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Ed Rollins

Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist, directed Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. He was a co-chair and campaign manager of Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign and worked in the administrations of presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Reagan. In December 2007, subsequent to this interview, Rollins was named chairman of Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign.

Jules Witcover interviewed Rollins on August 9, 2007.

I would just like to get your thoughts on the state of campaign finance law, whether it can be salvaged, whether it should be salvaged, whether it can be changed in any useful way.

Well, I think there’ll be lots of gnashing of its teeth when this one is over, because more money will be raised and spent than ever before. I think the primary problem with the old system — you and I go back a long ways, since ’72, when they had the Watergate abuses. They put the law in.

Well, wasn’t there some kind of a law before?

There was. But it was a very weak law. The old law was, you couldn’t take corporate money, or you couldn’t take labor money.

And that was it?

That was pretty much it. As a matter of fact, the [Lyndon] Johnson campaign was run out of the White House; they even set up a headquarters. The Nixon campaign, Attorney General Mitchell was the campaign manager for a year. And Maurice Stans was the commerce secretary, who actually raised money as the commerce secretary and would send out letters for fundraising on the commerce letterhead. And Mitchell would send letters as the attorney general and campaign manager on the attorney general’s [letterhead].

I didn’t realize this until I was trying to put the stuff together for ’84, because I was running California for them. And it was crazy; every three days we got a stack of memos. I went to this guy, Rob Odle, who was the chief administrative officer, and I said, “Do you have any of those old files?” And he said, “I have been waiting 20 years for someone to come and ask me for the files.” He said, “Nixon told me to make three copies.” And I said, “Three copies, why?” And he said: “Well, once for the public record, which would be his record. One for the court record, which they would come take. One for you to hide in your attic, so when they have those two in court for 25 years, somewhere there’ll be a real record.”

So he had all of these memos stacked. And I started going through them, just out of curiosity. And here were the Justice Department memorandum, John Mitchell, Attorney General, campaign manager, for like a year. And what became very clear to me was, Mitchell wanted to run a $50 million campaign. Put his budget together for $50 million in ’72. And he kept saying to Stans, who was a separate committee, “You have got to raise me $50 million.” Stans says, “I can’t raise you $50 million; $35 [million] is the tops.” So Mitchell started saying, “Well, if you can’t do it, I’ll do it.” These are letters going back.

So he went on and started doing the private. And they raised all of this money — illegally raised it — foreign money, everything. Nixon, I think, spent $100 million to win, where he could have won with yard signs against [George] McGovern. They put in this law in which it was public financing. And you had to live within limits. The weakness of that law was not that there is not enough money in the general election. You could still run a general election with the federal money you get. It gives you enough money to move your candidate around and run enough advertising to be competitive.

What you can’t do is set up 50-state organizations, which they don’t do anyway. But where there was not enough money, and where the rubber really hit the road was in the primaries. And what occurred in every primary, you had very stringent limits as to what you could spend in each state.

So the problem was always in the primaries, where you would have a place like New Hampshire that you can only spend so much money, but there is so much focus on it, so you would put staff and everything else in Boston, surrounding states. And if you were in a contested primary, in all probability you would run out of money before you got the convention.

And every campaign, up until about ’84, wasn’t challenged and ran out of money. We ran out of money with Reagan in ’80. Ford and Reagan both ran out of money in ’76. [Jimmy] Carter had no money. [Walter] Mondale, same way. And so changes really need to be made if you wanted to continue the public financing, to somehow make sure there are enough resources to run an adequate campaign — not like they’re going to do this time, but an adequate campaign. And that was not there.

So I think that’s what sort of tempted people to say: “OK. I am not going to take the matching funds. I am not going to handicap myself. I can go out and raise this money and give me far more flexibility.” And I think that sort of became the [norm] once Bush walked in, which is really the breakdown of it, when Bush came in 2000.

And very many serious Republicans were going to run. A lot of the governors, people like [Frank] Keating [of Oklahoma], [George] Pataki [of New York], and others. And Bush walked in and said: “Well, $35 million is what it’s supposed to take to win the primary. Here is my $35 million.” Plumps it down the first quarter. And then someone else said, “Well gee, I got $3 million.” “I got $4 million.”

Yeah. Where’s the exit?

Yeah. And so they all got out. And then he said, “Well, I think I can raise $50 [million] or $75 million.” And once he had started that fundraising — which is really his father’s operation which had been in effect for 25 years with Robert Mosbacher doing it — it really became, why go back to the old system? We can raise it.

Well, why wasn’t anybody able to do that in earlier cycles? Nobody either tried to do it or couldn’t do it?

