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Charles A. Baker

Charles A. Baker is a partner in the Boston office of DLA Piper, an international law firm, and is the founder of the Dewey Square Group, a strategic marketing and communications firm. After years of working for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under Governor Michael Dukakis, Baker was national field director for the Dukakis 1988 presidential campaign and has held senior posts for Democratic presidential campaigns in every election cycle since.

Jules Witcover interviewed Baker on July 11, 2007.

I would just like to get your sense of what’s going to happen now with the campaign finance reform law and the matching fund provisions. As you noticed that John McCain said the other day, he might have to fall back on it.

Let me say this: I don’t think that anybody has really completely understood or factored in, however you want to say it, the change in how campaign finance works here. And as a campaign participant, I’ll put it as a positive. The reality is that there are now an extraordinary number of individuals who are prepared to write, for any given person, relatively significant money for the candidate they care about. So if you look at [Barack] Obama, and you look at Hillary [Clinton], you look at [Mitt] Romney, it’s pretty extraordinary to see that level of individual giving this early in the cycle.

What do you attribute that to?

That’s a good question. I attribute it to a couple of things. One, I attribute it to the fact that actually there are a lot of bad things about what’s happening to the economy in the United States. The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. I think that’s true. The working class is struggling. But I do think that there is a broader cross section of people who are doing well.

So it’s sort of a bit of a caricature. But in the ‘70s, you probably had the top 1 percent or 1.5 percent in the U.S. funding campaigns through soft money. Today you probably have the top 15 percent of the U.S. supporting campaigns through hard money. Right?

Right.

And when you get down into that next level, the folks who are making $150,000 or $200,000 a year, who live in New York or Silicon Valley or Chicago, they are Democrats. So it did what [campaign finance reform advocate and Democracy 21 president] Fred Wertheimer and a lot of people thought it might do. It did level the playing field.

But what it did at the same time, which I find kind of interesting, is it raised the playing field. But I think a lot of us thought it would both level the playing field and sort of slow the arms race in terms of how much money got spent. And I don’t think that happened. More money is now being spent.

Do you think any of it is attributed to anxiety in the country and desire, whatever the party, to do something about it and do it through politics? Or is that too optimistic?

No. No. I don’t think it’s too optimistic. I think it’s true. I mean it’s a personal story. You never want to come up with a theory just through a personal anecdote. But one of my college roommates — and I am engaged in this professionally; he is just somebody who works in New York — he had called me in the last cycle, and he said, “You going to give $2,300 to Jon Tester, right?” And I said, “I already gave Jon Tester $2,300.” He said: “I know that. But you can do $2,300 more, right? And if there is any time that we can make a difference, now is the time.” And he’s just a regular guy, you know what I’m saying?

So I think that there was a general we can make a difference. And this is, again, the optimist in me. I look at what I would call the well-educated sort of high-tech, bio-tech financial services workforce, who are now voting probably 70-30 Democratic. And I think these people are incredibly uncomfortable about the fact that this country is polarized in economic system as it does. They see that most people in that situation were not born in that situation. They see the inequalities in the U.S.

And you hear this all of the time. You hear about how ridiculed we are in than the rest of the world. And for people like that, the idea that you could spend some small amount of money, $1,000, $2,000 to make a difference, is really happening. I mean think about it. Think about the last whatever number of years of politics. The idea that the Democrats could outspend the Republicans is like beyond any world view prior to this cycle.

And if you remember, when McCain-Feingold first happened, all of our Democratic interest groups, the labor unions, EMILY’s List, good people, they always thought that the lack of soft money would give us a competitive disadvantage, which it arguably did in the [2004] cycle, by the way. Because we knew what the hard money did. But now it’s just not true.

But I guess I would agree with the premise of your point, which is if you are in a hard money environment, you have to sort of catch a wave or do stuff that people think make a difference. The hundred thousand people who are writing $2,000 checks to some candidate aren’t doing it to curry favor. They are doing it to make a difference.

Well, is the Internet a factor in that?

Oh, it’s a huge factor. Yeah. I think we have just begun to tap the beginnings of that.

