Countdown

Home > Interviews > David A. Keene

David A. Keene

David A. Keene is the chairman of the American Conservative Union, an advocacy organization in Alexandria, Virginia. He worked in the Nixon administration and on the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole. He also is a managing associate at the Carmen Group, a Washington lobbying firm.

Jules Witcover interviewed Keene on April 5, 2007.

Why don’t you start by talking about what you think the half-life of the federal subsidy system is . . .

Gone.

. . . whether anybody at all can and will try to use it this time around.

No. I mean, the only people who would use it would be like a Lyndon LaRouche or somebody like that who figures that they could qualify and get some matching money.

Well, Dennis Kucinich says he is going to do it.

Same. Right, yeah. Your point? But otherwise it’s been overtaken by the fact that the way the system is, you can’t raise money that way unless you devote all of your time to it to get the matching money. And, as you know, it’s more than just finances. It’s the combination of the financing system and the way in which the nominating system changes. Every four years they make it worse. And it’s now to the point that I’m glad I’m not involved in it, because this moving all of the primaries to the beginning means you have to have the money. And they don’t mean much.

They are getting to the point, the closer you get to a national primary, the less you have to have. You just anoint whoever the front-runner is the day the primary is held. And that’s the end of it. So, as you know, I think it was a bad idea to start with. And I think it’s gotten worse. And now it’s dead. But nobody has looked at the system in any kind of rational way. They have tried to close down this or that or close that loophole — they call them loopholes — and the result is all they do is force political activity and money. They have destroyed the parties. And I mean, I almost become incoherent because it’s a terrible, terrible system.

Why, if there is a national primary, does the front-runner necessarily win? Look at how Howard Dean came into Iowa with a head of steam and the appearances of being the front-runner. And his campaign just imploded.

Well, you could have theoretically this year, and I have said this in a couple of interviews, it is possible that the common wisdom is wrong, particularly in the Republican Party. I don’t think it’s wrong in the Democratic Party, because you have got three supposed front-runners or heavyweights, and it’s conceivable that neither one of them can get above about 20 percent. And so they could spend all of their money fighting with each other and not go anywhere.

But if you get into these primaries — and particularly on the Republican side, where you have winner-take-all primaries — and they are moved up, f you have got the 20 percent and you win them, you have got it going. And then how does somebody regroup? How do you come back on that? The old system, you started with Iowa and New Hampshire. I even liked it before Super Tuesday, but you had Super Tuesday. And then you could come back. So there was always a chance for buyer’s remorse. There was always a chance for somebody to catch fire. I think that’s less true today.

Because of the space?

Well, the space is incredibly important.

The period of time in between events so you could either build on your momentum or recover?

Right. What happens is, if you go back — and of course my examples are dated. But you should understand that.

Who would understand that more than me?

That’s right. For example, this is how these changes affect outcomes: Had the primary calendar in 1976 been in effect in 1980, Bush would have been nominated in 1980. Because one of the reasons that the sort of the junkie press would say, “Oh, the system is so long.” And then as you know, nobody pays attention to it. Real people don’t pay any attention to it until they have to, which is what creates the momentum. So who wins in Iowa impacts who wins in New Hampshire. Because when the people of New Hampshire all of a sudden focus on it, when they have to make a decision, they are looking at a different world than the one the people of Iowa focused on. It’s a world in which there is a different front-runner. And the half-life of that win is like eight to 10 days.

I think it was in ’76, you had a week or so between them. And by 1980 you had three weeks. And then you started rolling into them. So what happened with Bush was, when he first got to New Hampshire, he was still ahead. And for all of the talk about the debates and everything, by the time he got to that debate, he was already behind Reagan. What had happened was the advantage he got had topped out. And he had a new fight on his hands. And Reagan was able to win that fight, because Reagan was a better candidate.

But if you can put them together close enough, then whoever wins the first one wins the second one, and the third one, and the fourth one. Or if you put them together close enough and have them all in one day, then how do you recover from that? The ideal thing is, regardless of how many you have, if you are designing it rationally — and these things aren’t designed rationally, because they are designed by different states with different competing agendas and ambitions — but if you have a couple small ones, then you can have more. But if you have two to three weeks between them in sort of stages, then people can really assess the candidates.

But you know, I’m trying to think what year this was when Al Gore won a number of primaries. Would that have been . . .?

Did he run in ’80? No.

I think it was later than that, [1988]. But in any event, he won a number of the primaries. And so it wasn’t automatic that on Super Tuesday. Whatever year that was, the results were split.

I haven’t looked at it this year, because I am not involved in the race. But that was more true in the Democratic Party, because you had almost all of the Democratic primaries, I think all of them, under the rules [as] proportional primaries. So if you would say take those rules and lay the Republican candidates over them, and they have each got 20 percent, they would go rolling through them with their 20 percent unless somebody got some momentum going.

California being the example, on the Democratic side California is a proportional state, and on the Republican side it’s a winner-take-all state. And so on the Republican side, if you do that, pretty soon, bang, you have got it wrapped up. And it’s hard for anybody to overcome it. But I mean, yes, it is possible. It’s more difficult. It’s possible because, you remember the story that John Sears used to tell — I think it’s applicable to this year — about the dog food. Where they had the best dog food . . .

