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Dick Morris

Dick Morris, a political strategist and commentator, is the president of Vote.com. He was the chief strategist and adviser in President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign and has also advised such Republicans as Trent Lott, Bill Weld, and Pete Wilson.

Jules Witcover interviewed Morris on November 16, 2007.

I’d just like to have this little conversation with you about the state of the campaign-finance reform.

Well, I have a very radical view on this that I think is very different from the conventional wisdom of the reform types in this field. Eileen [McGann] and I, my wife who works hard on these issues, wrote a book in 1999 called Vote.com. It basically predicts that the Internet will end the power of money in politics. And we wrote it in ’98. So we are pretty proud of that.

But the fact is, I think, that in two different ways the Internet is ending the tremendous power that money has had in politics. And I think that the practitioners of politics are slow to realize it. But I think historically we will be able to look back on the period from 1972 until 2004 as the media age of American politics. And the previous era having been basically the “boss-dominated age.”

What date did you say?

Nineteen seventy-two, with the defeat of McGovern, to 2004 was the media age of American politics. And I believe the period after that, you would probably have to call the Internet era. And there are two different levels. One is becoming apparent; the other is not, but is obvious when you think about it. One level, of course, which is apparent, is that the Internet is making it cheaper, richer, and easier to raise honest money than to raise crooked money. Because the barrier to honest money, which I define as small, more or less, anonymous contributions — not anonymous in the sense that the candidate doesn’t know who they are, because there are billions and millions of them — was the cost of direct mail and of phoning that would cost basically 50 to 75 cents per outreach. Should I walk through those mechanics?

Please do.

Well, normally when you drop a direct-mail piece you get about a 2 percent response. That’s kind of the norm.

Really? That’s all?

That’s all. And it normally costs about 50 to 60 cents per envelope. So let’s say you mail out 1,000 envelopes, just to make it simple. So you are spending 6,000 cents, so you are spending $60. And you get a 2 percent response. So you get 120 to respond. Six thousand, 1 percent, that’s 60. So you get 120 responses. And the average response is usually $20. So you are going to get $2,400. And it’s going to cost you roughly $3,000 to drop the mailing, 50 or 60 cents an envelope.

So the point is that you are lucky if you break even. Let me just go through that math again, because I think I got it wrong. Let’s say that you send out 10,000 appeals. And that’s going to cost you $5,000, 50 cents an appeal. Of the 10,000 appeals, you get 200 responses. That’s 2 percent at $20 each; that’s $4,000. So you spent $5,000 and you made $4,000. Those are the typical dynamics of your first solicitation. Sometimes you really get lucky, and you break even. But most of the time you don’t.

So why do it then?

Because what you have now are 200 donors. You then re-solicit the 200 donors every six weeks, and you get a 10 percent response from them for an average of $20. So you are going to get 20 people every six weeks to give you $20. You are going to get $400. And after 12 weeks, you have broken even. And then every six weeks you get another $400 that comes in. And if you do it over the course of a year, you make $4,000 or $5,000, having invested the $5,000. You gross a total of $9,000 or $10,000, and you have laid out $5,000. And that’s the math of direct mail. It’s pretty lousy math. That’s why it isn’t done. That’s why it’s not effective.

And, by the way, phone solicitation is more or less the same thing, because it’s about 50 cents per tape-recorded call, a dollar for a live call. And the result is that it is such a lousy return with such a large up-front capital investment that basically special interest and big fat donor fundraising became the norm, because you really couldn’t do it off mass solicitation.

But now you can with the Internet, because it’s free. There is no up-front. Your gross is your net. So [Barack] Obama, as you know, has raised a huge proportion of his money online — much, much more than anybody, more than Hillary [Clinton]. And the advantage of online fundraising is that you can re-solicit constantly. The re-solicitation doesn’t cost you anything. And you don’t have any turnaround time. You don’t have to open envelopes, cash checks, deposit checks, wait for them to clear, all of that [expletive]. It goes immediately into your account.

So for all of those reasons, direct-mail and phone fundraising didn’t work and Internet fundraising does work. And increasingly, a larger group of people are becoming acclimated to giving to campaigns and through the Internet. That is increasingly creating a source of money that’s good and clean and honest. And it’s eclipsing the fundraising by fat cats. So that’s the first point. And that process was first done by Howard Dean in 2004. Now you are seeing it’s being picked up by Obama in 2008.