We thought about doing it in ’84. We were the first ones to run since that law had gone into existence without a challenge. So the FEC lawyers were telling me I couldn’t spend any of the primary money, which is about $20 million I got from the federal government. I couldn’t spend that money because I didn’t have a challenge. So I basically said to them: “If you are telling me I can’t, I’ll just go out and raise the money. I’ll not live by your laws.” And then they went back. And they reinterpreted laws. And they said, “As long as you are spending it ahead of wherever you are doing.” We did voter registrations.

Couldn’t you just get out and get somebody to run?

The truth of the matter is we could have raised unlimited money. We raised all the money we needed in three mailings of the national committee list. But we also made a determination that we thought there was a limited amount of money out there. And why should we be taking the money away from the Senate candidates and House candidates? And we were not in a serious challenge at that point in time.

But I think, at this point in time, the real question is going to be, do they waive the money in the fall? And it’s $80-plus million this time, which is a big chunk of money to say, “No. I don’t want it. Thank you very much,” because it really is enough to run a campaign. And the Supreme Court is now putting enough loopholes in the McCain-Feingold law that you can do a lot of things. You can have two ends in the Republican National Committee. One end is the soft money, who hires an Ed Rollins. And you say, “You go help elect whoever the candidate is, but you can never talk to the campaign.” I’ll say: “Thank you very much. Give me the money.” So it’s really a big loophole.

But I think if they don’t take the money in the general — which Hillary [Clinton] will be the one to be tempted to, because I think she is raising so much money and continued to raise so much money. My sense for her [is she will] have to wait until September after she’s the nominee to get the $80 million [public grant].

So will that be the incentive, because you couldn’t get a hold of the money soon enough?

You cannot get the money until you are the nominee. You literally have to wait until you are. And whichever one goes first; it used to always alternate back and forth. And we always wanted to go later, and that would give us three or four more weeks to spend our money than it would the Democrats who had all of this debt. They would have to pay their staff, put everybody back on payroll, and certainly spend at least a month, so you get a four-month, three-month budget. They would spend more of it than at that point in time. So I think this may be the end of it this time. If [Hillary] breaks it, I’m certain that whoever the Republican is will break it, too.

Well, yeah. I have heard some people say, “Well, there is only so much money you can spend in two months.” And so you don’t need that much.

Yeah. I will argue that premise that you don’t need that much. What I will argue is, you can spend unlimited amounts of money. We have now run two races that cost almost a billion dollars: two presidential races in which we have only put on television about 14 or 15 states. Had you lived in New York or California, you never saw a TV ad. So if you really wanted to go spend money everywhere, you would basically . . .

So that’s where the money would go?

It’s all television. Today you move the candidate around. And if you are the president, you have Air Force One. If you are not the president, you have a chartered airplane. They both have chartered airplanes this time. And then everything else is television and overhead. But you don’t run organizations. It’s not a grassroots organization in California or anything else. It’s all television, mail, and now the Internet, which is cheap compared to television.

When you look at television, to run a full week of television in California, television-radio is about $5 million a week; to run in New York is about $3 million a week. And then you throw a radio component in; it’s half a million dollars a week in California to hit most of the voters you need to talk to. So you are really talking a lot of money, and it takes three, four weeks to penetrate a message. We’ll see that in this primary season, Super Tuesday, when you have all of these idiotic states up on one day.

So Ed, is another impact of frontloading that it leaves that long period of time after the nominee is chosen to stay alive?

To stay alive and live off the land. I mean when you really bust everybody to have as much money as possible to be able to nominate — by March 1, 70 percent, 80 percent of the delegates are picked. So either you are in, or you are out, at that point in time. And in all probability, you have maxed out your donors. It takes years and years and years to build mail lists and donor lists and all of those. And there are way more people than I ever thought before who were willing to give the maximum. Because there are more people who are well-to-do and more people participating in the game.

But there is never going to be one like this one. And so my sense is, if you want to keep control of your campaign, and you don’t want to let all the independent committees who are out running in the name of Hillary Clinton ads and everything else, and you really want to drive your own message, my sense is March 15 she’ll say: “Let’s just keep going. Go raise all the money you can. And we’ll spend it in the fall,” which will force the Republicans to do the same thing.

But then you still are going to have the independent expenditure groups and 527s.

You will.

How, as a campaign manager, do you get a handle on those?

Legally, you can’t get a handle on them. Let’s say I’m running a campaign. I can’t talk to you. Whoever is doing an independent expenditure can never plan, never strategize. But I can have my donors, one of my finance chairmen — it’s all the same money group — say: “Listen. Go hire Jules, my buddy. And he knows what I am doing. And we never have to communicate.” And he basically goes out. And I’ll say, “Jules, you take the attack; I’ll do the positive,” or vice versa. And you try and say the same thing.

Is it also done that a campaign manager will leave something that needs to be done undone, so that a 527 or an independent expenditure group can pick it up?

I would never do that.

Why not?

I feel that I have to build. I have never been in a campaign that I have had a serious candidate with real money, from Election Day, back. And I have always had more money in then end than anybody else’s.