Oh, yeah. “Dogs don’t like it.”

And then the guy gets up in the back and says, “The dogs won’t eat it.”

Well, the Republicans may have some candidates that the dogs won’t eat the food. If that’s true, it’s a little bit like when Lyn Nofziger told me that a few years ago when — who was it from California? [Dan Lungren], he’s back in Congress now and ran for governor. He was attorney general [of California]. He called up Lyn and he wanted some more money for his campaign. And Lyn said, “You know, when people see you on a television ad and they conclude that you’re an asshole, buying more ads is not going to get you elected to governor.” Which is a good point.

So you can get to that point where the money doesn’t matter, because money is not everything. But money is a lot. And you need a certain amount of it to get going. I mean, people can complain as much as they want, for example, about Iowa and New Hampshire, as they have always done. Well, you need someplace. You need someplace where somebody can sort of test fire a campaign and get started. And then, the wisdom now is — and this is why they are saying this — you have got to have $100 million at the starting gate. Let’s say Duncan Hunter, take an extreme example. Let’s say Duncan Hunter wins Iowa. Well, under the law he can’t take advantage of that. He can’t raise enough money between Iowa and the next primary to benefit from it. And if that next primary is not within the next week . . .

Just not enough time?

There isn’t enough time. This is after the finance system was developed in the mid-’70s. Then they started front-loading the primaries and putting them together. And the way the system works, the demand for money increases geometrically. But the money increases arithmetically, because you are limited to, in those days, the thousand-dollar gift.

The Bush campaign was successful in ’80. Didn’t win it, but it was a successful campaign against Reagan, because his biggest victory did not occur in the primaries. It occurred in the main straw poll when he beat Howard Baker. And from that point on, he raised money as if he had won a primary. And so by the time the actual primary season started, he had enough banked that he could run through June. But if you are the unknown, if you are Dennis Kucinich, and for some reason insanity strikes the people of Iowa and they vote for you, under the current system, that’s it, because you can’t capitalize on it.

Well, isn’t this simply what they now call the money primary? Doesn’t that, in a way, replace Iowa and New Hampshire as an incentive to give?

You mean, if you have got money, you give money.

Because you have a long time. You have nine months from now.

Yeah. But look at [Rudy] Giuliani and [John] McCain. McCain raised most of his money early. And he raised that money because people thought he was going to be the nominee. Probably 60 percent or 70 percent of the money that they get is money from people who want to be with the winner. So, the perceived front-runner has a bigger advantage than anybody else. Then, when you had Giuliani come in, in March or late February, and get these polls that showed that maybe McCain wasn’t the front-runner, then Giuliani raised a ton of money in that month. Probably more than he’s ever going to raise again. And, in fact, what would be interesting to look at is to see how many people who gave to Giuliani in March gave to McCain in January and February. Because a lot of that money is money that people just want to be with the winner. And that’s why McCain’s now tailing off, because he is not inevitable. And he doesn’t really have the kind of base that would give him money if he wasn’t inevitable. So that money is now going someplace else.

Do you think the same thing could be happening in the Democratic Party as a result of what [Barack] Obama . . .

Well, this doesn’t have anything to do with finances. I know that Hillary [Clinton] is sort of a mean-spirited type. But if she weren’t, she ought to be paying Obama. Because Hillary is in the same position, in many ways, as McCain. I mean, in other words, that dog food is not all that attractive, either. Obama came along and took the air out of the room. And I don’t think he’s going to be nominated. I don’t think he’s got much shot at that. He’s got his celebrity. He gave a good speech. But in a country that’s concerned that they didn’t think George [W.] Bush, when they elected him, was as qualified as they thought he was, they aren’t going to elect a state representative. They are not going to nominate him to be president.

So he’s ultimately, I think, helping Hillary, because he is taking that money that might have gone to [Bill] Richardson or [John] Edwards, to somebody that could actually run a race against her. But then I think that she, in that party — I am usually wrong about my own party, so you have to take it all with a grain of salt. But it’s just hard to conceive how somebody could get off the ground against her with Obama there, sort of blocking it. She ought to make him her vice president or something. Instead, he’ll probably have his taxes audited for eight years if she gets in.

Is there a finite amount of money out there, though?

Well, obviously there is.

Because if you have nine months to raise money, and there is no clear front-runner, which probably is the picture right now in the two parties because of how much Obama has raised and [Mitt] Romney surprised . . .

If you are a serious candidate, you can raise $100 million, probably. And that’s an arbitrary number. But it’s probably somewhere up there. And it’s not finite in the sense that some of the front-runners will tell you that there is only so much money. And if we have our $100 million, they can’t get their $100 million. It’s not finite in part because those guys may have maxed out to him. But if he starts to slip, they can give to somebody else.