[Democratic pollster] Stan Greenberg has a piece in The American Prospect on this issue. It talks about the danger that because, as he puts it, the Republicans have made such a mess of running the government, that people are not just turning away from Republicans, but they have lost any confidence in the ability to do anything. And so that would suggest that they wouldn’t be giving any money to a party that’s been identified as using government to make things better.

Well, if you had asked me what I thought the two things that happened to encourage people to write people to Democratic candidates, first, people wanted to stop the war. And that, I think, is why you see a lot of disappointment with Congress right now. Because, I think kind of naively, the average folks thought, gee, the Democrats took the Congress. Therefore, the war is going to stop. Well, that’s not the way the Constitution works. So you have that.

The second thing is that I think that people who give money are voting their hopes, not just their fears. And they want this to become a better place. So I guess that’s where I disagree with Stan. I wouldn’t disagree with that in the sense of, if you did a focus group in Canton, Ohio, or some regular American place, I think people are like, what can the government do for me? You read about how the Department of Homeland Security can’t get its act together. It makes people nervous.

You are talking about people who have gotten past that and do think that if they put their money some place, it will get good results.

Right. I am being a little naive about this, but I am not being too naive. When you write a $2,000 check to somebody, you are making an investment. And you are not making an investment like in the old days, because why can’t some line items you wanted to get marked up or something. And it’s clear that when you look at this, Jules, when you look at the Internet fundraising, this is broader than some special interest thing. These people are investing in change. So I think, actually, changing the nature of soft money and getting people to focus on raising hard money has made a difference.

But you still have the 527s and the independent expenditures pulling in a lot of soft money, too. But anyway, Charlie, what about the survival of the matching system? The conventional wisdom has been, it’s all going to be over in a month, early February. And therefore, if you don’t have a huge bundle, you can’t compete.

Right.

But most of the candidates not raising a lot of money are counting on lightning striking in Iowa and New Hampshire and a couple other early states. Aren’t they going to need the matching money just to play in those early states?

Well, the short answer is that it’s pretty clear, on the Democratic side, that Obama and Clinton do not.

Right. I think they have indicated that.

Right. I think it’s probably likely that [John] Edwards doesn’t. Everybody else will. On the Republican side, I guess Romney and [Rudy] Giuliani maybe don’t. Hard to guess who else. I have a basic view of this, and you have seen this a lot. There is an inefficiency to spending excess dollars in the state. So what do I mean by that? I can easily figure out like how to spend like $15 million in New Hampshire. It may be, if somebody gave me a wish list, I could figure out how to spend $18 million in New Hampshire. Above that, I think it’s a big waste of money. So there is a number at which having more money is meaningless.

What is the projected number for New Hampshire?

Oh, under the cap?

Yeah. Do you know?

I can’t remember. It’s probably like seven million. Because remember this whole crazy thing with Boston TV?

Yeah.

Right. Where it’s only 15 percent of the buy, it’s probably like seven or eight million.

Yeah. But does it make any sense that anybody who doesn’t have big bucks can, armed with matching money, have a strong enough performance in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina, etc., to survive and then go into the big states without that much time to raise any more money?

Well, the answer is the public finance system is broken. And it hasn’t caught up with inflation. I do believe this is true: it puts people who participated in it in a financial disadvantage. That being said, if you asked me, on the Democratic side, the people who might fit into this category right now are like [Chris] Dodd and [Bill] Richardson. If I were a fully funded [candidate], if I raised my $21 million before the day of the New Hampshire primary, could I spend effectively as much money in New Hampshire as Obama and Clinton and Edwards? And what I mean by as much money effectively, maybe 70 percent. I think the answer is “yes,” if you participate in the finance system. So I do think it gives you a way through. What it doesn’t give you, as you suggested, is any money after those early states.

So I mean lightning would really have to strike in a way that it hasn’t done in the past to come out of the early primary states and be able to compete once you get into Florida, California, and then New York, etc., Illinois.

And I would say, probably — you are talking to everybody, I’m not — a majority of people who look at this will tell you that pre-February 5, the Democratic and Republican nominees will be chosen. Under that scenario, it’s still a long shot. But it’s like a one in five shot that somebody who is on public finance can win. If it goes beyond February 5, I wouldn’t even know how to project it.

