Countdown

Home > Interviews > Douglas Sosnik

Douglas Sosnik

Douglas Sosnik served for six years as a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and was White House political director during the 1996 presidential campaign. He was a strategist for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and chief of staff to Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut. Sosnik now works as a crisis-management and strategic-planning consultant. He is the coauthor, with Republican strategist Matthew Dowd and Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, of Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect with New American Community.

Sara Fritz interviewed Sosnik on March 7, 2007.

Tell us about your new book.

Our view was that we are going through a historical transformation in our country due to a variety of things. I’ll quickly get back to what the topic here is, but we think a confluence of events all happened at the same time to create a once-in-a-hundred-years kind of change in our society. And it started with the demographic changes in our country in terms of who we are as Americans and how much different it is now than 30 years ago. Secondly is technology, which I think is directly relevant to this discussion. When Clinton became president, there weren’t 50 sites, as he used to say, on the World Wide Web. And it’s really a critical-mass thing the last couple of years. The third thing is globalization, in part due to technology and how the world is different now. It’s a much smaller place. Fourth was the failure of all of our institutions, including the press, government, sports, Catholic Church. It’s really changed our country.

In terms of how we think about ourselves and how we think going forward, I mean, just as an example, I was trying to check on my passport application for my kid. And I thought we were living in Paraguay. I mean, I called the number. And the automatic number won’t even accept calls. Everything is broken. It’s chaos down at the passport office. And lastly, 9/11, which we thought wasn’t necessarily the event itself that changed the country, but rather a bunch of things were happening. And 9/11 hit at what was a critical point.

Galvanized it.

So the main point is, I think our world is one of these changes in our society that happens once in a generation. An example I’ll often use when I give a speech would be if you went to college — I always exaggerate to make a point — if you went to college in ’63 you were a guy [who] was wearing a coat and tie, and drinking martinis, and listening to Sinatra. And if you were going to college in ’65, two years later, you were wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and smoking pot, and listening to the Beatles. And that was two years’ difference. It might as well have been 30 years’ difference.

I was in college in those years. It changed like overnight.

So we are at one of those points. And I worked in the Clinton White House for six years. And in many ways I worked right down the street six years ago, seven years ago, whenever it was. But in many ways it might as well have been 30 or 40 years ago, 50 years ago, in terms of how much the country is different. And so to tie all of that back into this, I believe this election, people like us and your colleagues who they hired, we are using the old analogy about airline pilots. The best airline pilots aren’t the ones who have been doing it forever, because they think they know everything. And they are not young ones who just started. They don’t know what they don’t know. It’s the ones in the middle. They have been doing it long enough they somewhat know what they are doing. But having been doing it so long, they think they know everything. And so you mentioned earlier about the books that you have written in the past, not necessarily being apt, I suspect for different reasons, you said that.

Thanks.

But I think if you know a lot about politics and have been covering it for a long time, you are probably at a disadvantage of understanding the country going forward. And directly, as it ties into money, which is the point of why I just went through all of that is, money is important in politics. I think the role of money is greatly exaggerated in politics. The fact of the matter is if you can’t organize and raise $10 [million], $15 million dollars to run for president, you have no business running the country. But I think that increasingly a combination of things, starting with technology — and we have never seen technology hit critical mass in a presidential campaign like we are going to see in 2008.

You think it’s going to be . . .

Critical mass. Like everything else in society.

Meaning Internet or what?

Yeah, meaning everything.

In McCain-Feingold, in conjunction with that, I believe this country is dying to be a part of something larger than themselves. This is the first president in history who never tried to bring the country together. Some have tried and failed. He never tried. Part of this is post-9/11. People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be asked to be a part of something. They want to sacrifice. And so they are in the market to find someone who is running for president who they can connect to. And the person who runs and has a message is going to be able to raise enormous amounts of money through the Internet.

The Pew [Research Center for the People and the Press] studies show, I think, that almost a third of the people who gave money to John Kerry in 2004 were never even asked. In the old days — 35 years ago with John Connally, the bag guy for Nixon — you could go get bags of money, $100,000, without any reporting. And then you had a situation up until McCain-Feingold where legally you could raise large sums of money and run it through the party committees. We are in a different world now. And because our politics has been democratized, not only in participation, the Internet enables you to do that. But also to fundraising and the law that I think money, while it’s important, is greatly exaggerated by the elite press. And understanding the role of money in the politics going forward is like the Sinatra/Beatles analogy I gave you — the ‘60s. Going forward, I think, you have to unshackle the burdens of how you view money in politics. You have to decompress from The New York Times’s obsession about money and politics. You used to cover this in the L.A. Times. So this is a brave new world. And I think that the press’s obsession about politics, and money, and the intersection, while it’s not completely wrong, I think it’s a great exaggeration.