Now the dynamic that has changed this time, Jules, is the absentee ballots. Literally, probably a third of the country votes by absentee ballots. In a state like California that has an early primary, there will be people getting their ballots in December. And they will be voting before Iowa or any of the rest of it.

So it’s not like the old days, where you really put your best stuff, your hits, everything, the last two weeks of the campaign. Because you may have a third of the electorate already voted. So you really have to have a very sustained [campaign]. You have to know who your voters are. You have to hit them with mail. You have to have a really full-scale campaign. So for me to say, “OK, I want them to do that.” I am not sure it will ever get done.

They may not do it the way you think it needs to be done.

Absolutely. I mean, to me, any of the corporate money or anything, that’s an add-on. The Swift Boats got a lot of play last time. [John] Kerry still would have lost. He ran a miserable campaign. And I think the reality is, I can’t ever show any evidence of any campaign that someone has won because of the special effort of the special outside money. And if anything, it will often dilute your message and confuse voters. I mean if someone thinks it’s my campaign, and it’s a dirty, nasty spot, my candidate is going to get blamed for it even though we don’t have anything to do with it.

What about the possibility of some of these second-string candidates or second-tier, third-tier candidates, to survive the first group of contests with matching money?

Well, the example now is [John] McCain talking about taking matching money. The probability is, you can’t get the matching money until January. McCain is absolutely out of money. I mean he is running on empty. So what you can do is, you can go to bank and get $6 million that he would get for the match, which you could get matched up to $250 per contribution. Somebody gives you $2,300, and you can get $200 [from the] federal government for that $2,300.

So he has about $6 million that he could get in matching funds in January. He can go to a bank and borrow $6 million and get it today, so he is actually spending money he is supposed to be spending in January to basically keep himself running, which just puts him further and further in debt.

In essence, come January, when he gets that $6 million, he has to show that he’s spending that $6 million. So even though I have the money today, and I spent the money today, it doesn’t count as far as the Federal Election Commission is concerned. If my campaign is out of gas, and I have quit, I don’t get that $6 million. If I don’t spend that $6 million, which they audited, then I have to pay it back. So it’s keeping him alive to fight another day. But it’s not a very good strategy.

So in answer to your question, could some of these people in a low end take the matching funds? Sure they could. I mean none of them have raised enough money that it makes any difference now.

But in addition to getting the matching money, you have a lot of exposure this time around over a long period of time, that you didn’t have in previous elections, because of all of these debates. 

Right, and it’s because we’ve all dreamed of it. I hate to even say it. You could have the possibility of someone not getting the nomination in this early stage, in which you have two or three candidates basically splitting it up. [Barack] Obama really runs a serious campaign and gets votes and Democrats are proportional, so that in every state, it gets split up by depending on your vote.

We have 20 states that are winner-take-all. But you take California, and it’s always been the biggest winner-take-all for Republicans. Now it’s divided up by congressional district. So if you win in San Francisco as a Republican, you get the same three delegates that you win if you get Orange County. It’s congressional district by congressional district. And then the person who wins the state gets the two for the Senate. So it could be 10 here, 15 here, 10 somewhere else.

So you could have a situation where, coming out of that pack of states, [there is] a split decision. [Do you think] that anybody who would hang on by the skin of his teeth could then still be a player?

I’ll just run you through my assessment. I think McCain is done. I think John is finished. I think he is not going to raise money. He is a tired candidate. Just watch him sliding back in the polls. And polls are just an indication of momentum. But his momentum is going backward. And nothing is going to jump-start him. He is on the wrong side of all the issues as far as the base. And he looks old and tired. So I think he’s done.

I think [Mitt] Romney — if [Fred] Thompson ever gets off his ass and gets in the race — and [Rudy] Giuliani are going to be the three finalists on our side. Mike Huckabee has made a lot of favorable impressions. But I don’t think he gets in the race. What could happen on our side, though? If for some reason Giuliani becomes the nominee, I could easily see the right-wing running a third-party candidate, a Pat Buchanan-type.

Getting in that late?

Well, they get in through an independent. They would run as an independent. And for a couple million dollars, you can go in and wreck havoc on Giuliani and run as the “Christian Conservative.” And that could be Huckabee or someone like that. And that would easily pull 10 percent, 12 percent away from Giuliani or from the Republican base. I don’t see that happening on the Democratic [side].

But on the Republican side, that would be basically a spoiler situation.

But I don’t think the right-wing would care. I think if Giuliani’s the nominee, I think let’s go over the cliff; I want someone that I would go vote for. And I am never going to vote for that guy. I think Romney, and I think [Fred] Thompson would be fine. But I think Giuliani could easily draw that animosity. And major players have said they won’t vote for him.