But somebody who has been involved in a lot of campaigns, as a Democrat has suggested to me, it’s not impossible. With delegates being selected by proportional representation by district, if you have two or more strong and well-financed candidates, which is the situation as of today in the Democratic Party, you could get a split verdict out of those early states and even out the what’s now called Super Duper Tuesday. It could be a split verdict. And there wouldn’t be enough of a trend or enough delegates in hand to say this person is the nominee on February 6. Do you think that’s a possible scenario?

It is a possible scenario. The problem is, if you run the theory out the way you just described it, OK. If you are participating in the system, you are out of money. See it gets to one of the sort of . . .

Assuming that everything you raised, you would go into those early states, you wouldn’t have been able to salvage anything to go on.

Right. Then you might actually be in third place on February 5th. And in theory, be able to still corner enough delegates or to bring the convention into a brokered convention.

Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking about.

Right. But you wouldn’t have any money. 

But suppose you have a particular special interest that is put really in a vacuum. I am talking about, just for example, [Dennis] Kucinich and the anti-war constituency, which is very worked up. And they were the last time.

Is it conceivable that a candidate like that — or somebody who had some other special interest, like a labor candidate, or a black candidate — to pick off enough congressional districts in those very states that are voting after Iowa and New Hampshire, to confront the people who calculate where they are on February 6 to say, “Well, this thing is not sewn up yet.” And that these people who have picked off these districts will continue to be a more energized group, like an anti-war group or a black group or a labor group, to keep them afloat in the states that remain. If that situation happened, wouldn’t there be an awful lot of free media going into those states?

Well, see, you are right about that. I mean it isn’t like Jerry Brown or Jesse Jackson. People won late primaries in the ’70s and ’80s on gas fumes, because nobody got any money.

I think Frank Church and Jerry Brown jumped in later. So they didn’t burn up a lot of money. And they were really, literally, fresh faces in the race. By that time it was too late. But it wasn’t too much too late when you think about how well Jerry Brown and Frank Church did against Jimmy Carter in the later primaries.

Exactly. Right.

So what I am just kind of hypothesizing here is that if you had another candidate other than the big money candidates who could do this, who could hang on through picking up some delegates in various districts and look like a possible candidate, even if as you say, rightly, they have run out of money. They then would be getting a tremendous amount of free media if they look like they were alive at all. I mean that’s my hypothesis.

I’ll say two things. One, if you talk to the folks at the Hillary and Obama and Edwards campaigns, who are probably watching this closer than anybody on the Democratic side, they’ll tell you the idea that there won’t be a decided nominee by February 5 is pretty remote.

I know they do say that. I know. What I am suggesting is a long shot.

Well, and I have actually said to myself, if I were Al Gore, and I wanted to get into this race, I might wait until there was a car crash on February 5.

Well, essentially, I believe that’s what [Newt] Gingrich has in mind. That he wants to see whether there is a car crash and then how many bodies are flattened out. So it doesn’t make sense for him to commit.

Yeah. I mean the thing that I laugh about, but it’s not funny, it’s just sort of silly: so many states have moved up early, that they don’t understand that what’s going to happen in their states. People just react to the news out of the early primary states. If you were a May 15 primary, you might be very important right now.

Yeah, under those circumstances. Well, in any event, that’s just a little aside theory that I wanted to bounce off of you, because [it will] really stand conventional wisdom on its head in this cycle.

Right.

Well, getting back to the demise of the current federal financing system, do you see a way to salvage it? Or do you see something that could substitute for it?

I don’t. I mean I guess I do, in theory. One, you can actually have limits, which we don’t have. Two, you could raise the amount of public subsidy — well, let me get back there.

People aren’t contributing to the check-off now, even though it’s been raised a couple of times. That hasn’t worked.

It hasn’t worked. And maybe it’s because people see that most of the money comes from other sources. There is an inefficiency to raising money. So when you ask yourself the question — the [John] Kerry campaign as an example, and I guess the [George W.] Bush campaign did the same thing — why did they take the federal grant in the general election?