You would answer the question that, as we see the amount of money grow, we are not talking about any qualitative difference? In other words, the amount of money needed to run for a campaign doesn’t cause a qualitative difference? Or does it?

What do you mean qualitative difference?

I mean, it doesn’t change politics that there is just endless . . .

Well, politics has changed, but not because of the money.

OK.

But look at everything in our society. Look at kids, the competition to get into college. Look at kids now selling Girl Scout cookies, where they are selling by the cartons. I mean, everything in our society is at a much different pace than it used to be. And a much different scale. And the bar of being successful, going forward, is much higher now on almost everything than it was before, including politics, including the ability to raise money. So campaigns are much more costly now. We have much more money in the system. But the big thing about post-Watergate reforms and politics, the real thing then wasn’t getting money out of politics. All it really did was make disclosure, really. Now, I think in large part because of the Internet, people are able to raise much larger sums of money. And they are also required to because of McCain-Feingold.

I have felt for many, many years now that transparency would be the only thing that would be any good.

Right.

And all the rest of these little changes just make it more complicated.

Right. And then the other thing is, though, if you look at what you can give at a presidential-candidate level, it’s all pegged off of 20 years ago. I mean, they just boosted it slightly. But what the 21, whatever number, that came from when?

’73 or ’74.

So, you are 30 some-odd years later. How much would a loaf of bread cost then compared to now? Gasoline? And so the amount of money that constitutes the max-out is a much smaller amount of money as it relates to people’s capacity to give that amount of money, based on what the value of that money is in 2007 dollars.

And in fact, it seems to me the logical conclusion of that is it is responsible for the time spent raising money.

Yeah.

Every candidate complains, “I have to do three hours on the telephone every day,” or something.

Yes. Right, right. But I see it in airports. I travel a lot. I have been running all of these candidates. They are bouncing from Omaha, to Denver, and raising money. But the Internet — I mean, I don’t know if Hillary raised $1 million in a week or whatever on there — but the Internet now enables you to leverage the candidates’ time much more effectively to raise that money.

Do you think it’s going to eclipse the big-donor thing, just the Internet fundraising?

Of course it will. I don’t know what the numbers were.

A third of Kerry’s stuff, the money came from small donors on the Web. Oh no, you stated with people who had not been asked.

Right.

Which I assume . . .

Most of it probably was from the web.

Are you going to be able to run a campaign primarily on that kind of thing?

Well, I don’t know what the real numbers are. But it was shocking. Actually, you probably did know. If you looked at where the Democratic Party got their money, the Democratic National Committee through 2002, I bet you a vast, disproportionate — I know what it was: It was Jewish, it was labor, and it was people over 65 through direct mail. And trial lawyers. So if you are one of those people, forget the small-donor older people. Put them aside because that was just mailing them and stuff. If you take these other three groups, those numbers are gettable. And they are shocking.

But back in those days, if you were one of those three groups, you had a disproportionate influence in the party. Now, in part because of just the amount of money that had a disproportionate influence, the kind of numbers you have to put up, but also because it has been democratized, by definition — it makes these people that had that disproportionate impact, or at least potentially, based on the fact that it constitutes the donor base — it’s going to be much more watered-down. It’s what it should be.

The way it should be?

Yeah. We are going to democratize. We have a democratized and deregulated politics. The only regulation we have on politics right now is the cap on the amount of money. But basically everything else has been deregulated. And they are opting out of the primary in terms of the match. They are going to opt out of the general. And it’s basically open season.

So if you are a candidate this time around, and you sit down to plan your strategy, how does that change it?

Well, it depends on who the candidate is. I mean, a [Sam] Brownback [or Bill] Richardson strategy is different than a [Hillary] Clinton [or John] McCain strategy.