I don’t think it’s going to be someone that’s a big name or credible, but it could be a Huckabee. And he would run as an independent, so we could have a four-person race. And then if [Michael] Bloomberg gets in, obviously, that changes the dynamics dramatically. But I think on the Democrat side, it’s Hillary’s to lose at this point in time. And I don’t see any reason for her to lose it. But Obama’s giving her a great race. I mean he really is. He is a candidate for the future.

I was up in Chicago months ago. I went to [his] headquarters. They have 150 people working full time already. So it’s serious.

He is the candidate of hope. I mean he really is. He has the biggest crowds, 10,000, 15,000 people. He has been the number-one fundraiser all the way through. There are a lot of young people very enthusiastic about him. But in the end, if he doesn’t get it, he doesn’t become the vice president; I don’t think he would be a good choice. I don’t see him walking away from his party. I really think he gets behind Hillary, and they go on to victory. But I think this guy is a player for the long term. And I think it’s a very positive thing for America.

On our side, Romney is running the classic Republican race. The disadvantage he has is, obviously, he is a Mormon. People have made a bigger deal out of that than they could. And he had some misstatements in the past that he’s had to correct. But he is handsome. He is solid. He has a good record as governor. He has had a series of accomplishments. I think he wins the Iowa straw poll big this week. I think he wins Iowa and New Hampshire. He has the resources. I mean he has told people he’d put $75 million of his own money into this race. That clearly gets him through Super Tuesday and in a very credible way.

[Fred] Thompson is going to have a hard time raising money. It’s hard to raise money. And you can’t just jump-start it. It’s a very tedious process. I’ll never forget McCain, who lined up all of these big-money guys in San Francisco when he announced, and in New York when he announced his candidacy, where I live now. And it was Henry Kravis. I said: “This is the old politics. This isn’t the new politics. All of these guys can give this $4,600: $2,300 for the primary and $2,300 for the general. What you need is someone who has a thousand friends that he can hold a fundraiser for, and a thousand friends will come.” There aren’t very many people who can do that.

Who do you think is behind the [Fred] Thompson thing? There is a lot of money in Tennessee. There has been a lot of money raised in Tennessee.

[There are] a lot of very substantial money-raisers in Tennessee. I mean you go back to the history; it’s been a very strong state. And as a matter of fact, most of the $3.5 million he raised is right out of Tennessee. But once again, those guys are old. I mean they’re our generation.

I look today where McCain announced that Bob Mosbacher is going to be his fundraising chairman. And Bob is 81 years old. He was the best in the business when he did it, but he hasn’t done it in 20 years. That’s an old donor base. Is he going to get on the phone and do like he used to do? I mean it’s a nice honorary name. And I love Bob. Bob’s a very dear friend of mine. But he doesn’t have the rolodex that he can roll out. He doesn’t know the people. It’s a whole different game today.

So my sense, in the case of the Tennessee fundraisers, the guys we grew up with are not still there — the Rogers and all the rest of them who did so well. But I do think Fred’s name ID has a big presence. He is a smart guy. He is charismatic. I think he is just getting battered and bruised here before he could start.

Bill Lacy is going to run [Thompson’s] campaign; he was one of my guys in the White House and worked for me both in the campaign and the White House. He is a very good nuts-and-bolts guy. He is not a big visual guy. But right now they need to get the thing started. And he’ll do that. He’ll do that.

Ed, what role did Clement Stone play in the concept of fundraising?

Nixon?

He was kind of the poster boy for the people who were always complaining about how much money Nixon was raising. He didn’t raise that much, did he? Or give that much? He gave them $3 [million] or $4 million?

Well, it may have been a little bit more than that. But the Nixon people raised big chunks. I mean it was always, want to raise $10 million, $5 million, $6 million. I always like to tell the story of how Ronald Reagan started off. And I don’t know, even, if you’ve heard the story. In 1964 Reagan made the speech supporting [Barry] Goldwater. And Reagan had actually been a Democrat until about 1962. So everybody wanted him to run. He came out of some of the ashes of the ’64 campaign. And he is going to run for governor, totally inexperienced at politics, but obviously a great communicator.

So [there was] this guy named Holmes Tuttle. And Holmes was an Oklahoman who had moved to California as a young man and became the biggest car dealer in California. He was the Ford dealer, had exclusive rights to Ford, and became a multi-multi-millionaire, a wonderful, wonderful man. He is now dead. Plus he owned all of this land, all of these orchards, the car lots, which I think ended up being Beverly Hills.

So Holmes sat down [with] a guy named Stu Spencer. And Stu was the first of the political consultants. He worked for the party in California. Actually, he had been a recreation director. I always say that’s where he learned his skills to blow the whistle and make sure the kids get out of the pool.