The second thing is less apparent, which is that money increasingly is not useful in winning elections. At the presidential race, that’s becoming increasingly obvious. Look at Mike Huckabee’s surge in the Republican primary with no money. Look at Hillary’s faltering despite having a lot of money. I mean, she’ll win, I think, but it’s not because of all the money she has. Look at [Mitt] Romney’s inability to break 8 percent nationally, despite massive amounts of money. But in microcosm it becomes clearer, which is that fewer and fewer people are watching television. The levels of households using television — it’s called HUT levels — are way, way down. They are down by half since 1990 and half again since 1980.

Is that for all television, including cable?

Well, no, it’s for network television. But, of course, many cable outlets don’t have advertising — HBO and that kind of stuff. So basically your ad dollar on television buys you less and less and less. A good way to understand that and to quantify it is that if you look at the Nielsen Ratings for the ABC, NBC, and CBS nightly news combined, in 1996 they were roughly 30 percent. Now they are roughly 17 percent or 16 percent combined. And in 1990 or 1980 they were in the range of 50 percent or 60 percent combined. People just aren’t watching them. They are not watching television nearly as much.

If you look at the prime-time ratings for prime-time shows, take 60 Minutes, for example, and track that in four or five years, you’ll see this story. 60 Minutes used to get ratings of about 20. Now it gets ratings of about 10 if it’s lucky, usually 8 or 9. It’s just that people aren’t watching TV as much. They are either watching cable that has no advertising, or they are online every night.

So what’s the overall impact then?

Basically money doesn’t buy you happiness in politics anymore. What’s happening is that the TV networks are tripling and quadrupling their prices, because they need to, because they are reaching fewer and fewer people. Not tripling their prices; I don’t mean that. What I mean is you buy three times as much advertising, because you have to, to be able to reach anyone. But it’s reaching the point of diminishing returns.

At the same time as that’s happening, the rise of [things] like YouTube and cable news means that political information disseminates widely without your having to pay for it. The Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry were probably a total expenditure of a quarter of a million dollars, and yet it destroyed a presidential campaign. You regularly see these days videos circulating on the Internet. You go to YouTube, and you look at them, and they are free. They don’t cost much to produce, either. So because the Internet is lowering the barriers to fundraising and to communication, we are becoming a nation where you really don’t need money to reach the voters. Now that has not percolated down yet to congressional, Senate, or governor races. It still is largely true only in a presidential race. But it’s going to be increasingly true with everybody.

Well, do you see candidates laying off the network buying?

No. No. They haven’t gotten the message yet. They are still raising a huge amount of money and spending a huge amount. But it’s much more arm candy. It’s much more display money than it is money that they are actually using. It’s much more “I am winning the money primary, because I raised more than Obama did this quarter.” It’s much more a kind of replacement for a primary vote than it is dollars that you actually use.

The political impact of the money is less and less, particularly at a presidential level. And I think that at a congressional and a statewide level, that is going to percolate down in short order. And increasingly, you are going to be able to reach people for free; first, because of the proliferation of cable TV, and talk radio, NPR, and, of course, the Internet.

Won’t campaigns continue to try to raise money because they don’t buy into this concept?

Yes, they will. But increasingly, it will be come evident. It takes a while for them to learn the reality. It took them 10 years to learn to raise a lot of money for TV. Lyndon Johnson did it first in 1964. And it wasn’t until ’72 that it became conventional wisdom. It will take a while for them to learn this new world.

So they’ll continue to raise it. And they’ll continue to flaunt it. But in the long run, paying money is losing its power in American politics. Internet advertising is of some use, but mainly to develop a list. And once you have developed the list, you don’t need money to reach that list. So I believe, increasingly, that candidates are still doing it the old way. But it’s mattering less and less.

Then, of course, you have the other element, which is that you have a lot of people doing cable TV political buys, because the cable news stations are reaching, increasingly, the main vote. Just let me give you the stat. Gallup, I think it is, did a survey and found that 57 percent of the American voters regularly watched nightly TV news, the local news; 35 percent watched network news; and 35 percent watched cable TV news. So while in any given hour your ratings for cable are less than they are for network, cumulatively, over the course of the day or the week, they are as high as they are for the network TV news. And that is so much less expensive to buy, because you are not buying a lot of nonvoters. And you are targeting geographically.