But let’s assume you have a little bit of a barbell effect in the campaign right now. You have the mega big six [candidates]. And then the other guys [are] just doing the best they can. There is kind of no middle class. But let’s pretend like you are just sort of an average, run-of-the-mill candidate, whatever that means. If I ran a campaign, I would want to do one of two things. One, I have to raise money to show I’m real. And that’s going out and getting the lowest-hanging fruit and putting numbers on the board as a demonstration of my ability to organize and demonstrate that there is support for my candidacy.

I’ll give you an example of some people that get this. The way to raise money beyond that is message-driven. That’s how you raise money. And what people are doing, the best example of that is the announcement. I mean, I always go back for some reason to Phil Gramm. I don’t know if you remember — this is the advantage of talking to someone as old as I am. Remember the Phil Gramm announcement where he had the military procession, and the guns, and saluting? That was the high point of the Phil Gramm campaign. And I don’t remember the John Connally announcement, but I’m sure it was just like it. That was the old days of an announcement.

The way you do an announcement now, and I actually spent a lot time with [New York Times reporter Adam] Nagourney, Nagourney wrote a story on this about two months ago. And he actually wrote a better story than the one I was trying to get him to write on it, and I influenced his story in part. But he wrote a really good story. [John] Edwards did a really good job. He used the announcement of the announcement to engage his supporter base to broaden it, turn his supporters into donors, using the announcement of an announcement as a point of reference from which supporters could go to their friends and build up their donor base. And so that’s a very good and real-time example of how politics is changing. The Internet is what it is, which is tremendous latent capacity to do something. But the point is: What do you do with it? And so, using events like the Edwards example, [Barack] Obama announced when he was going to announce in Illinois. It gave him weeks to set up. Hillary gave a message-driven announcement on her sofa. 

McCain did it . . .

On [Late Show With David] Letterman, yeah. But the main point is, you want to build up a grass-roots support. In part, grass-roots support is expressed through walking door to door, or wherever it is. Part of it is giving money. Part of it is reaching to your friends, and family, and neighbors, which I think increasingly is disproportionate. It’s like the old days before television. I think in the last half a century we have had, I guess, two big elections. We had 1960, which is probably the biggest, which was generational change in our government, advent of television, which changed how we campaigned. So when we talked about politics until the last few years, we never went back to the ’56 Eisenhower reelection. We never talked about the ’52 or the ’48. It was always modern politics started in ’60. That was the beginning of the modern campaign. And I guess the other big lesson, you can argue, is 1980 with Reagan. And that was a change of direction. I think the 2008 election will be the beginning of the postmodern election. I don’t think people will go back to the 2004 campaign like they did the ’56 Eisenhower campaign, at the beginning of postmodern politics. And the Internet, in a way, is analogous to what a TV was in ‘60s.

If what you say is right, I mean, since ’80 we have been talking about appealing to a narrow base of people.

I totally don’t believe that. This is what [Matthew] Dowd, Ron [Fournier], and I wrote in the book.

You don’t believe that was true then?

I think it was true then, but it is the politics of the past.

That’s what I wanted to say. If you are going to be message-driven in your camp, in your fundraising, you can’t possibly be driven by a message that appeals to 2 percent of the people, right?

Wait, wait. You can be message-driven in your fundraising. That’s the whole point of the Internet. You can communicate person to person. So what you do on the Internet or direct mail can be different that what you do in narrowcasting. It’s different than what you do in broadcasting.

Oh, right. I see. So, you can have a whole bunch of narrowcast appeals?

Yes. But what you want to do, though, I believe, is through the Internet get large numbers of people to participate in your campaign actively. And obviously part of that is giving money. But to me, the rules of the road on postmodern politics are: One, they believe anything is bull until you can prove it’s not; they are looking for authenticity. I think once they see something on TV, like a political ad, their buzzer goes off. If it’s all bull, they shut down on it. And not to mention the fact that 50 percent of the people now who watch television don’t even watch broadcast anymore. It is cable, and the lines crossed a few years ago.

But as important is like what happened in 1960 with television, when it took over. We are back to the old days of people going more and more to their friends and their neighbors, their families, their coworkers, getting cues from them in how to personally make a choice on a political candidate. Much the same way as the woman down the hall came to me, because everybody who knows me comes to me, when they are going on a trip somewhere. They know I’ve been a lot of places in the world. And she said: “I am going to these places. What do you recommend I see? Who should I talk to? Where should I stay? Where should I eat?” Whatever. And people do that all of the time and always have, except that the combination of cynicism, the absolute glut of information that people have now, the irony of the information age is that it’s harder and harder to reach people.