So Holmes put together a lunch, and he put 10 people around the table. And he asked Stu, “What’s it going to cost to run for governor?” Stu said, “I don’t know, $2.5 million, $3 [million], $3.5 million.” And Holmes says: “All right. There are 10 of us here. Here is my check for $350,000. I expect everybody else to write a check.” These 10 guys, which all went on to be his kitchen Cabinet, wrote $3.5 million worth of checks. And they never raised another penny. He turned it over to Stu, and Stu ran the race. And it was about $3.1 million.

That’s for governor.

For governor. But I always say, that’s the easy way to do it. But I think Stone was always one of the — there were five or six guys. But Nixon was always quick to go to him. And the problem with Nixon — it wasn’t just campaign money — they were always looking for money for something. They always had a pet project somewhere to redo the San Clemente, to redo this, to redo that. So the hand was always out. It wasn’t just campaign finance.

The public impression is that campaign contributors go to the candidate and say, “I’ll give you ‘x’ dollars, and I want you to do this.” How often, in your experience, does that actually happen?

Never. Never. What I have had people do to me is, they’ll say, “If you’ll do a fundraiser at my house and have a picture with my kids, I’ll give you $250,000.” You obviously know who your friends are, who have raised money for you. I have been in four administrations and two different White Houses. I have never seen someone walk in and say: “Here is a big donor. We need to take care of him.” That doesn’t mean they won’t get their issue heard.

I think the most flagrant of the money, probably since the Johnson-Nixon era, which was the earlier era where everybody did it, was the Clintons. I am not being derogatory toward them; just everything was for sale. A night in the Lincoln bedroom, the donors ride in Air Force One. I had the Karl Rove job. And I had all kinds of people come to me asking me for the same things. I’ll raise $100,000, or I’ll do this, and just let me have one night in the White House. Invite me to a state dinner. And you’d just have to draw the line and say no, absolutely not.

Wasn’t there a time, prior to Watergate, when the candidates were handed cash money on the spot in an envelope or . . .?

Cash. Oh, absolutely. I can just tell you, the Nixon campaign of ’72 was all cash. [Lyn] Nofziger and I were running California. And I kept saying: “What’s the budget? Tell me what the budget is.” And they said: “Whatever it takes. This is the president’s state. He lost this state to [Pat] Brown for governor. He does not want to lose the state.” Guys would come out with, literally, cash. They’d open it up. And they would run all of this money, millions of dollars through Mexico, as you recall.

So how was that solicited, though, in those days, and how was it delivered?

Well, I assume it was delivered in cash. I told the story in my book [Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics], which I’ll repeat here. When I was in the Philippines doing a presidential race after Aquino, this guy came up to me. There were two brothers who were congressmen who came up to me, and he said: “Oh, you ran Reagan’s campaign. I am Congressman so-and-so. And I was the finance chairman for Marcos. I was the guy who arranged the $10 million in cash.”

He mentioned the guy’s name, who you know very well. And I said: “You gave $10 million in cash. We can’t take foreign money. And that never got to our campaign.” And he said: “It never got to your campaign? I flew to Hawaii. I delivered it myself.” And I said: “It didn’t happen. I mean it may have happened. But it didn’t come to the campaign. The campaign is all American money. No foreign money is allowed.”

But I think that habit had gone on for a long period of time. And this particular had been on the Nixon group and knew where to go. And Maurice Stans, who obviously was a great solicitor of money, I think to a certain extent went and said, “You want to give us $100,000; we’d prefer it in cash.” And there was a lot of money run through Mexico in that campaign.

But do you think money is cleaner now and more available?

There is more money available. There is no question there is more money available. It’s definitely cleaner. I mean you see no examples of someone basically saying, “Here is a $100,000 in cash.” The individual limit, which is now $2,300, you may get your family of 10 and say: “Here is my cousin. And here’s $23,000.” Or, “here in my law firm, I basically just raised you $100,000 from my 50 partners.”

But there is no red dairy down the road here that’s basically saying, “Here is $200,000 for the milk fund,” which obviously had gone on in the past. I have always felt — up until this time where the money has been raised to $2,300, it used to be $1,000 the maximum since the ’70s — for $1,000, or even now for $2,300, you get good government. I give you $2,300, I get good government.

If I am a CEO of a company, I’m IBM, and I give you $1 million in soft money, I expect something back. And that’s what happens; the VP for governmental affairs, what have you, says the convention wants $1 million. And this one wants $1 million for the inaugural. And this one wants $1 million. And I sit there and I go: “I have just given them $4 million. I want something. They are doing a tax bill up there. Get your ass up there and get that tax bill modified or something.”

I think the expectations get higher the more money that you give. And equally as important — and this has really been since the [George H.W.] Bush era — I mean Reagan, we took the matching funds. And we never had a soft dollar spent anywhere in our campaign. We spent exactly what the federal money was and didn’t need any more.

