. He went to Florida, and Clinton cleaned his clock when he did all those — I think accurate — declarations about entitlements and the need to eat our spinach and so forth. Clinton went down there. That’s when Paul started calling him a “pander bear” because of what he was saying in the condos down there, which was: “I won’t touch Social Security. I won’t touch Medicare. I’ll spend more on you, not less.”

It’s true that he wasn’t prepared, but had Tsongas not gotten out of the race and try to get back in, Tsongas did run out of money. It would have mattered to him. It’s hard for me to write a scenario today that, if I had enough money, would have had me stay in the race.

Would it have made it easier?

It would have made it easier to stay in the race, but I think people probably would have been wasting their money. We had a Western strategy. Back to my statement about the Democratic and Republican primary and why I’d like to see it taken away from the parties: I’m not talking about abolishing the parties, but I think the rule-setting should be [by] Congress or set up a commission to do it. You’ve got to finish first or second in New Hampshire. Failing to do that, it’s hard.

I don’t think Paul had gone to Georgia once. He got the Atlanta [Journal]-Constitution endorsement two days after the New Hampshire primary. He wasn’t even on the radar screen in Colorado and he blew to first or second in Colorado immediately after the New Hampshire primary. To win the New Hampshire primary, to get your name identification with likely Democratic voters as high as that win gets you would probably cost you $1 billion or some big number, some unfathomable number. It’s not small.

Well, it was unfathomable before this year.

Obama raised a ton of money, but I think all the money he spent on television, which was impressive, was determinative in beating back a spirited counterattack by Hillary Clinton after she won 10 straight caucuses. The outspending at two to one kept that margin down in Pennsylvania. Absent that, it would have been a huge win in Pennsylvania for Hillary, likewise in Indiana. The win in Iowa is probably worth $500 million to Obama. It’s worth a lot more than he spent. It wasn’t just a win. It was a speech, too. He converted that.

Think of the comparative analysis between Obama’s speech and McCain’s speech. He converted it into a big deal. Still, he stood on that stage and he got, I don’t know, a couple hundred million dollars of free airtime. He came out of Iowa with people saying Hillary ought to get out of the race. Again, another very, very long answer to a simple yes-or-no question. I think it would have allowed me to prolong the agony, but it was very clear to me then, and even clearer today, that having finished third in New Hampshire, the question wasn’t “am I going to get off the dance floor,” the question was “when and under what circumstances.”

An interesting counterpoint to that is Brown, who stayed in much longer without a great deal of resources. Maybe you’re going to counter that with actual facts. He didn’t have that much money, did he?

No. He was behind the three of you.

He benefited with Tsongas not having money, I believe, unless my recollection of it is completely inaccurate. I think Tsongas getting out gave Brown a bump. It kept him in the game. If Tsongas had the money and stayed head-to-head with [Bill] Clinton, been just one in two, I think Brown would have had to get out. My recollection is Brown was making a pretty good charge until it turned out to be an accurate rumor about coke use from some anonymous highway patrolman in California, or some damn thing.

With that race, you had about $8 million because of the federal matching funds. Nowadays, it seems the candidates can’t get out of the matching funds and now the public financing system fast enough. What do you think? Is the system dead? Can it be fixed? Should it be fixed?

Yes, it can be fixed. A federal law needs to be written so that Congress or somebody to whom it delegates the authority sets the terms and conditions of the presidential election. It’s too important of an election to let local politicians in every single state in the Republican and Democratic parties decide when the caucus is going to be held, whether it’s going to be a caucus or primary, what the rules are going to be.

We had a very exciting primary by accident. It was not the intent of the Democratic or the Republican Party to have an exciting primary. It was the intent of the Democratic and Republican primary to get it over in a hurry. But what happened is, if you’re a Democratic official or Republican official in Florida, your interest is not the nation. Your interest is yourself, bringing as much attention as possible to the state of Florida. Two wonderful human beings, in my view, two great political leaders, Fritz Hollings and [James] Clyburn, agreed that they would stay out of the race in order to get the candidates to come to South Carolina. It was one of the few I would say idiomaphanary gestures in the entire scene.

Step number one is Congress has to take it over and create a national system of primaries. If you want to have some caucuses, fine, have some caucuses, but not like the Iowa caucuses, which are completely undemocratic, at least on the Democratic side. They destroy the tally sheet. You have to experience the Iowa caucus. I didn’t actually experience it because we all thought that Harkin would be the favorite son.

And he was.

Well, I’m not sure, today. If you ask me if I made any big mistakes in getting in the race, I would say not going to Iowa, not contesting Iowa. If I had finished second in Iowa — and I think we would have finished at least second in Iowa — then I’ve got a bump coming into New Hampshire. My lack of experience was very telling there. I would say, to your question, emphatically yes, but not unless Congress takes over writing the rules of presidential elections.

I don’t think the public understands how the presidential election works and how the parties themselves control. The parties are created by law. They have the authority under law to do it. Federal laws give them that authority so federal law can change the authorities. It isn’t like the parties sprung up out there out of the soil of the country or something like that. Unless the American people understand that Congress can change the rules, then I think it’s unlikely that they’ll change the rules in a way that solves the financing part of it.

In your experience, does money buy access?

Yes.

Does it buy influence? If so, do you think that corrupts the process?

Yes to all questions. Money buys access. Money buys opportunity to influence. Money corrupts the process. Now, does it corrupt it as bad? You have to put in the scales, the scales of corruption. [There are] two sets of facts. On the one scene is you have just given me $4,600, primary and general, versus somebody gave me $50. You are more likely to get your phone call returned than the guy who gives $50 and the guy who doesn’t give any.