And increasingly they are dependent on, as I say, people that they have known and will know — friends, family, neighbors, coworkers — to make the decision. Now people want information. They want it straight. So, if I am a foot soldier for a candidate, I am going to get information to you. I’m going to say: “I am for this guy. You have to make your own mind up. Let me get you some stuff. You decide.” That’s a much more effective communication, I think, than a friend, family, or coworker, than to say: “I am for this guy. Here are some talking points. Here is some spin.” So that’s part of the rules of the road postmodern.

Second is: I don’t think that 35 percent of the people out there, or whatever, are Democrats and 35 percent are Republicans. And you ask where they are, they will answer that. They are both at record lows, by the way. I think you will easily see third and fourth parties in ’08. But I think there is a huge, huge block of voters out there. Again, Dowd and I come to the same conclusion despite our different backgrounds: They aren’t Democrats and they aren’t Republicans. Right now they are probably as likely to vote for Obama or McCain as for anybody else. And in their own minds, they’ll feel quite consistent in that. So, as you are out there communicating to people, it can’t be the spiny stuff. It can’t be the hot-base kind of communications. But you need those base foot soldiers and arm them with civilian messaging.

I have a tiny question as off that point. Did Bush push this into happening? Or has he been the beneficiary of the fallout against it? You understand what I am saying?

Fallout of what?

In other words, he is completely spin and bull-[expletive]. Has he advanced this idea that enough people aren’t listening? Or has he suffered from it?

No. I do believe in the pendulum. And I believe he was the end of the pendulum and he helped push it, but the pendulum was swinging before that.

And if you go back to 1980, NCPAC [the National Conservative Political Action Committee] threw up these negative ads. And if it’s on TV, it’s true. And then, as you started moving into the ’80s, people are like, “Well, just because it’s TV doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.” And so then they started having fact-checking in newspapers, and referees. And I think the sort of open market, say what you want, if you say it it’s true, it’s probably Willie Horton. That’s sort of a peak point of that. And then people started getting their back up a little bit and their guard up. And then it sort of mattered if what you say is accurate or not. And I think that [Bill] Clinton, both the tactics that we used on that, our politics, which is an important thing for these people running for president now, I think we are in sort of what the public wants to see in the back and forth of a campaign. It’s not where it was ten years ago.

The [Hillary] Clinton people, in particular, ought to readjust based on that new reality. But I think the [Bill] Clinton tactics and war-room mentality, which I was part of for six years, the Lewinsky stuff, and then all of the Bush things — in terms of the rationale for going to war, or the whole notion of stripping away all kinds of rights, telling people what they want to tell them, not telling them what they don’t want to tell them, the Libby trial, or whatever — it’s all a continuation of the pendulum having swung and all of these other factors I was talking about earlier.

So we are now coming the other way, which is in television, Letterman’s whole sort of humor. He’s been on a long time now. The whole sort of premise of Letterman’s humor is that this is a television show. This is not for real. And so he takes you behind the scenes. And he’ll throw the card against the glass and it will break. But everyone sees it’s not glass. And so you see all the MTV-style, hand-held-camera kind of reporting and all. People are so far past the highly stylized, artificial manufacture on every aspect of their life, including their politics. And Bush helped that. But it wasn’t just Bush.

I don’t think we’re going to see, however, the end of major network advertising.

No.

But what are we going to see?

You are already seeing it decline. Well, it depends on how you want to keep score. If you are in a deregulated market of people opting out of the primary and the general, which means there is more money being spent in a campaign, you could make an argument that you will see more network. Because there is more money. But if you look at a percentage of money spent everywhere, you see it now in the private sector, Procter & Gamble and all of the rest of these guys, all dialing back their broadcast network spending and putting it in other areas. Every two or three presidential cycles, you have changes in how you run a campaign. And the campaign that figures out the new way you run campaigns and does it is the one that wins, generally.

So, as an example, in the last 20 years, you can take the ’92 Clinton campaign, where [George H.W.] Bush was still running with three networks and Clinton was doing cable and daytime television. And [the Clinton campaign] understood that the world had changed. And Kennedy, obviously, in ’60 with television. The [George W.] Bush campaign in 2004 took $25 million out of broadcast, which was both sides working off of the cap. They spent $25 million less on broadcast network television and put it into cable. And every major Fortune 100 company will tell you that while they still buy at the network, for sure, they are increasingly every year making that a small percentage of their total expenditure.