But I think starting in ’88, soft money, they started looking for the loopholes in the law. And I think it’s been looking for loopholes ever since. I think the attempt to close it with McCain-Feingold was not a well-written piece of legislation. I think the courts now just opened it up, too. If you follow sort of the way they have written, they believe freedom of speech is freedom of speech, and whatever you want to spend on freedom of speech, you can spend. But I think the idea of campaign finance of limits is pretty much outdated.

You don’t think there is any prospect of putting together a new or amended law that would enable candidates who don’t have a lot of money to be players?

What happens today is, the system works well for those who are here; the ones who always require reform are the ones who aren’t here.

So what about the idea of a real public financing? Will it ever happen?

It’s never going to happen, because the incumbents are never going to vote for it. They are never going to give; it’s always a system that works for you once you get there. And they are the ones who have to write the laws. There is just not enough public outrage to [change it]. I mean as upset as the public may get at a point in time, it goes away.

I was going to ask you, do you think this question about money and politics is something that is a voting issue, that people really care that much?

No. I have tested it a thousand different ways. And I think the vast majority of Americans think they are all the same. They are a little crooked. Sort of like the National Football League, there is a National [conference] and an American [conference], but they all play football. And it doesn’t matter who are Republicans or Democrats; they are all going to do it the same way when they get there. I think there have been several instances in which I really thought the issues were going to be hot issues: the corruption of Duke Cunningham, those kinds of things. And they just go away.

What about the clamor for public disclosure?

I think that’s alive and well.

Do you think the average voter wants to know where that money comes from?

I think there is enough pressure on members of Congress. I don’t think the average voter cares. I think the average voter just doesn’t. I go back to the premise I just said. But I do think that the members of Congress know they are very unpopular and don’t want to do public financing, [but] are willing to do something. And public disclosure, to them, that’s good government.

That’s our idea — I am a lobbyist. I give ‘x’ amount of money. I have to disclose it. And I think they are willing to do that. Once again, the sums are not so large that they can’t disclose it. I mean $2,300 from Tommy Boggs given to 20 members of Congress is not so outrageous as a Clement Stone.

So the contributors aren’t that concerned about it either?

No, they are not. As a matter of fact, they are kind of bravado. They want to make sure they get their credit. We live in a very affluent society, and those guys want to make sure that they know they are “pioneers” or “team 100” or whatever the term might be, so I don’t think they have any qualms about that.

Why do you think nobody ever thought of that whole concept of pioneers, rangers, whatever, in a big way before George W. [Bush]?

I think, partly, we didn’t need it. It sounds absurd today, but I never let money people in the White House. I let them each have one event. There were three national committees. There is a national committee, there is a congressional committee, and there is a Senate committee. And I let them each have one reception in the White House for their big donors.

The Republican National Committee had an Eagles [level], which is $15,000, when I was there. They got one event a year. And they would all bitch and moan; they wanted to be there every other week. And I would say, “No, you get one event a year.” And the same way to the other two groups. That doesn’t mean the president wouldn’t do some events outside. But we did not make, basically, that White House a political entity.

Then I limited the number of events that he did as president. I would say on the Senate committee, we are going to go deal with 10 senators this year. And you give me the names that you think are in the trouble or the best shots. That’s it. No more. It’s not going to be 20. We’ll do 10 events. Now I was always mindful: I had lived through Watergate. I had lived through the Johnson era. And I wanted Reagan to always be viewed as a president — not as just a political leader — who was doing good government.

I think, to a certain extent, once they started these “team 100s” and the “pioneers,” the demand just became so high and the price tag went up so much. I mean it’s one thing if you give $15,000 and you come from San Francisco, and you get one event at the White House and nobody else gets it. But if you give 10 times that or 20 times that, and you say, “What’s the difference if the guy who gave $15,000 has been in the White House; I should be in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

I think that’s what happened. I think Clinton was always worried about losing. And I think, to a certain extent, the Terry McAuliffes of the world were very good, very effective at fundraising and really used every tool at their disposal. I’ll be very honest with you. The committee would come to me and say, “If I could just take people out and put them on Air Force One and just let them walk up and down and have a Coke, I can raise $3 million today.” And I said: “Great. But you are not going to do it.”

It’s what’s proper. And I am not putting myself on any pedestal. My pedestal was I learned lessons of Watergate better than a lot of other people did. And I just thought it demeaned the president. And I think the more money you raise — I can tell you this as a strategist. I have said this about guys like [Governor Jon] Corzine and others. You need a certain amount of money to run. In New Jersey, you probably need $15 million to win the governorship. Anything less than $15 million is tough. You don’t need $45 [million] or $55 million to win the governorship. And you end up spending $40 [million], and you waste $40 million. There is no limit to what you can spend. But that doesn’t get you a five-time better campaign.