So what you’ll find in one of these races is that a lot of these people, if the lead is changing, they may have maxed out to two or three people, because they just want to be with the winner and they want to support the party nominee in either party. So there is a lot of money there, in that sense. But money, up to a certain point, is a relative thing. And if you are Dennis Kucinich, you are not going to raise much money. And the fact that there is $100 million out there theoretically available to you doesn’t mean you are going to get it.

If you can’t raise money, then there is probably something wrong with your candidacy. However, if you are limited to $1,000 and you need a half a million, then if you are starting as a relatively unknown candidate you have a problem because you can’t get the money to get known. Under the previous system, Gene McCarthy always made the point that under the ’74 law, he couldn’t have run against [Lyndon] Johnson in ’68, which is true. [Barry] Goldwater couldn’t have. [George] McGovern probably couldn’t have done it. Maybe they are all three bad examples, because none of them won. And that was because, ultimately when it gets down to it, whether you have got those limits or not, you need so much money that you can’t get it from two people. But two people can launch you. Generally an “ideas” candidate is launched by an angel. And all of those were ideas candidates, issues candidacies.

Now the way the system worked then, you could buy your way in. But that wasn’t going to guarantee that you were going to get out of it alive. This reminded me of after the war when Henry J. Kaiser decided to take all of the money he had made from building Liberty Ships and started a car company. He had a big press conference. And he wrote a personal check for $50 million to this car company. And somebody asked the vice president of General Motors what he thought of that. And he said, “Give him one red chip and welcome him to the game.” You have got to have more than one chip. And so the fact that somebody will give you the one doesn’t guarantee you are going to be competitive. But at least it launches you.

But aren’t we moving past the idea of individual kingmakers in that you have all of these other new ways of raising money on the Internet?

Yeah. Oh, there are other ways. But they only work for certain kinds of candidates. I mean, I could raise money. MoveOn can raise money for an antiwar guy right now. I could raise money, or somebody could, for an anti-immigration guy. You know what I mean? You could do those things. But if you are a candidate with some hope of breadth later on, whether you are conservative or liberal, those guys aren’t going to help you.

Every time you change the finance rules, that affects the source of the money, that is going to have some impact on the outcome. I mean, the rules do matter. That’s why when you have campaign finance, unions want to stop corporate PACs [political action committees]. Because if you can make it one kind of money, if you can give one kind of money an advantage, using the argument that the other kind is illegitimate, what you are really doing is trying to fix the endgame. And that’s particularly true, frankly, with small givers, the Internet givers, and the direct-mail givers and all that, because in order to get them you need to be very hard. You need to be able to scare the bejesus out of them about the opposition. You need to be able to have a very strong ideological message, whether it’s a single-issue message or another message. And in my world, if you didn’t have big givers, the Republican Party would be totally in my hands, because particularly on the Republican side, the big givers tend to be a moderating influence, not an ideological influence.

Why is that?

Most of the Republican money from big givers now is from sort of big-business managers and stuff, who are, by their nature, not very ideological, or by people who are sort of genetically Republicans, but don’t really care. Jim Nicholson said, when the McCain-Feingold bill was on the floor, when he was chairman [of the Republican National Committee] — this was one of these off-the-record dinners, a long time ago. He said, “You know, I’ve discovered since becoming chairman that going to a precinct meeting and a Team 100 meeting are really the same.” He said they’d talk about the same issues, each one — guns, abortion, and taxes. The only difference is at the Team 100 meeting, you want to abort your kids, raise your taxes, and take your guns. And that’s largely true, because the right-wing ideological money tends to be entrepreneurial money to some degree, of which there is less.

The left-wing money, it also depends on the industry. Because the big money these days coming out of the high-tech industries tends to be liberal. And then the other money is sort of the third-generation money. Stewart Mott is a bad example, but that kind of money that’s inherited. But they didn’t have anything to do with making it, or earning it, or managing anything. And that tends to be Democratic money. It tends to be more ideological. We have some of those people. They have more of them.

Before the last election, Harold Ickes had this meeting. And they were going to raise $30 million in whatever period of time. I don’t know if they ever did it. I asked some people. I said, “Okay, name me the people we would get in a room to commit to raise $30 million in this period of time.” And whether they succeeded or not, we couldn’t even come up with a name. And then they say there aren’t any such names. There aren’t any people like that, businessmen who are not ideological driven.

Back in ’74, when I put together the Buckley v. Valeo suit against that set of laws, when we needed plaintiffs I had to get Stewart Mott because he was the only contributor who was fool enough to say he didn’t like limits. The other business contributors all said: “A thousand dollars? Well, why don’t they make it $500?” I told Fred Wertheimer [of Common Cause]: “You have got it backwards. It isn’t that these businessmen are trying to buy congressmen. It’s that these congressmen are extorting money out of them.” They felt that the campaign laws were for protection of their wallets. In order to really want to spend your money, you need to be ideologically driven. And there aren’t many that are like that.

Well, do you think, overall now, that money is more of a determinant about the outcome of an election or less?

No. I mean, if you go below the presidential level.

No. I’m talking about the presidential.