We see a situation now where, particularly I would say with Hillary and McCain, they are buying up consultants like crazy, almost just to occupy them. Do you think that the consultant class in this town gets what you are talking about?

No. This town is like Hollywood, or Hollywood and movies, and New York and fashion. It’s all about fashion, and what’s hot, and what just worked. And I think most of the people in this town — and I have been in this town a long time — including the consultants, have a view of politics as it was, not as how it is changing. And I think most of your, let’s say, former colleagues in the press will sit down with me and start comparing ’08 to ’04 to ’00 as if these are just a bunch of signposts along this road, as opposed to what occasionally [expletive] happens.

I have little kids. And they have these Etch A Sketches. You shake them and [the image disappears]. We are at an “Etch A Sketch moment” here where just everything’s shaking, everything’s new, everything’s different. So I think that the vast majority of what I call the political-industrial complex, which reporters are a part of, don’t have a clue what we are talking about right now. But they will in 2009, I think, and reinterpret the new world based on what happened in ’08.

I think you see a lot of people realizing that at least. They may not understand it, but they know it’s not the same as ’04.

Yeah. What happens is, you saw it with white redneck southerners — I grew up in the South — in the ’60s and ‘70s who had to memorize to say “Negro” because they were told that’s what you are supposed to say. And they had to memorize, at some point, you say “woman,” not “girl.” Even though they don’t really understand it, you memorize it because you’re supposed to say it. And you see it all the time in business, where business people will tell you, “We have got to run our business much more like it’s a political campaign, with a war room.” They say all that. They have memorized it. They don’t really understand what that means. And you have a lot of people in politics talk about how you got to run campaigns more like a business now. And they say that. But they are memorizing it. They don’t quite know what it means. And I think that saying that you have got to run campaigns different and all, people say that, they know that, but I don’t think they know what that means.

Well, consultants have taken a pretty hard knock in recent years.

Especially Democratic consultants.

And especially several that we could ding. What’s your view of that?

You take it in business, throughout reporting, anything, there are two lines. There is how hard you work, how good you are, and what your recognition is. So you’re like a really hard worker. No one knows who you are. You are really putting points on the board, great reporter or whatever, don’t have a lot of recognition. And then you become famous for some reason. And you start doing TV. And you don’t work anymore. So now this line is all of a sudden of going up here. But your “how good are you” line is coming down. So these lines are never really in sync.

Man, that is Washington.

Right, it’s true. The impact of consultants and the role of consultants were out of sync, where the culture of consultants and politics really took off in the ’80s. But if you back up to your book, what was really different in politics starting in 1980 and before was television. And the cost of television gave people the reason to raise the money.

In sports, you look at how a ballplayer can make $10 million a year now and they used to make $400,000 a year. The answer is television. The TV contracts that the leagues get enable them to pay these guys that kind of money. So the culture of consultants, the impact of consultants, goes back to what I said earlier about the impact of politics, and how you get stuff out there, and the willingness of the public just to take it. So it started in the ’80s and the dominant role of television, which really determined the outcome of where 80 percent of the money went in terms of spending. And spending skyrocketed because of television. The consultants really probably hit a peak, in terms of this one line of impact and influence. I don’t know, probably the ’92 campaign and maybe The War Room, the movie, and maybe Dick Morris on the cover of Time in September of ’96; somewhere around there was the peak. And so the real impact was these people understanding what is going on in the country. That started going down as the culture celebrity of these guys continued to go up. And those lines are out of sync. And they are now readjusting.

You clearly need smart people around you. One of the problems — our strengths are our weaknesses — of the Bush White House is one of its strengths, which is a loyal group of people around the president, [who have] been around him for a long, long time, a very tight core. They don’t represent America. You could have what happened in [Hurricane] Katrina and in Louisiana and for them to not know about it for four or five days because they weren’t in touch with America.

And so as the country is changing, which I believe it’s profoundly changing, to have a really good campaign, you need to have at the top of that campaign enough pieces of what America is to be able to get a sense of what is going on out there, what people want, what they care about. So it’s important to have some consultants as part of that discussion — very important, critical. Still is as it was. However, if you get just a bunch of smart consultants sitting around a table, they have lost the ability to know what’s going on out there. If it was static out there, and it was for a while, you could do that. But in this kind of rapid change that’s going on in this country, a lot of it’s been diffused and decentralized. You can’t have a consultant culture and class that’s running the campaign.