I think, to a certain extent, the problem that we have today is, what does make the difference is candidates can’t get to that threshold, whether it’s a half a million or a million dollars for a congressional race, to run a good race. It doesn’t matter if someone spends $8 million against them, but if they don’t get that million, and they are sitting there with $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000 or $100,000, they are not going to be a credible candidate. They are never going to make it.

I think somehow if you are going to ever get into public financing or some kind of an equalization of the game, whether it’s free television or something, that’s what you need. It’s just because the incumbents just sit across the street from their office and have fundraisers and raise a ton of money from the lobbying community or the lawyer community right here.

Do you see the Internet as a major player in terms not only of raising money, but of providing voices into the campaign? Some people have suggested to me that television may not be as important in the future, because you can get other voices into the dialogue, either with money or through the various bloggers, groups, new videos, and so on.

The game is changing dramatically. But at the end of the day, if you are back in your old beat, and the paper hadn’t been sold, and you are still writing, you are one of the deans, you’d have still covered the debate on Sunday. You still would have covered the debate in Chicago. What’s on television is what you write about. And I think any means of communication is helpful to a campaign.

But 15 years ago, we had C-SPAN. Anybody who is a junky could sit and watch every kind of political event possible. What the bloggers do today is, they put so much clutter out there. I use the example of I used to run a big PR firm in New York, when I first moved to New York 12 years ago. And it was right in Times Square. Every day I would take the train down from Bronxville.

I would go into Times Square. And there are millions of dollars in billboards. I mean every single one of them. You take any one of those billboards, and you put it in Des Moines, Iowa, people would drive from everywhere: “Let’s go look at the billboard.” In Times Square, there is so much clutter that you never knew what was there. Someone said to me: “What about the new Coke or the new AT&T [ad]? It cost $8 million or $10 million.” There were so many, you just didn’t see it.

My sense, one of the dangers of the blog — and it’s also a danger of television and commercials — is there is such a clutter, how do you break through? But where it does play a part is now you have to respond. And something that moves on the blog in a campaign today, someone has to sit all day long, five people or 10 people, and watch the blogs. And they have to run in and say to somebody — not to the candidate — “So-and-so just said such-and-such on the blog. And it’s not true. We better respond to it.”

When you and I started in this business, you would get a story. You would write it for that afternoon, or you may run it a second time, or it may get on network news that night, which is really big time. But you had about 24 hours to respond to a crisis or to get ready. If it’s on the network news, you had to make sure the next night there was something favorable that’s on for you.

Today it’s instantaneous. It’s a combination of cable television. I don’t think it’s better. But I don’t see anybody basically saying: “I am not going to spend money on television. I am going to spend it all on the blog.” And similar to direct mail, direct mail was a very effective way of putting something into people’s hands. And I think to a certain extent, even though people claim there are 5 million bloggers, or there are 100,000 per minute, or whatever, you don’t know whether they are really reading it or watching it or flicking through or any of the rest of it. I mean the numbers are way beyond the imagination.

I do think it’s a vehicle that you have to pay attention to. But if you are saying to me, as a strategy, you have $100 million to spend, are you still going to spend $50 [million] or $60 million of it on television? I’ll say: “You bet you I am. You bet you I am until someone proves to me television is not watched.”

The dilemma that you have today is, how do you get people to watch your commercial? So it’s not like more repetitions. It’s how do you make it more interesting so that someone’s going to sit there and try and get your message. And running it 20 times doesn’t necessarily get it through.

But some of these videos on the Internet get huge daily hits on it.

They get huge hits. And I think to a certain extent, it’s young people. It’s not the older voters that are sitting there saying, “Oh, let’s get on MySpace and look at the video today.” So you have a lot different audiences. If I were running a campaign, which obviously I’m not, would I devote a lot of time and energy to having a bunch of young kids around that know the space? You bet you I would. And I wouldn’t ask them to explain it to me. I would just ask them to go do it.

Well, is that kind of a mixed bag, though, that similar with the 527s and the independent expenditure groups, they might do things you don’t want them to do?

Absolutely. Sure.

So you have to keep an eye on them [so that they won’t] pass on a message on your behalf that you don’t want.

Ultimately, you are responsible for anything that goes out in your name. So you have to instill in your people that, at all times, you are representing a campaign and a candidate. And anything you ever do to embarrass this campaign or candidate, there is nothing you are ever going to do that’s going to offset that. You are not going to go out and produce to me a million votes. You do one screw-up on a commercial, you do something irresponsible, you break into a headquarters and you cost us 100,000 votes, you can never make it up.

You have to really instill that. And fortunately for me, I lived right through Watergate. So it was easy for me to basically say: “Here was a campaign that was going to win 49 states without batting an eyelash. They could have done it with yard signs. Why did you have to go do the crap that they did?”

So how, as a campaign manager, do you get a handle on all of these voices out there to get them to do what you [want]?

You have to have some kind of editorial policy, whether it’s the bloggers who are the kids, someone has to be schoolmarm sitting there.

