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Bruce Babbitt

Bruce Babbitt, a Democrat, was President Clinton’s secretary of the interior from 1993 to 2001. Prior to that, he was the Arizona’s governor (from 1978 to 1987) and attorney general (from 1975 to 1978). He sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1988. Babbitt now is the chairman of the World Wildlife Fund.

Jules Witcover interviewed Babbitt on May 4, 2007.

[We’re talking] to people who have been involved in other campaigns to get their fix on how it worked then, how it’s not working now, and any ideas you might have about what needs to be done about dealing with the whole mess that the campaign-finance [system] is in now, with a lot of candidates now having to opt out because the others are raising so much money.

OK. Let me first of all say that I am really out of date. I am now sitting in the bleachers way, way, way up by the ceiling and have really not followed this.

But talk about your own experiences.

Let me tell you about the one thing that has always struck me as the neglected part of political campaign finance. That is our inability to deal head-on with television. After I left the presidential doings in 1988, I happened to be in 1989 leading a delegation of election observers to Chile for the great transitional event there, which was [Augusto] Pinochet’s referendum on the constitution that his group had written to consolidate his sort of autocratic view of the future of Chile. I was astonished. But in a couple of trips to Santiago, to find that every night at 10 p.m., which is prime time in Latin America, every television station in the country would switch into an hour of programming in which one side got 30 minutes to use. And the other side of the argument had 30 minutes. It went on for 30 days in the rundown to the election, in which each night, at prime time, the only thing you could see on television was a half hour for one, a half hour for the other. And they got to do what they pleased with their 30 minutes. There were interlocutors, no sort of Chris Matthews or big feet from the media. And it was a striking example of how the media, to me, can be used.

All of our campaign-finance debates in this country have simply walked past what I consider to be the most important issue, which is what about the public interest in the use of the airwaves? And I really think that ought to be revisited. And then one way to dampen down this misuse of money and these complex tortured attempts to get around the [Supreme Court’s] Buckley v. Valeo decision is to go to the public interest and the known and understood power of Congress to regulate the use of the airwaves and open up television in a meaningful way, not just for free ads but for the allocation of real time to hear candidates.

Why do you think that hasn’t been done in Congress?

Well, because every member of Congress has been elected in a campaign contribution system in which no one is eager to bite the hand that runs the current system.

It’s amazing to me to hear that about Chile under Pinochet. You would he think he never would have allowed that.

It was quite striking. Now, if you use this anecdote, the only factual mistake I may have made is — I don’t remember whether my analysis is all correct — I believe the constitutional referendum was advanced by Pinochet, and that therefore the opposition was a no vote. It may have been the other way around. I think I got it straight. That’s just a little technical thing. But in any event, it was quite striking. Your point is absolutely valid to see that in a government which was . . .

Yeah, even in a government like that.

And the three things, again, that I thought were so striking were the preemption of prime-time programming on all channels, simultaneously, every night for a full hour. And the candidates were free to use the time without anybody getting involved in this sort of big . . .

It’s amazing. You know, there is a group [here], that involved Walter Cronkite and a couple of other media giants, and I think a couple of ex-presidents, to try and deal with this whole question. There is a reporter named Paul Taylor. I don’t know if you remember him.

I remember him. He covered the ’88 campaign.

Yeah. He left newspaper work and joined this group [the Alliance for Better Campaigns]. He was kind of the executive director of it for a while. . . . That was one of the things that they worked on — couldn’t seem to make any headway at all.

Well, just imagine the lobby power of the electronic media groups. But there is no legal impediment to doing it at all. I mean, the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] has regulatory power over the use of the electromagnetic spectrum, if you will. And Congress can legislate rules.

Television has a stranglehold, also, on the money that’s spent. You know about that. Talk a little bit about, in your own campaign, how you dealt with the huge costs of television and also the way they can decide whether or not they are going to run your ads.