That’s interesting. Because what you see with Hillary and McCain, they have the money to hire everybody. And I thought they were just trying to buy people’s loyalty. But also, it seems to me, you could compare it to the idea of hiring investment managers. It used to be people put their money in the hands of one investment manager. Now, big institutions have dozens of investment managers.

Right, right.

For the very same reason: because you get different points of view, which may be what we are seeing here. If you were running for president right now, what kind of advice would you look for, in this circumstance? You would hire yourself, of course.

I don’t know. [There are] two kinds of people in presidential politics: the ones who know what they are doing and can do it because they have done it, which means they are probably tired and burnt out, like me, or people who want to do it who haven’t done it before. It’s hard to find anybody in that middle; that’s the sweet spot.

So I wouldn’t want to hire too many of me, because I don’t want somebody who can sit around and tell you some great old stories. I think I have, hopefully, done more than some of my colleagues to kind of reinvent myself and stay current. That was the whole point of writing the book. But to answer your specific question, all of these campaigns are about the future, not about the past. I would want to be thinking — and I do this a lot now — I want to think not about what our society was, and to some extent, what it is, but more importantly, the way it will be.

And what I mean by that is: How do people live? Where do they live? How do they get their information? Who is influential in their life in terms of getting information from them? It’s a lot different than it was 15 years ago. And I would clearly want a bunch of really smart under-30 types. If I am running a Democrat, under-30 types are important because they’ll vote Democratic. I don’t understand. I used to be like the marketing person’s dream, because I knew everyone in my age group, sort of what the sweet spot was. I knew how to market. I am completely gone from that world now. So I need to get people for that campaign who understand 30 and under, huge potential. But also to harness this technology we have been talking about.

But back to our book for a moment. So much of what we believe in politics is to understand the person, you have to understand their lifestyle. If you understand their lifestyle, you understand what’s important to them. You understand how to reach them. You understand who is important in their life. So I would want to put a campaign together that’s based on trying to reach what we believe is a disproportionately large number of potential voters that are undecided, not Democrats or Republicans, and much more try to get into the fabric of their daily life both in terms of who is important to them, where they spend their time, how they get their information, where they get their information, and what’s important to them.

That’s interesting.

That’s how I would build a campaign. It’s all built on [heart], not [head].

And obviously, technology gives people a heck of bigger access to the youth vote if they can do it. Do they have the formula for that?

No, I don’t think so.

It’s a challenge, because we call it the youth and we talk about the non-youth. On the youth, I mean, young people don’t watch the network news. They don’t use hard telephone lines. This is a whole different set of where they get their information. On the other hand, technology now enables you to take that building over there, regardless of what your age is, and be able to identify five people on the seventh floor that you want to talk to, and four people on the third floor, regardless of age. So it’s not just an age thing.

But the narrowcasting is what you are able to do.

Yeah.

Let’s talk a minute about 527s, because this has become a very big issue, of the expansion of 527s, and also the idea that they are taking the campaign out of the hands of candidates. Looking at it from your point of view, I can’t figure out where you would come down on that.

Well, first of all, the single most dominant law of politics, I believe, is the law of unintended consequences. So whatever you try to set up, generally the opposite happens. So if you think about when McCain-Feingold was passed, and you talk about how awful the old financial system was, the authors of the old system that was so awful, the PACs and all that — the authors of that were the Watergate reformers. Remember that? So who would have thought that the Watergate-baby reform class of ’76 would be the founding fathers of a system that was dominated by big money and special interests and everything else. So whatever you set out to do, generally the opposite happens in politics.

On 527s, part of what’s happened is, in the land of unintended consequences, regardless of whether it’s a 527, an LLC, an independent expenditure, whatever it is, increasingly people are not only allowed, but actually financially are encouraged to be able to participate in campaigns and have an impact on the campaign outside of the campaigns themselves. And the best example in the last cycle was in Tennessee, in the [Bob] Corker campaign [for U.S. Senate]. It’s a funny thing. Because if you follow the law, what happens, then, in a place like Tennessee is that outside the people can actually have a dominant influence in a campaign. And if you break the law, that means you can tell them what to do, which is breaking the law.