What does this development do to the people in your business? And I say “your business” broadly meaning all of the people who are in what you could now call the political industry.

Well, we are basically like silent-movie actors having to adjust to an era of talkies. Everything we learned is now obsolete. For example, the soundbite used to be the dominant thing in politics. Say it in seven seconds. Well, if you say it in seven seconds online, it’s not effective. People are spending three hours online. Seven seconds, they’ll go to some other website.

In politics and advertising, the sine qua non is repetition, called frequency. That’s deadly on the Internet. You repeat yourself, and you lose them completely. Instead, [it’s] elaboration, in-depth. In television advertising, you have a message, and you run it for three weeks. On the Internet, you run it for half an hour. So everybody has to learn a new trade.

But from your point of view, about the impact of money, the good news is that the money will, in its old way, lose its influence over politicians. But there is, of course, a new way that money will assert its influence, which is directly with the electorate, through the Internet and every other way. Increasingly what’s going on is that special interests are less and less able to tell a politician what to do and more and more able to tell the voters what to think. That’s why these cigarette companies, for example, are able to win referenda in different states. You find special interests winning ballot propositions in states because they are able to win with the electorate — not always with the politicians, but with the voters.

So they are bypassing the politicians?

Exactly. And going directly to the voters. The new style of lobbying is like the sun shines on the ocean. It evaporates water into the clouds and then rains on the politicians. In other words, the money and the special interest get support from the electorate that then rains on the politicians. And let me also just say that my feeling about campaign-finance reform is that it’s a totally obsolete issue. What’s happening is that the disempowerment of money in the old way by the market forces is doing it far more effectively than any campaign-finance reform can ever do.

Explain that.

Well, they’ll never invent a system that you can’t figure out loopholes to scam. McCain-Feingold is a perfect example of that. It made the situation worse, not better, because it created 527s. The new reform would allow something else to exist. But in the long run, the important thing is that the money that you are trying to fight, the influence that the money buys, is diminishing rapidly because of the decreasing importance of money and the increasing importance of information.

I would also argue to you that it’s destructive, because I look at European elections — I work abroad a lot now — and their limits on spending basically amount to limits on political communication. And it really amounts to the empowerment of the press, because you can’t go over their heads. You have to go through the media. And they have their bias and their filter. It means that you ultimately become the slave of the station executives. So that’s my thinking on it. It’s rather different than what you are probably used to, but I think it’s right.

So what do you think will eventually happen to the whole process?

I think in five years or 10 years you will have a situation where candidates will still raise a bunch of money just because they can. But it’s not going to be very important. It’s not going to be the determinant in elections. The amount of money that special interests give will be dwarfed by the massive amount of money that individuals give through the Internet. And the importance of the money that they give will not only be diluted by massive popular donations, but will become less and less useful and more and more expensive, because it creates an issue that their opponents use to beat them over the head with.

So I think three things. Number one, the money they are raising will be cleaner and cleaner. Number two, the dirty money will come at a higher and higher political price.

Because people will know about it and . . .

Yeah. And beat them over the head with it, like they are doing to Hillary right now. And finally, that the importance of money generically will be significantly reduced in political campaigns as opposed to the importance of information that you can disseminate largely for free.

Well, if you are a special interest, and you have grown up and matured by giving money for access and influence, what do people in that category do to continue to have influence and access?

It becomes increasingly necessary to shine on the ocean. You increasingly have to bypass the politicians and talk directly to the voters and convince the American public of your point of view. And have them then convince Congress. And increasingly it becomes incumbent on them to have arguments, not just money, to advance their point of view. Increasingly, they have to formulate their case in public-interest terms. For example, you take the oil companies that are obviously self-interested. Well, they need to articulate their approach in terms of jobs or in terms of energy independence.

Do you see that now? Do you see that already in the ads of the energy companies?

Yeah, you do. And the car companies no longer speak of profits. They speak of how many jobs they are protecting. Everybody has to articulate their arguments in public-interest terms, because it’s a constituency no longer consisting of some politicians you are paying off, but voters who you have to persuade. And increasingly, it’s more important to have a good argument than a lot of money behind it, because the Internet is increasingly the major place that you propagate your point of view.

Well, how does this affect the news business?