The moment when I reacquired my patriotism was 1990 on the Appropriations Committee. I saw Mark Hatfield offer an amendment to increase the amount of money for military hospitals. A lightbulb went on that the hospital that had saved my life was there, despite of the fact that I had contributed nothing to anybody. There wasn’t a politician I liked in 1969, let alone somebody I’d be willing to give money to. I had absolutely no access, no power, despite of that. So there are lots of good examples for the cynic to counter their motion that it’s entirely corrupt. It’s not entirely corrupt. Some corruption is not the same as all actions, all decisions, all votes being corrupted. There is corruption that comes as a consequence of the money.

The second thing you want to put in the scale, though, is, I’ve got to stand before an audience and tell them something that could cause them to “boo” me. Or, I tell them something that would produce a standing ovation. The boo comes after the truth. The standing ovation comes after the lie. Which do I do? The boo or the lie? The boo or the standing ovation? Do I tell the truth and get booed, or do I tell the lie and get a standing ovation?

That’s human nature. It’s not just politics. People want to be loved and liked. They’ll oftentimes tell somebody something other than the truth in order to be loved and liked. That’s a lot more corrupting. I believe the most dangerous influence in democracy is [being] uninformed; the more ignorant it is, the more connected hate and vengeance, the more dangerous it is. Uninformed public opinion is a danger in democracy. It’s a dangerous influence. All those guys in Gitmo know it.

I think [there are more than] 1.5 million individual donors to the Obama campaign now and $225-plus million. Do you think, at least at the presidential level, the $4,600 contributor becomes more marginalized and less influential?

No, I would say no. Actually, at the margins, since you used the word, yes. In five minutes, I’m going to be in a meeting with a guy and he’s not going to use the word “bundle.” If I do an event for him, I can get people to write $2,300, $4,600 checks. Let me put it this way: There are two kinds of money out there when you’re raising money. Pot number one is “I want Obama to win.” That’s the $1.5 million contributors, small contributors. Pot number two is “I think he’s going to win.” Guess which pot is bigger? “I think he’s going to win.”

So I’ve got two candidates I’m raising money for, Sid and Mary. The name identification is 4 percent. Mary is an incumbent with 99 percent name identification. Mary looks like she’s going to win. Sid looks like he couldn’t win unless lightning strikes. It’s a lot easier to raise money for Mary, a lot easier to raise money for the person that looks like they’re going to win than for the person that looks like they’re not.

I supported Hillary, but her last name was Clinton. She started out with the lead. In this presidential campaign, all you need to know about money and the influence of it is that Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, if you put their résumés together, they’re the three most qualified people in the race. They got less than one percent in Iowa, collectively. It’s just stunning. Hillary Clinton’s last name put her at the front of the pack. Obama’s speech at the convention put him at the head of the pack. John Edwards was the vice presidential candidate. So you had three people in the top tier. Everybody else was at the back of the room jumping up and down saying, “Hey, what about me?” They got no ink, to use an outdated expression.

Until recently — I think the vote was a couple of weeks ago — the Federal Election Commission lacked even the quorum to operate. I saw that you’ve been an adviser to The Reform Institute, which has talked about switching to a somewhat less gridlocked-by-design method of arbitrating.

First of all, I am not an adviser to The Reform Institute. They asked me to join their advisory board not long after I came to New York, and I said yes. Except for some of the political troubles they’ve gotten into, I haven’t heard from them since. I have since actually took my name off the advisory board. I have not been giving them any advice until, as I said, they got in some trouble.

You’re still listed on their website.

It should be off by now. If it’s not off, I’ll really be upset. I asked them in a phone call to have them take it off. It didn’t happen so I finally just sent them a letter about 30 days ago. I don’t dislike them or what they’re trying to do. I just wasn’t giving them any advice. It’s not unusual for me to be on an advisory board and not give people advice, but in this case, it became more problem than it was worth. I don’t know where your question was going.

They’ve proposed I think a fairly interesting idea of having a three-person panel with administrative law judges rather than a 50-50 split Federal Election Commission.

I imagine myself, through you, talking to an audience and saying: “Look, the Federal Election Commission is a creation of federal law. You have to start by giving a bit more detail. The law intentionally has made the FEC weak. The people who wrote the law don’t want a strong FEC. If you’re going to get fined, let the fine come after the election.” Making the law intentionally weak is, I would say, if not the primary objective, certainly one of the objectives.

It’s exceptionally difficult for Congress to get this one right, exceptionally difficult. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but it’s probably going to take some sort of phenomenal scandal where the public says: “This is enough. You can’t mess around with this thing anymore.” Even then, I’m skeptical. Having been on the 9/11 Commission, I watched Congress move very quickly to reform the executive branch. Every single proposal we had to reform, Congress failed. It’s hard to reform yourself. It’s a lot easier to reform yourself.

I just looked at their website. I guess between when I jotted down the question and now, they’ve taken you off. But the idea still is an interesting one. Any final thoughts on how the system could be made better?

I think you’ve got to have a strong federal entity that’s writing the rules. We have a weak federal entity writing the rules. I think people should be worried about it. The founders put together an ingenious system, but it’s not foolproof. One of the great difficulties is getting good people to run and making it feel like you’ve got a fighting chance to win if you do run. The way the rules are currently written, I don’t think that’s the case. I’m not a basher of Congress or political people — quite the contrary — but I don’t think we’re getting our best and brightest running.

I’m not encouraged by trends that say, “Yeah, but how about Mike Bloomberg and John Corzine?” That doesn’t encourage me. I like them both and I’m glad both of them won, but that doesn’t encourage me that the exception is somebody who’s got enough money to fund their own campaign.