So if you break the law, then outside people aren’t having an undue influence. And if you don’t break the law, you then have, in the case of Corker, these guys who are independent of the campaign — assuming that they didn’t break laws, and there is no reason to think they did. They made a decision to inject race in that campaign by putting [the controversial anti-Harold Ford] ad up. So if you are running the campaign, you are now having people who are outside of your campaign, in many ways, making determinate decisions about your campaign. Now the 527s, in part as a backlash in the Democratic side of 2004, there is a lot of migration away from 527s. If you look at the amount of money spent in ’06 on 527s compared to ’04, there is much less money spent on 527s.

Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

Part of it is misleading though, because it’s a presidential year and a nonpresidential year.

Oh, right.

But there weren’t a lot of Democratic 527s in ’06. And in fact, there were more for Republicans. But again, it’s like water always finds its way to get where it’s going to get. Like money in politics, there are other places that money has gone other than the 527s: [501](c)4s, [501](c)3s, LLCs. But at least on the Democratic side, there has been a pullback, a pause. I mean, we had ACT [Americans Coming Together], which raised and spent almost $150 million, I think, in 2004. There wasn’t that kind of money out there in 2006.

What do you think we are going to see? Now we have a presidential campaign.

Well, I think in a deregulated environment, the campaigns will get the money. Why not?

Why not?

Yeah.

If they are not taking — you are right. Good point.

But big donors will have to park . . .

If they are not limited in what they can spend.

Well, right. But you are still under limits on what you can give.

So if you want to give $50,000, you are still going to have to give it to a 527 or something.

Yeah. They will have a role. But I think at the end of the day, let’s just say that one of the major candidates is going be the nominee of each party. And everybody is talking about what, $500 million? Is that sort of what the numbers being bandied about each side [are]? So that’s a billion dollars total. The price of being a 527 and having an impact in that environment has gone way up in terms of if you want to have that kind of impact, that means you have got to be spending 10 times what it was in ’04 just because of the political environment being so contaminated by so much of this other money.

You come out on the opposite side of so many things.

I always tell people I don’t know if I am right. I can guarantee I’m different. I actually, coincidentally, believe it. And you may want to talk to [Matthew] Dowd.

I have to go buy your book now.

Yeah. All of what I am saying is really kind of party-neutral. It doesn’t necessarily accrue to the benefit of the Democrats, my point of view on any of this.

What worries you in this mix? A lot of what you have painted here is good stuff.

Well, I worry, though, that there is a big gap between the possibility of being a president and getting to the point of affording the ante. In other words, I am a big believer that if you can afford the ante, then all of this other stuff becomes much more secondary, whereas you have got enough table stakes to be able to give to the table, get out there and mix it up, make your points.

This price of the ante has really gone up.

Right. That’s the thing that worries me the most in terms of closing opportunity. And once you get the ante, then I think all of this navel-gazing about money and politics just missed the whole point. And the price of the ante has gone up, in part, because of competition in the nomination. But it’s also going to go up because of the need to keep the pressure on it.

You are basically going to a national primary now beginning in February, if you get California, and Florida, and New York, and New Jersey, and Illinois, all of these big states. So I worry a lot about [candidates] being able to afford the ante. And I worry a lot less than most people about if you can handle the ante, what happens next.

That’s an interesting point of view. I think that’s why you have this barbell effect that you are talking about; the ante is so high. What about voter fraud as a tactic, the whole business of either side using its power to eliminate access or using the complaint that [its voters] have been denied access?

I think it was outrageous what happened in 2000. And I think history will be very clear on what happened, and why, and the impact, and the intellect. I mean, it is not voter fraud at the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court’s politicizing of what went on. And that will be a scar on our nation’s history in terms of electoral politics. Kids sitting in classrooms 100 years from now, and teachers talking about the 2000 election, people aren’t going to believe that.

Having said that, I actually think we have one big problem that’s not getting fixed, which is that the states’ rights/local rights role in voting is such that we do live in a Third-World country. I mean, the fact that you have these eminent domains of every locality deciding how you vote, and hiring people that are not qualified to watch over it, and it’s a ridiculous system that begs these kinds of problems. It’s shocking the fact that American Express right now could, in two minutes, analyze for you on the phone how you spent your money in the last 10 years, on which subgroup and how much was spent, in which city. They can tell you what time of day. They can tell you everything you need to know in two minutes. But we can’t figure out, in the same country, how somebody could cast a vote and make sure the screen works right and goes to the right place. I mean, it’s just incomprehensible. And that’s sort of spreading out.