The simple answer is that getting $50 million, or whatever the number was last cycle, free, is the moral equivalent of raising $90 million, because of the fundraising cost and the infrastructure cost. So you are better off taking the $50 million. So there is some number of public finance where you make raising money, like not a good bet. It’s like a two-to-one kind of thing.

You mean you make the money that’s available under the subsidy large enough that it discourages going alone.

Right.

But in the general election, I think maybe for a long time the nominees or their managers felt what they got would be enough, since there is only a two-month period.

Exactly. Well, you got what would be enough. And when you added what the party could do and now what the IEs [independent expenditure groups] can do and the 527s can do, it was sort of enough. Because absent that, you would have to figure out, how am I going to raise $200 million in three months?

And the danger is — and I am dating myself now — if you remember in ’92, when Clinton started surging the first President Bush’s numbers, money just dried up. So they were playing to massively out-raise and spend Clinton. And they didn’t, because they suddenly became unpopular. So you can’t count on raising huge amounts of money in the general, unless you assume you are going to win no matter what, because it sort of creates an inevitability thing. 

Well, does a candidate have to make it known in advance?

In fact, I was involved in this. When you accept the nomination at your convention, you have to sign a piece of paper that says you are either participating or not.

I see. But that’s not until the convention.

Right. Remember how Bush moved his convention until very late?

Yeah.

That was why.

And that just killed the Democrats. But what about the other things that have occurred to affect the money picture, including particularly the frontloading of the primaries and the caucuses? Do you see anything that should be done about that?

Well, I think it was a mistake. Having been involved in an in-depth way in the Gore campaign in 2000 I guess it was, where [Bill] Bradley almost beat us in New Hampshire. And thank God we won that election. But had Bradley beat Gore in New Hampshire, I don’t know that Gore could have survived. So the problem with frontloading things is, if wildfire catches, some dark horse catches fire, I don’t know that anybody will have enough money to stop it.

Yeah. There is no opportunity for buyer’s remorse. If the guy you get you don’t want after a short time.

Exactly. You remember this. Let’s say you have some sort of extraordinary event. If the next contest is four days later or seven days later, the momentum from the extraordinary event tends to sort of control the cycle. You move it to 10 days or 14 days. By the way, that’s why New Hampshire cares so much about the distance between Iowa and New Hampshire. As you remember, it’s almost a campaign within a campaign, that window between Iowa and New Hampshire. It actually allows voters to stop and think and rethink. Without that, you are just sort of, by and large, reaffirming the status quo.

So it works both ways. It gives you the opportunity to reconsider. But it also gives the guy who has won, if there is a period between, a chance to capitalize on it.

Right.

But there will be very little of that this time around, because they are bunched together so much.

I mean, look. It’s not a particularly fair comparison. But if you look at the last cycle, [Howard] Dean, who collapsed, was ahead of Kerry in New Hampshire by a substantial amount. In fact, by winning Iowa, Kerry got at 15 point bounce in New Hampshire, which was enough to allow him to win comfortably.

And that was over a short period of time, wasn’t it, if I recall.

Exactly. And [Gary] Hart’s surprise finish in Iowa helped him in New Hampshire. I mean there has always been this bounce effect. 

Yeah. If there is enough time, but I think you are saying it doesn’t need enough time anymore.

No. I actually think the shorter the better. But I guess [if] it was the next day, I wouldn’t. You know what I mean? But give me five days, and it’s enough. Because we are now in a national news cycle. Right?

Right.

I mean you and I can remember when nobody won the Michigan caucus until the primaries two days later were over. Right? But now, everybody knows simultaneously. Right?

Right. What about this other factor: it’s been argued to me, again, by another person who I have talked to, that maybe the money you need now is not as great as it used to be, because you have all of these voices out there on the Internet, free voices supporting you or against you, but making an input into the conversation. That doesn’t cost the candidate anything.