Oh, presidential? No. Once you get to the nomination, I think it’s more important to get into the game and be a serious contender for the nomination. Once you get to the nomination, it doesn’t make any difference, because there is enough money there for everybody. And that’s irrelevant.

Although it looks like some candidates are going to opt out of the general [election public financing] as well.

Oh, yeah. No, there is not enough money in the fund. That money is too low. I don’t think any candidate who makes it to the general election is going to accept public financing.

But it’s [so] short; it’s only a two-month period. How much can you spend in that time?

A lot.

As much as you’ve got?

That’s right. I mean, you can spend it as wastefully as possible. It doesn’t mean you spend it effectively.

You remember Burdell Bixby? “Bix” managed [Thomas] Dewey’s campaign and then he managed the [Nelson] Rockefeller campaigns. He also managed the Malcolm Wilson campaign after Rocky left. And they used to have their headquarters at the Roosevelt Hotel there in New York.

I was working for [James] Buckley, so I went up to see him. I said: “Bix, what can we do for you? How are things going?” He said: “Frankly, I don’t know. You know, I know how to run a $20 million campaign. But I’ll be goddamned if I can figure out how to run a $4 million campaign.” And, of course, because Rocky just threw money at everything. And so it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s that much more efficient. But at least it’s easy. Rockefeller’s problem always was it was like the Army. He didn’t know who won the hill. So he had to promote everybody.

I remember once traveling with him in New York. And he had to do some gubernatorial business. He took the whole busload, about 40 reporters, to Sardi’s [Restaurant].

Sardi’s, yeah. He liked it there.

And he picked up the whole tab. And then all of the reporters said, “Oh, we can’t let you do that.” But it happened.

Oh, what the hell. It was a widely attended event. Well, in ’72, he and Buckley co-chaired the Nixon re-elect [Committee for the Re-Election of the President] in New York. And the hardest problem I had was some woman had called Buckley. She had been a volunteer in his campaign and everything. She said she wanted to work for Nixon, and she went to the headquarters. And of course Rocky was really in charge; we weren’t. And she wanted to volunteer. And they said: “We don’t accept volunteers. We’ll put [you] on the payroll.” And I went up there and I said, “What is this?” And they said: “Volunteers are too hard to deal with. If they are on the payroll, you can fire them.” So, if you have a lot of money, it doesn’t mean you get more. But you have to organize it a little differently than if you don’t have any money.

But in contested races, the reason I say if you drop down below the presidential level, if you had a sort of — fair is the wrong word because they wouldn’t be geographical, either — but if you have congressional districting that created 400 or 435 competitive seats, there wouldn’t be enough money in the political world to run that. But for the number of competitive seats you have, there is more than enough money. And if you had 50 more, there would be plenty of money. But at some point you run out, because there are a finite number of people who will give. And in the direct-mail universe there is a finite number of givers. And the same is true for $1,000 givers or $5,000 givers. And they are all chasing the same ones. That’s why you get this competition for fundraisers.

Do you see any possibility, with a number of candidates in the first quarter having raised a lot of money, that more than one or two candidates could survive past February 5, Super Tuesday, to go on?

Sure. If they can’t get more than 20 percent apiece or 25 percent apiece, they are going to survive, I mean, under those circumstances. We have in the Republican Party a very, very unusual nominating year because there is no clear front-runner. There is no clear favorite. There is no ideological favorite. And there is no favorite in any other way. So you have got a bunch of guys out there with a little base within the party and either a fundraising network or not. You have got Romney; I assume that Romney tapped into Mormons the way Bush tapped into Yale [alumni] when he ran in ’80. And I’m sure that Rudy’s tapped into the sort of New York base that he had. They have all got a little bit different. The guys who aren’t that kind of candidate have got a problem.

Well, which do you think is a more likely outcome because of the money involved? That it will be over in a hurry or that there will be so much money that candidates will be able to hang on? I mean, the conventional wisdom seems to be . . .

Oh, the money will not allow a candidate to hang on. If it gets rolling for one of them, the other ones will be wiped out pretty quickly because the demands on that money are huge. If I have $40 million left, and I come up to this big block of primaries and stuff, I can’t husband that money. I have got to take my shot. So that money would go pretty fast. If they are able to hang on, it’s because of having done that and everybody else having done it. It’s like World War I; we all blew it. And we’re still in the same trenches we started in.

That’s the way it could happen. For those guys, that would not be a consequence of their finances. Because I think those top three guys would all have the money they need. And if [Fred] Thompson got into it, he might have the money he needs, too. So the question would be, Will the dogs eat any of the dog food? That would be the question. And we don’t know the answer to that. But so far they are gagging on it.

But what about the new ways of raising money? I mean, we really don’t know the potentiality of the Internet — not only money, but other ways to get your message out, YouTube, all of the other new ways where you don’t necessarily need money.

Right, that changes in all kinds of different ways. Yeah.

So the question that our project is trying to get at is will money, again, dominate the selection of president?

That’s what the money’s for.

That’s what the money is for. If there are other ways to communicate, is it possible that money could, for all the money that’s being thrown around now, end up being less important in the outcome?