I was never directly impacted by this; will they or will they not run your ad? I mean, that’s a relatively new development that relates to the direct special-interest sort of stuff. But I was never running ads like that. Nobody ever claimed that any ad I ever ran was somehow inappropriate for television.

But there were also these stations, particularly in the primaries, that would be inundated with requests for time from all of the candidates. And then they wouldn’t sell to some, because they didn’t have any available time.

Yes. I didn’t have any personal experience with that. It’s clear to me, in campaigns that I have been involved in, that that becomes a problem. We have only so much time for political ads, because we don’t want to compromise or dilute our preferred source of revenue. But again, the only thing I can add to this discussion that has any value is to say, you have to get beneath the whole assumption that what you are trying to do is make it easier for paid 30-second advertising. Because it doesn’t go to the heart of the issue, which is opening the airwaves up at no charge for candidates in substantial blocks of programming time to use television as a public forum for the discussion of these issues.

In your campaign, as I recall, you did take matching money under the federal program, where you had to raise a certain amount and then they matched that.

I don’t even remember. I don’t remember whether the match kicked in later on after the primaries.

The payments kicked in around the time of the primaries. But you were able to raise money a year before the election year that would be matchable.

Yeah.

But the amounts that we are talking about now that are being raised are just killing that system. Because the history of it, as you know, is that in 2000 George W. Bush opted out of it so he could raise as much as he wanted.

Right.

And then in 2004 he did the same. And in retaliation, or to stay in the ballgame, Howard Dean and then John Kerry both did that.

Yeah. And now everybody; it’s a condition.

Well, there are a few candidates who really don’t have that kind of money-raising capability. [They] are going to stay in the matching system to get enough money to get into the ballgame in Iowa and New Hampshire. And now, apparently, in Florida, which is . . .

Yeah. Listen, are you familiar with the Arizona state system? I don’t know much about it, but I would encourage you to look at it. Again, I am so far away from all of this. Arizona has a system in which, if you are not in the system, if you opt out, the system says you file financing reports. And the candidate who is in the system will draw money in a sum exactly equal to what the nonparticipant is raising and reporting.

That’s interesting. I think New Jersey has something like that now, too.

OK. I think I am stating it accurately, but this is just sort of my casual recollection of it.

Well, what do you think is the downside of this phenomenon of all of the candidates opting out? The obvious downside is much, much more money. But do you think it makes it impossible now for a long-shot candidate to compete?

Oh, the system is conspiring against long shots in two ways. One is the financing system. And the other is the forced shortening of the primary season. It seems to me both of those are working together to create a system in which dark horses will not predictably or effectively be on the field. Did you watch the Republican debate last night?

Yes, I did.

I watched it for about five minutes. Really, I was ashamed of myself. I watched it for five minutes, and then switched to a rerun of GoldenEye, because there were 10 candidates. And it was all under the control of the moderators. It all just was a big blur. It’s just one little chance for somebody to break through. But they are overwhelmed by the system in which the money and the timelines really do not provide a candidate any way to kind of break out with a serious message that will reach a significant audience.

I don’t remember in your campaign in ’88, did you participate in any of those massive things?

Every one of them.

How do you feel [about] the opportunities you had that year? I don’t think there were quite that many candidates then, were there?

There weren’t. Well, there were six or seven. I learned that I am not a compelling television performer. That’s what I mostly learned.

But even if you were, you would have to outdo the moderator.

Yeah. Exactly.

How can you possibly limit the number of participants in a debate?

Well, you see, that’s what the staggered primary and convention system used to do. And that really has a certain kind of logic to it, because the winnowing would start in Iowa and New Hampshire. And then the field was down to a manageable number. And you still had four or five months to go, all the way through — what was it? The California primary was in June in those days?

Right.

So it kind of had a comprehensible view of what was going on that the unwashed, nonpolitical public could actually see. And I think there was a nice little moment there, too, when there was both a long run of primaries and a certain number of convention votes, which were not pledged in primaries, that gave us all kind of a nice, slow-motion mix that came down to the end. I think it just exacerbates the problem that you are talking about in terms of the money — I mean, what we’ve turned this thing into.