Now there are downsides to that, obviously, because what the voice is saying is not what the campaign wants to be said. There is a similar problem with the 527s happening. But I am just wondering what you think of the openness of the Internet and the opportunity, and how it’s being seized by thousands of voices, some of them not knowing what the hell they are talking about, but nevertheless having that input. If a candidate catches on and rides that wave with a lot of unsolicited positive messages on the Internet, could that, in the time, reduce the need to be . . .?

My own view is we are probably a cycle away from that. But we’ll only know when it happens. But I mean if you are sitting here and a quarter of a million people have contributed to the Obama campaign, you are thinking, how [many] volunteers through e-mailing and blogging and Facebook and all of that stuff, how big a sort of viral network do I need to actually sort of be more important than TV? I think people get close. But I don’t think people will bury it.

Candidates, in both parties, are fed up with the way that television is hijacking them with their prices. And if this impact of the Internet goes considerably beyond fundraising into this area of providing voices for the campaign, getting the message out, I would think that campaigns would be very happy to try to generate that rather than paying the television stations.

Well, no. And part of it’s the technological. If you remember back in the ’92 [Bill] Clinton campaign, Craig Smith came up with this line, GOTV means “get on TV.” And it was because there was enough technology at the time that you could download feeds and send people talking points through fax or by e-mail and through phone conferences. So you literally could be holding the same press conference in Des Moines that you are holding in Lansing. And it was an easy way to do that because technology had changed.

We are going to hit a point where, through the ability to videocast on cell phones, people being able to send out e-mails to their friends’ lists on their desktop or on their Blackberrys, you are going to hit the next wave of this. And there are a bunch of people looking at that. I mean if you ask me, I think we are a cycle away from it.

Yeah. I went to a briefing for people like me who know nothing about all of this stuff. And my eyes were opened about how much is already being done in terms of citizen videoing, blogging, putting all kinds of stuff out there, pretty sophisticated stuff. But [there] doesn’t seem to be, yet, any kind of a pulling together of it as a campaign with any kind of discipline.

Right.

Which raises another question, Charlie, that I’d like you to talk about. And that is the danger as opposed to the advantage of having other people doing what your campaign is trying to do. That is, is it a mixed bag? Or is it basically disadvantageous to have 527s out there making the case that may not be the case that the strategists of the campaign believe should be made?

Well, definitely there are some real world examples of this. Look at the last congressional cycle. And look at those ads that the [National Republican Senatorial Committee] ran in Tennessee that were perceived as being racially motivated against Harold Ford.

Nobody in their right mind would have wanted those ads run.

Right.

And because of the crazy independent expenditure 527 rules, those weren’t controlled. So I definitely think that there is a risk in that. I mean something I was thinking about when I [knew I] was going talk to you, if you remember in the old days when there used to be party expenditures, and they were completely coordinated, that never happened. I will say that in fairness, again, to the people who created the McCain-Feingold system, the 527s, the IEs, really are independent now. People don’t coordinate stuff.

Because they are afraid they’d get caught?

They are afraid, yeah, they will go to jail. Right. That people are going to jail now. So in a positive way, Ellen Moran, who ran the IE for Kerry in 2004, I actually thought did better stuff than the campaign did in many ways. So sometimes the independent, sitting in your own little room and look at your own polling, you can do better stuff.

But I also think it has a tendency to really bite people. And it’s less in the presidential context, but I think in the congressional context, [there] is a likelihood of like cookie-cutter attack ads that I think are becoming increasingly ineffective, because now you can turn on CNN, and people can see that they ran the same attack ad in four states against three different people’s positions on the same issue. It looks sort of silly.

Yeah.

But isn’t it possible, still — and I am just asking whether you think this is done much, what I am going to suggest to you — that a campaign can have five functions that they are trying to do. You can do four of them and leave the other one undone. And any 527 or IE that’s paying attention could then say, “Well, that’s what we’ll do.” Does that happen?

Yes, it does. And that’s the smartest way to do it.

And can you give me an example of what would be left undone? I mean the obvious thing is, don’t advertise. Let the 527s . . .

Don’t advertise or don’t send any mail.

But since there can’t be any collusion, you have to count on the 527s and the IEs to give the message you want.