If you have enough — in other words, if you get to the point where the next dollar’s marginal utility is not as great as the dollars you have. If you have enough to do what you need to do. If you have all of these technologies that didn’t exist before, they all cost money. You don’t have to buy the time, but you have to pay people.

And the campaigns are putting a lot into it. The Bush campaign, this last time as compared to the Democrats, they had a huge edge on this micro-targeting and doing all that sort of thing. That’s a whole different technology. And it has all kinds of different consequences for a political system, as does this Internet kind of stuff. The two things that have happened that have real impact are that it’s taken control out of the hands of anybody that has any kind of formal role to play with the campaign.

At this point, a candidate sort of hops on a wild tiger and hopes he can ride it to the finish line. But he doesn’t have any reins or anything. The tiger might run off in the wrong direction, carrying him, because of something somebody else is doing. And now, at a much, much lesser degree, that was always why campaign organizations hated independent expenditures, because the manager couldn’t control them. To the extent that somebody else was doing something, they wanted that outlawed.

The same about 527s, right?

Yeah. But even before that, back in the ’70s, whenever there was an independent effort, it always got trashed. It wasn’t because they were necessarily effective or ineffective. It was because if you are the manager, you are trying to shape the strategy, the timing, the message.

You mean trashed by the campaign?

Yeah. And so they hate you more than the other campaign, because you are taking over their job. And to the extent that you can compete with them on the message, they are no longer in charge.

Today, it’s hard to argue. I mean, you have got all of these campaigns putting up people as fronts and saying, “I didn’t do this, it was somebody else.” There will always be that. But it might not be a front. For example, that Internet [1984-theme anti-] Hillary ad, where her people say, “Well, Obama did it.” And he says, “No, I didn’t.” And then the guy was for Obama. Well, we wouldn’t have expected it to be somebody who was for Hillary. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a completely independent thing. But that guy, for that week, had more control over both campaigns, in a sense, than anybody who was being paid to do it.

But don’t things like that really erode the influence of money?

It erodes the influence of official money. And it doesn’t necessarily erode the influence of money, because if that is the route that you take, money still becomes important.

But you can do things like that for peanuts. Don’t have to advertise on the networks.

Well, you can do it one day for peanuts. But if a million people are doing it, then it can be done by all of them for peanuts, but not in a concerted way. A campaign can’t do that for peanuts. A campaign has to pay people and do all of that. That could end up being as expensive as anything else.

Just like in a campaign, the biggest expense item for what’s delivered is, generally speaking, volunteers, because they have to be run. They have to be managed. The reason the campaigns in the ’70s and ’80s went from volunteers is [that] it was more expensive to have people in to lick envelopes than it was to just hire somebody to run them through a machine, because you had to buy pizzas, you had to manage them, you had to get people on the phone, you had to have space.

So it was sort of outsourcing. It’s not as easy. We had people like Paul Laxalt [a senator from Nevada and the national chairman of all of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns] say, “We ought to just get away with all of this stuff and go back to volunteers.” Well, that’s the most expensive thing. Which doesn’t mean that for other reasons it wouldn’t be a better way to do it. But the point is, all of these things have real-world impacts and consequences. And what has happened is that the formal campaigns and the candidates have less control over everything than they once had, even if they had $100 million, because this guy could run an ad on the Internet, or the way they did it I n Virginia, they got somebody to take something that no responsible press person would print, put it on the Internet, and then buck it up so that all of a sudden there is enough controversy about it that it has to be reported. And that was the whole campaign. I mean, there was a whole effort to do that. And it worked successfully. So there is going to be all of that kind of stuff, and not only does it take control out of the hands of the campaign, but it’s made campaigns even more than they were 10, 15 years ago, it’s made them completely tactical, because you have no time to do anything except respond. Because how long is the news cycle these days? Twenty minutes? The older I become, the more like a curmudgeon I become, bitching about all of these things.

Well, it seems to me that we are at the early start; a lot of money has to be spent between now . . .

Raising money.

Not only raising money, but spending money. Because you are seeing candidates now going on television and running all kinds of stuff, doing all kinds stuff here in March and April of the previous year.

I don’t know that I’d do that if I were them. But that’s a decision that they have to make.

But they all seem to . . .

I know, because if one person does it, the other person does it.

And if there is enough money. I mean, historically, where you would spend the money is in Iowa and New Hampshire. And it wouldn’t be on the air. At this stage, you would be organizing.

Well, that’s what they are doing. They are all out there doing that.

And that’s fine. Well, they have to be.

So is there a danger in that early start, that for all the money that a lot of these candidates are raising, they are not going to have enough when they go into the starting gate?

It depends on how much they spend. I don’t think they have released spending figures yet, have they? They have just released the reporting on the fundraising.

Right, yeah. I think that comes in a couple of weeks, [April] 15.

Yeah. The McCain campaign, I’ll bet, has spent a ton of money and so has Romney. McCain in particular, because they have had people out there for a long time, and also because it was in his interest to get it, to try and become formidable enough to stop challenges. That didn’t work.