It’s getting worse because it’s not getting better. We are in as bad of a position in the country in 2007, in terms of integrity of the system, confidence in the system, after what happened in 2000. I mean, the notion that we’ve gone six years now, and here we are, or here we aren’t, it’s pretty shocking. And that’s the real issue. However, putting that aside, overall I think the 2000 election is the exception. It’s not the rule. When you had ’60 in Illinois, with Kennedy and Nixon, which is questionable. You had Johnson’s first Senate election.

I think we are just more attuned to it in some sense.

Right. Exactly. However, I think overall, thinking 50 years from now, we are much more toward Oregon today, which is that Election Day is going to be a day that people don’t vote. It’s a day that people count. I think you are going to knock down the barriers of people voting. Increasingly people are voting not on Election Day, but in absentees or whatever. I mean, you literally don’t vote in Oregon on Election Day. It’s all done by Election Day. So that’s the trend. I believe, overall, that we are going to have more democracy and participation, making it easier for people to vote, not harder. And the voting numbers are going up. It’s not fashionable to say that, but I think it’s a 4 percent increase from 2006 compared to 2002.

And in 2004 – 2000, I think there were 10 million more people that actually voted. It’s not fashionable to talk about more participation and more interest. But it’s true.

Well, if what you say is happening, and if the participation of small donors and that kind of thing is happening, it’s got to be.

Of course it is. And I believe that in 2008 we’ll continue that increase in participation. I think people will understand the stakes are so high that they can’t afford not to be involved. If I am right, you’ll have third-, fourth-, and fifth-party people running. While the numbers may go down for the two major parties, the total number will go up. And I think people realize that they can’t afford not to participate now.

One last question, and then if you want to say anything more about the press.

I think there is an institutional, structural problem with the press. And then there is the problem with the press. The institutional structural problem with the press is that the newspaper business, as we all know, is dying.

It’s falling, right. And I would imagine if you are a campaign, you don’t get the same reporters showing up every day like you used to.

Well, you can’t physically. I mean, it’s a major victory for a campaign right now to get a major newspaper reporter to go out and cover an event. Forget about whether you get a good or bad article, just getting them to show up, because they have twelve options, or whatever number of options.

But it gets back to what I said earlier. Increasingly, people don’t get their information from newspapers or the news. There is hardly any news even if you watch the news. And so increasingly, that’s why I think lifestyles are so important. The Bush people bought closed-circuit television in gyms in 2004 because they had analyzed that their supporters, through their lifestyle, disproportionately worked out. And so they bought closed-circuit television in gyms to go talk to those people. So everyone in our society has less influence now than it used to in terms of bigfoots.

So the press is not equipped to be as good as they were, because the resources aren’t there. So that’s the structural problem. I am shocked, as someone who has dealt with reporters for 30 years, [as to] the quality of the people who are “top reporters” in this country, comparing them with who were 15 or 20 years ago. I mean, there are a few smart television people. But pretty much as you move from print to electronics, the level of knowledge goes way down. So that’s the structural thing on the press.

The press part of the press is that most people who cover politics are just saddling up for another campaign. And they are looking to the rearview mirror of the past to cover the future. And I think that’s OK if things aren’t happening in our society. But I think that so much has happened, as I said earlier, to bring about this change, that it’s almost like walking around in Germany in the late ’80s and talking about East Germany. It’s had such a fundamental change.

And I don’t think the press gets that. And our society is really changing. Now most of the reporters who are the top of the field have been at it for a while. They know too much about the way the world is. They are too far removed from how the world has changed technologically and all the rest and everything else. And they view things from a fixed point. I could mark it every day. I could just show you articles about the caught in past, fighting the last war.

Well, in fact, my worldview is different than it was when I worked for a newspaper.

Right. Well, you were a short-order cook. You guys didn’t get to pick when your papers came out. You had to cover something every day.

There was a kind enforced worldview. And that’s still going on, I think.

Well, that’s why papers, though there are not a lot left, but that’s why they want to move you around to different beats.

In the last ten years, I have spent eight weeks doing presidential politics. And I just did the last two months of the Kerry campaign. I have spent time in politics. I have spent time away from them. I am, I think, probably far better equipped to better understand the world of politics now from the fact that I have spent all of this time out of it. And part of it’s the same when you cover it.