So if you are, say, one of these second-, third-, or fourth-tier candidates, and you want to run, the ballgame for you is between now and the start of it, right?

That’s right.

That’s the way you have to do it.

I once explained that I was in this presidential race intensely all the way up to the beginning. And that is really true. I think of a guy like Bill Richardson, who really has a lot to offer. He is from a small, square state out west with a small population. But he’s got from now until February in this vast field of candidates, with no significant breakout potential other than spending $30 million, which he is not going to raise.

But again, looking back to 1988, if you or another candidate had a really good showing in an early primary, you would then, well, it happened; it happened to Jimmy Carter.

Yeah, exactly.

It happened to Gary Hart. You would have sufficient time to capitalize financially on the momentum you had. I remember in 1976 it was, I think, five weeks between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. And that was gold for Carter, because he came out of nowhere to raise a lot of money. That possibility doesn’t exist now.

Exactly right.

So it requires candidates to use this period, this long period where nothing was happening 20 years ago, to really campaign hard as if the election is going to be tomorrow.

Well, there is another little wrinkle here that you might think about. This staggered process that Carter took advantage of really does have fundraising implications. Because what happens is, when you make a good showing somewhere, that’s the point at which the fundraising really becomes possible for the public at large. I have noticed that any time I was in the media and performed really well, you could see the money coming in the next day; that’s pretty hard to do in this new system.

I mean, how do you raise money in small contributions from a public that doesn’t know you? And how do you get up on the stage to make your pitch in the system in which it’s all over after the matinee? There is really a premium on going to the big bundled sources. There are exceptions. Howard Dean learned how to use the Internet. [Barack] Obama is, obviously, connected in a quite striking way. There are always, always exceptions. But that doesn’t suggest to me that it’s the right system.

As you just mentioned, Dean found a way to use the Internet effectively to raise money. But the Internet is exploding so much now in various ways of communication, including all of the new voices that are now coming into the political discussion who are not part of the campaign, the bloggers and various groups. I wonder what you think the impact of that is going to be in terms of both the money but also control of the campaign. If you are a campaign manager, you used to have to deal, I think even in your campaign, with independent-expenditure groups that would work ostensibly outside your campaign with no collusion. I don’t know whether that ever worked out. And then there came the 527s. And now you have the whole blogosphere and all kinds of voices — may be helping your campaign, may be hurting your campaign.

Well, in one sense, it’s great. It enhances levels of participation. The downside is that it further fragments the political process and makes it even harder for candidates to fulfill what I perceive to be the appropriate traditional function of a candidate. That is to lead the discussion rather than follow the discussion — and leading sort of, if you will, hemmed in by this kind of deconstructive, fragmented process of interest groups, which dominate the process in the absence of candidates with the resources and the ability to get into the public discussion, which means television. I think it’s an interesting point.

If you were running today, with the situation that exists today in terms of money, and the frontloading of the process, and the early dates . . .
What would I do? I would announce my withdrawal on the same day I announced my entry.

So you don’t see any possibility any longer for somebody who is like you, successful at the state level, to establish yourself sufficiently to be successful, even in those early primaries?

Yeah, Barack Obama. I mean, it is possible.

Of course, he’s going to have plenty of money, too.

Yeah. But the money has followed — I mean, the sequence is right in his case. He went out and got on the stop and began speaking, connected. And the money began to follow. But he is the exception. There ought to be a little more time and space in which other candidates — some of the dropouts are really interesting. I happen to think that Tom Vilsack is really an exceptional public servant. He is a classic kind of guy, a really successful governor, a guy with real skills, really has something to offer. And he’s even from Iowa. And he looked around and had enough sense to say the odds are so great that this just is not a rational exercise. I think he is the classic, illustrative dropout in this round: the guy with enormous potential who never has the chance to get acquainted with the American public.