Why do you think all of this has happened? Why do you think the system has kind of fallen apart? I mean, I know why it has, because of the front-loading.

Yeah.

But why are so many states doing that?

Well, I don’t know, at this point. In fact, it’s not in their interest. But what is in somebody’s interest and what people think is in their interest are often widely divergent.

Is it simply that there is a feeling in some of these states that they are not having a say on the nomination? Or is it because they want to get the money that comes into . . .

They want the money. They want the attention and all that. The problem is [that] if everybody goes early, then nobody gets any attention. It all becomes a television campaign. The great thing about the system was — and this is where the analysts or the pundits were exactly wrong. They said, “This is so tiring for voters to have this long system.” Voters didn’t give a [expletive]. I mean, they paid attention when they had to. What it did do? Can you imagine if Jimmy Carter had not had to go around the country, [that] he just had to sit at his peanut farm and buy ads? He wouldn’t have known anything about the rest of the country. What that system did was it made people go to Pennsylvania. And it made people go to Oregon, and Wisconsin, and those places, and spend a couple of weeks there.

And pretty soon you might not have liked all the interests you ran into, but by the time you got the nomination, you knew that there were a lot of competing interests in this country, and that there were people with strong feelings. There were industrial interests, labor interests, that kind of thing. And it wasn’t that it was too long. It was the way you educated the candidate. I think a candidate who survived that didn’t just prove he could pull votes. He got an education that he would never have gotten any other way. Now that doesn’t necessarily guarantee one was going to be a good president. But at least, I mean, you knew some of those people. And they just didn’t know anything. And I just think that was the value of that system.

But didn’t it depend on how much a candidate actually does? Like [Richard] Nixon always liked to talk about he learned this or that from somebody who came up to him. And people never came up to Nixon because they couldn’t get near him.  So the idea that when you are out there, you are soaking up the wisdom of the country . . .

But you don’t even have to meet them, if you go to Pittsburgh or you go to Iowa. And I mean, it’s not always for the good. If you go to Iowa and don’t know that those farmers are making money on ethanol, you don’t have to go out and meet them. You know that you are not going to give a speech without . . .

But the idea — this is something I have always kind of believed — is that the process is an educational event for the candidate, not just for the voters.

It is. That’s what it’s for. The voters learned something about the candidate. And that’s good, because they have to make a decision. And ultimately they do see, they pretty much see. After the fact, they talk about how, “Well, gee, Nixon fooled people.” He didn’t fool anybody. He was a tough son of a bitch. They didn’t want [Hubert] Humphrey. They wanted a tough son of a bitch. They may not have liked it once they got it, but nobody got fooled. They see the candidates and they get what they want. We may think they want the wrong things. But I think that part of the system works pretty well. And that works whether they are going to have to see them in debates, or see them out there, or see them over a period of time. They are going to get that. I mean, I am one who happens to think television has really helped in that sense, not hurt. Because voters get a sense of these people before it’s over. But the system where the candidate had to go out and spend some time in different places, that educated the candidate. And I don’t see how you replace that.

One of the raps about money in politics is that it influences the candidates.

It takes up their time.

Well, do you see today that there is much quid pro quo between contributions and influence?

Actually, rarely. I think it’s overblown. I mean, there is always the argument of what’s first, the chicken or the egg. Does an oil company executive give money to a senator from Oklahoma because he wants to buy him, or because he votes with him because he’s from Oklahoma? And does an antiwar candidate vote against the war because George Soros gives him money, or does George Soros give him money because he votes against the war? I mean, that’s never been as easy as people on either side would suggest it is.

If that’s the case, what’s wrong with a lot of money in politics?

Nothing. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it.

Well, isn’t there something wrong with it, in terms of if you believe — maybe you don’t believe this — that it’s good for the commonweal to have a level playing field, that all of the candidates have opportunity to be taken seriously?

The political marketplace is a marketplace. And there has never been any evidence shown to me in this country that a candidate of the left, or right, or whatever, hasn’t been able to get the money to get launched. I mean, we have lunatic millionaires at every point on the compass. But it’s a marketplace; that ain’t enough. And if a candidate is going to succeed, he has got to attract a broad base of support financially and then ultimately in votes. You can develop sort of a theoretical sense that if this guy has all of the money, then this guy doesn’t have anything to say. But the way the real-world market works in politics is that whoever you are, there is somebody out there. There is a Dick [Mellon] Scaife or a Stewart Mott who is going to put up the money for your peculiar way of looking at the world. Now unless there are a lot of other people who agree with it, you are not going to go anywhere. I mean, were [there] enough, Rockefeller would have served two terms.

Isn’t it also a question of the size of the microphone? I mean, if it was the difference between having a big microphone and being able to raise your voice louder than the guy who is next to you?

Yeah. But remember what Lyn [Nofziger] said to the candidate: “If every time you raise your voice they think you’re an asshole, it isn’t going to help.” I mean, it’s still the message. It’s still the candidate and the message. The problem is when you make it impossible for anybody to get started. That’s the problem. And that was my objection to the campaign reforms back in the ’70s. If you cut off the angel, you cut off the ability of the outsider to go anywhere or test his ability to go anywhere. I’ll give you an example. When Jim Buckley ran for the Senate against [Charles] Goodell and whoever it was back then . . .