The monopolies get diluted. But journalism is the profession of the future, because the appetite and the information for news, and the ability to absorb massive amounts of it, is soaring. It’s gigantically increasing. That’s why turnout is increasing so dramatically in our elections. We had 100 million voters in 2000 and 120 million in ’04. And I’ll bet you in ’08 we have 140 million. That’s changing our politics, because the downscale voters who never used to vote are coming in and increasingly moving into the left. So I think the news industry is going to prosper. Not newspapers, not TV stations, per se, but the news industry, which will be disseminated increasingly online.

One of the complaints in this kind of embryo period is that there is no monitoring of the content on [the Internet], and how that will evolve.

That’s great. People read everything. So they learn in some places what’s wrong in other places. You have groups like Media Matters that savage Fox television and constantly dump on anything they are saying. And then you have right-wing groups that do the same to CNN. Read the Drudge Report today. It savages Wolf Blitzer for not being aggressive on Hillary last night in the debate. It becomes a pluralist situation in which the competitive flow of information disciplines the process.

Is that going to change the function of a reporter, of a news-gatherer?

No. It will increase his workload and, hopefully, his compensation. I am not sure how that works, but workload it will.

They have to monitor not just what they read in the newspaper or in a speech or what you see on television; they have to monitor everything that comes across their screen on the Internet.

Yes. When I worked for [Bill] Clinton, I was able to watch every night the excerpts from the three nightly TV news [shows], read five newspapers, and get a summary of the headlines of the 25 leading regional newspapers. And that would give me all of the information I needed. Now it would give me a minimal amount, perhaps 10 percent or 20 percent, of the information that I need.

We are in an era in which in political campaigning two things are true. First of all, those running the campaigns cannot possibly monitor a large portion of what’s being said. And secondly, they neither control it nor generate it. Campaigns have become like a franchise, like McDonald’s. You get the Hillary Clinton franchise. And the Hillary Clinton campaign is a de minimis portion of the amount of positive information generated on behalf of the Hillary campaign. Ninety percent of it arises spontaneously from people who are committed to Hillary, who e-mail their own lists and put it on their own blogs and so on and with her opponents.

But again, there is a question of monitoring, is there not?

Yeah. But the market does the monitoring, because you have both sides. I have never really believed journalistic ethics are that great at monitoring. I think what happens is it’s the competitive reality of each side slashing the other, and news information bouncing back and forth. And it ultimately works out pretty well.

Well, is that going to maximize negative campaigning?

Well, I don’t really believe in the word “negative” campaigning. I believe that if you say negative that isn’t true, you get savaged pretty easily. And I think that the marketplace and competitive political campaigns thwart negative campaigning if it’s inaccurate, and can’t if it is accurate.

But what about Swift Boats?

I think they were right. I think they were absolutely right. And I think the reason Swift Boat was effective was that Kerry was dumb enough to, in his convention, base his whole campaign on what he did in Vietnam, which was at best murky and at worst subject to severe criticism. Who knows what happened in that jungle 30 years ago? But in any case, I am not defending these developments as positive, although I believe they are. I am just characterizing them as inevitable.

Well, you are talking about a whole new world here.

Exactly. It’s as revolutionary of a difference as the transition from the boss-dominated choice of candidates in smoke-filled rooms up until [John F.] Kennedy’s nomination, which was the last example of that, to voter-dominated primaries influenced by media, of which [Barry] Goldwater’s and [George] McGovern’s nominations were the first examples of that.

So the question arises, then, about all of these concerns that have been raised about the process. And I mean not just the matching money that has kept candidates in the ballgame, especially what we call second- and third-tier candidates, but also, the whole debate about the virtues or drawbacks of proliferation of primaries and moving up the head to the front-loading.

Well, the front-loading is a different phenomenon. But I think the key point here is that you follow the progress of Mike Huckabee in the Republican nominating process. He is now second in Iowa, only five points behind Romney. I think he’s going to win Iowa. And I think he’s going to have the campaign that went from like zero money, with nothing, to probably the runner-up to Giuliani for the nomination.

Do you think there is enough time between events, particularly at the front, for there to be that kind of development? Because Jimmy Carter in ’76 had five weeks to build on what happened in Iowa.

I think there is, because I think the whole process speeds up so much. I deplore the incredible front-loading. But I do feel that the intervals are adequate, because everything travels faster. I mean, the main phenomenon we realize these days is that the quantum of information you get in a day, you used to get in three weeks.