Well, you do. But when using your example, if somebody is watching the Michigan primary, and you notice that your candidate’s campaign isn’t on the air in the Detroit media market, maybe that’s a message that your campaign thinks that’s a base voter area. And they think a generic ad will work. And they want you to put it on. They can’t tell you that.

So a nod and a wink is the way it’s done?

I wouldn’t even call it a nod and a wink. It’s sort of like, you create a vacuum, and you hope that people will find it.

Right. But do you think that’s widely done now?

No. I think you have identified a clever way to do it. Unfortunately in this business, I think most people have pride of authorship. And they still want to do stuff that’s cutting-edge and clever as opposed to effective. I hate to say it, but . . .

I take it you see us in a transition year in terms of getting the message out.

Yes.

And do you see it ever reaching a point where television will run second to the Internet in terms of getting the message out?

I think it’s getting very close. I think it’s getting very close. I would say we are now at a point where cable — I am not an expert on this — is getting close to being more effective [than] broadcast. And I think when that thing turns, it’s only a question of time until the other media outlets.

I mean political buying is way behind commercial buying. You pick up any newspaper and you will see that, what, 20 percent of most companies’ ad buys are on the Internet. Most campaigns are 2 percent or 3 percent. So other than the fact it’s hard to do, and campaigns are temporary, it’s harder to do targeting. If people who are selling products know where to find customers, it’s hard to argue that that’s not where to find voters.

What about the overall cost of campaigns? Do all the things that we have been talking about necessarily drive the costs higher into the stratosphere?

My personal view is that what is driving the cost is the ability to raise the money. It’s sort of like college tuition. If people pay it, you can charge it. 

If you can get it, you can find ways to spend it.

Exactly. You got it.

Well, the Center for Public Integrity has looked often at the concept of buying access and buying influence. What are your thoughts about how often that actually happens?

I think it happens rarely. And I actually think this new system has made it less likely. I mean I know people talk about it a lot. I don’t see it. There are always those awful examples of money bundling or foreign contributors or you name it. But by and large — and it’s particularly true in this cycle. I would defy anybody to pull any of these candidates’ contributor lists and do like a regular poll. You will find out that people are donating to these people because they want to participate. It’s just too broad now. It’s just not possible that it’s directed any other way.

But what about particular industries? What about the medical industry and the insurance industry in terms of health care? They are trying to get something for their money, aren’t they?

Well, I guess. But I guess what I’m trying to say is, just looking at this presidential, what’s $50,000 to Barack Obama given what he’s raising otherwise? It’s just hard for me to imagine that any given group or person or industry, given the magnitude of the money being raised, can actually have some sort of sinister impact.

Is it more that the money goes to candidates who the contributors already know will be voting the way they want them to vote?

I think that’s right. I also think there are a lot of people who — somebody who works at a big corporation was explaining this to me. The bigger the corporation, the more that the workforce and the management represent the American population. So if you are some executive at some large high-tech company or big financial services company, odds are you donated because you want to, not because the company told you to. So you take any of those big institutions; forget what the CEO is doing or the PAC is doing. The employee base is probably all over the place.

But what about bundling? That is more a . . .

I think all of that stuff is really, at this point, only a factor in congressional elections, just because that kind of amount of money is more of a factor in lower dollar races. If you are raising half a million dollars, and two million dollars, somebody raising $15,000 is a lot of money.

Yeah. But look at the [George W.] Bush campaign with their whole elaborate bundling operation. Wasn’t that really critical in changing how things turned out?

No. No. I think that may have been true at that time. But I guess what I am saying is now, because of the Internet, because of the diffuse ways that people are raising money, those specific bundlers are less of a factor.

So I mean the Internet can be a bundler itself, can it not?

It could be.

But it hasn’t reached that point yet?

Well, I guess I would argue it in a different way. It’s hard for me to identify how that’s a corrupting factor. I mean it’s people who are gathering together because they want to oppose the Iraq war, or for that matter, on the other side, because they want to oppose gay marriage, or working together to raise money for candidates of their choice. To me, that’s democracy. People aren’t going to MoveOn[.org] or the Swift Boat 527s website because they want to make sure that General Electric gets a tax break.