Congressman Ottinger.

. . . right, Dick Ottinger, Nixon, at one point, had called a buddy of his or signaled for somebody, a guy who was with Pfizer who was living in Ireland most of the time, that Buckley was a good guy. And that was back in the days when you could only get $3,000 from one committee or whatever it was. And so Buckley was, of course, having a hell of a time raising money. But this guy had promised him like a lot of money, but forgot. Because if you are a millionaire . . .

You forget.

What the hell.

Yeah.

So finally they sent somebody over to Ireland. They had to keep the guy up and give him a drink and make him sign all of these checks to get over there. So a few years later when I am working for Buckley, other than [Senator] Ed Brooke [of Massachusetts] he was the first Republican to call for Nixon to resign. So he was going to have this press conference. And we talk about that he is going to do this. And then he said to me — Jack [John A.] Mulcahy was [the donor’s] name — and [Buckley] says, “Is there anybody else that you think I ought to talk to before I have my press conference?” And I said: “Well, this guy Mulcahy gave you like a million bucks, and he’s Nixon’s best friend. I think for a million bucks you ought to give him a call, because he’s never asked for anything.”

So Buckley calls him and he says, “Here is what I’m going to do.” And Mulcahy says, “Well, [expletive] you,” and hung up. And I said, “That’s what you get for a million dollars.” The way the system actually works, and it’s gotten more this way, is if you are Jack Mulcahy or whatever his interest might have been, I could tell you to bug off, because I can find somebody else. If it was an issue, if you were pro-environment, I could find somebody else. I could replace you.

What you can’t replace are people who have lots of votes. And you can’t replace the small giver. I have always maintained that you are less beholden, as a practical matter, as a member of Congress to a guy that gave you a million dollars than you are to 100,000 people who give you $10 a piece. Because if you piss him off you lost $1 million and one vote. And if you piss them off, you’ve lost $1 million and 50,000 votes. And also, if you are active in politics, you find out that the guy that gave you the $50, it was probably more meaningful to him than Mulcahy’s million. And he wouldn’t forget about it.

So, when you turn on him — you can think of all the issues that people give money in the mail, on the left and the right — you have done something. So, in fact, if you are talking about the influence of the money, that money has a greater impact in terms of, buying is the wrong word, but locking up the guy who’s getting it, than does the million-dollar contribution. Now that’s not the case if you’re Duke Cunningham or if you are some of these guys who were in Abscam. But there are those kind of people in every population.

But generally speaking, just put yourself in the position of the elected official. And if you’ve got 50,000 people on this side and one guy over here, and you have the same amount from them, which one are you going to piss off? I’ll stick with my 50,000. And that’s the real power. I mean, today, if you go up there to Congress, they all know they can get money anywhere they want it. They can raise, they can extort it from anybody. So they want to know what you’ve got in the way of votes.

Do you think the average voter is concerned about the influence of money in politics? Do you think they care where the money comes from?

The average voter, no. I mean the average voter, take some hot issue, a tax issue, or if I want to raise your tax issue. You want to lower them. Or I want abortion and you don’t. And she cares about one of those votes. She isn’t going to say, “You know, that sucker got his money from the wrong person.” She is interested in what our position is.

So I don’t think the average voter is concerned. The average voter doesn’t like corruption. The average voter doesn’t trust politicians. Those are all healthy kinds of things. But the average voter is not concerned about how you got the money to get your message out. They are interested in what the message is. And that’s what they hear. That doesn’t mean somebody shouldn’t be concerned. But if you are talking about the broad public, the answer is no.

I mean, if you don’t have concern in the broad public, how do you elevate the issue of money in politics?

Well, maybe if the public isn’t concerned about it, then you shouldn’t spend all of your time worrying about it. That’s the problem with democracy.

But if you were a believer that money does have a corrupting effect, because, after all, that’s the only reason for the . . .

Well, then you have to go out and convince people that you are right. And I mean, remember, even the [Supreme] Court back in ’74, they were not able to substantiate any evidence of corruption. They said it was the appearance of corruption. And that’s a fairly low standard for infringing on the Bill of Rights. And I happen to think this was a good thing, because I am not pro-government. This country was founded on an incredible sense that government was not a good thing. I mean, that’s what the Constitution is all about. It’s about limiting it. Americans have never thought very much of politicians in terms of they might admire a political leader. But they think politicians are no better than the auto mechanic who’s trying to rip them off. That’s the real control.

Now in a sense, you get into this problem where everybody’s defense is, “I am no worse than the other guy in the public service.” Well, it’s probably true. But they also have a threshold. The one reason that the government functions is that the average member of the public is cynical about it. And they expect things from it. And they expect their elected representatives and their presidents to perform. But they don’t expect angels. I mean, that’s benefited [Bill] Clinton. They are saying: “Well, these guys are all bad guys, in that sense. But what has he done to me lately?”

This is an extreme example, but I remember [that] my brother was a cop, and they decided to unionize the police department. So they voted in the Teamsters. And I said: “Now, you are a cop. And you spend all of this time, and you know everything that you know about the Teamsters.” He says: “Well, if you are going to unionize, you might as well get the toughest son of a bitch on the block. And if he steals some of the money, you are still going to get more.” Well, that’s a very American way of looking at things. But I’m not necessarily arguing that that’s the way people ought to look at things. But it’s the way they do. And if it gets out of hand, they get pissed.

Are you optimistic about the trends in politics, particularly in terms of how much money is being pumped into campaigns?

I am not so concerned about the money. I am pessimistic for a couple of reasons. But it has less to do with money and more to do with the way the country has developed. When I came to town, we had a country that we all, for good or for bad, we all lived in the same world. We may have disagreed about how to solve a problem, but we all saw the same problems. And today, people don’t live in the same world. They don’t get their news from the same places. It’s no wonder they can’t agree on solutions; they can’t even agree on what the problems are. I mean, that’s why there is no cross. It’s Republican and Democrat, liberals and conservatives: they don’t even talk the same language. They don’t live on the same planet. And that’s not a healthy divide.

I have nothing against competition. I think all of this [expletive] about how everybody should get along is just [expletive]. But they ought to be playing on the same field. And I don’t even think they are. And I get this thing — I found this very funny. We were putting together this group of conservatives and liberals on First Amendment and civil liberties questions, the Patriot Act stuff and all that. And this guy, one of the people involved is this guy Wes Boyd that formed MoveOn.

Well, first of all, he’s totally paranoid. And he said: “Well, how can I trust you to say anything? Because if you say the wrong thing, Bush will cut off all the money he has given you.” And I said, “Well.” I mean, you engage in a conversation, and you realize that there is just no common ground. Because even though you might agree on this issue, the motivation is so different.

But isn’t it also part of the reason that there is not much center in the parties anymore?

Well, there isn’t.

And what is a moderate Republican?

Well, there isn’t any anymore.

What is a moderate Democrat?

There aren’t any.

I mean, in the South there are still.

No. The “blue dogs” are phonies. It’s basically [expletive].

But in any event, there seems to be such a polarization.

Well, that’s because if you don’t live on the same planet, how can you not be polarized? People don’t even watch the same news anymore. I may not have liked ABC or CBS, but if you are just watching — I don’t know what all of the networks are, because I don’t watch TV that much — but if you just watch Fox, or you just watch CNN, or one of these, those are different worlds. So how can you say, “Well, we ought to get together and come up with a solution to this problem”? And then both sides will say: “What do you mean this problem? That’s not a problem. This is the problem.” I mean, it’s harder to reach across to people when there is no common sense of the environment in which they live. That, I think, is the most troubling thing. And that doesn’t have to do with money. That has to do with the whole sort of — it’s almost like too much information is as bad as no information. And then organizing the information so that you only hear what you want to hear.

Well, that brings me to one other thing, that it’s the quality of the information. You now have, and this is kind of a parochial thing for me in my life in the news business, but the ethical and professional standards of conveying information don’t exist anymore because of the Internet.

There aren’t any. Right.

And anybody, everybody has a megaphone. And there is no way to determine whether the person who has it knows what he is talking about, has any training in how to try to be balanced and fair. So what do you think is the impact of that whole explosion of information?

That’s the whole problem. On the one hand, it’s democratic. On the other hand, there are no standards at all. And that’s what’s added to it. You can go on the Internet and live in a world in which everything else is a conspiracy. And you self-select the world that you live in and reject everything else. I find it weird But maybe that’s me. I find it ultimately dangerous. And I have no idea how you can fix it.

It doesn’t seem like there is a lot of interest, in either group, to understand what the other side is talking about.

No, and we used to. I don’t know if you know, I am co-chairman on this civil liberties stuff. Because, you know, I have always been interested in that stuff. So the Constitution Project has a liberty and security task force. And David Cole and I are co-chairmen. He is a big left-winger and I am a right-wing nut. And so we do that. But the woman who runs the Constitution Project it is a very liberal woman by the name of Ginny Sloan. She and I were both invited in one of these trans-partisan meetings, where we are all supposed to get together. And about halfway through we looked at each other and said, “Are these people crazy, or is it us?”

We are getting off track here. But we are talking a little bit about civil liberties and so on. But there is a really important question going on now about what are the limits of presidential power?

Absolutely. And I’m involved in the middle of that debate. It’s like I told Nat Hentoff once. I said, “I have never met anybody that believes in free speech, except maybe you, Nat.” I mean, because most people believe in free speech for themselves. But they’d like to shut everybody else up. I went to one of these things, and I said, “I happen to agree.” I lobbied against a lot of these provisions in the Patriot Act before it passed. Because when you have a war, this [expletive] always happens. I said the only good thing I can think about Bush is that, unlike Woodrow Wilson, he hasn’t sent any newspaper editors to prison yet for disagreeing with him. But no doubt they are studying the historic record to figure out if they can.