They don’t have a schoolmarm, most of them.

Well, the bloggers out there don’t have schoolmarms. That’s absolutely right. And what you have to do, in that sense, is you have to have someone monitoring and responding to it. And someone that can basically say in their language, “cease and desist or we are going to print the nude pictures of you at the fraternity party on [MySpace].” But there is so much clutter out there. And it’s a very dangerous place.
So the ideal situation for a manager still is, give me the money and let me do it myself.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

So is that one of the reasons that money is going up?

Yeah. Sure. There are always ways of spending money. The interesting thing, my experience with Perot, which was six weeks of hell, Ross Perot was so tight with money. [Hamilton] Jordan and I sat down and we said: “It’s going to take $150 million to match the two campaigns. And what we have to do is be on television by July 1. And we have to run July, August, September, all the way through, to tell your message before the two conventions.”

He agreed to do it all, until you bring him the actual stuff to do. And he wouldn’t. But meanwhile, he is being ripped off by every vendor in the world who will go see him. Some guy would say: “See this National Journal. I can put this in 5,000 of the most important people in Washington. It’s only going to cost you $500 per person.” He’ll say, “Hey, that’s great.” Anybody else can buy it for $10 a person.

He bought every piece of crap in the world. I’ll walk in and he’ll say, “Yeah, I just paid a dollar a list for these hot lists.” And I’ll say, “They’ll sell it to any other candidate for half a cent on the name.” He had no idea, but whatever sort of appealed to him. And what often happens is, it’s a vendor. When I started in the business, the difference between campaigns today — and I am not saying they are better or worse. I am simply saying the old days when Spencer and Nofziger and guys like you started and I started, there was one guy in charge. You hired a general consultant. He, in turn, hired the team.

And he sat down. You are the candidate. And you say, “What’s it going to cost me to win the Baltimore mayor’s race?” I’d say: “A million bucks. Last time it cost $800,000. This time it’s going to cost a million bucks.” I would then go hire the pollster, and everybody was accountable to me. So what you have today is, no one wants to pay an Ed Rollins anymore. They say: “Why do you need an Ed Rollins? I mean we have a pollster. We have a media guy. That’s what it’s about.”

So you hire a media guy. He comes in. And the pollster takes the polls. And geez, you have no name ID. I’ll get your name ID up. And the pollster gets paid on his poll. The media guy gets paid on his commercials. There is nobody saying: “Wait a minute. It’s too [expletive] early to be running commercials. We don’t want to be on the air now. Sure you are going to move your numbers. But who gives a [expletive]? No one is paying attention in January. The race is in November. And what we need to be doing is building the grassroots organization.” There are no disciplinarians.

You saw it in the McCain campaign. That’s the perfect example of, “We are going to have a $150 million campaign, because you put it on a budget on a piece of paper.” Someone has to be sitting there every day saying: “What’s coming in? What’s going out? What’s coming in? What’s going out?” I had Bay Buchanan, who was an accountant. And she was tough. She would sit there every single day. She told me exactly how much money I had. And the last two months of the campaign, she spent two hours a day with me. I spent more time with her than anybody else.

We would go through everybody’s budget. And we’d say: “All right. In Iowa they didn’t spend this. Pull that money away. And in California they didn’t spend this; they were supposed to do that last week. Pull that money away and put it in the TV fund.” Just moving money every day. And at the end of the day, we had $82 million to spend. And we gave $10,000 back to the federal government. Jimmy Baker and Ford put $1.8 million, because he didn’t know where his money was on a $15 million campaign.

So it’s control that money every single day. The hardest part of this business is, you have big plans. And the other thing is, everybody wants to hire all of the consultants, so they won’t be on the other side. And the reality is, you sit down and say: “What do I really need? Do I need 25 all-stars, because they work for Karl Rove? Or do I need one guy? Do I need one guy to do this, one guy to do that, and one guy to make the TV?” That’s an example. That campaign is going to be an example of how not to run a campaign forever.

How important is it that the top guy in the campaign is close to the candidate, devoted to the candidate, and in the campaign because he believes the candidate is good for the [job]?

I think it’s 100 percent. I have had campaigns in which I was hired gun; very few, but I have had them. And it’s much better, much easier, if you really believe this is the best person. After you do it for a long time, you realize nobody is perfect, as you do being an observer of it. But at the same time, you still want to say: “This is a good human being. This is a guy I want to get up every day and work for.”

Do candidates often, these days, lose control of their own campaign?

Sure. Totally.

They are not running it after a while?

Well, what happens is, some try to run it. And what you have to do is find somebody you trust. You sort of need the old “check and verify” or whatever the Reagan slogan [“trust but verify”] was there. McCain should never have let his campaign get this far out of line. Someone should have been sitting there saying, at least once a week, we are doing really well on this fundraising, but we are spending way too much. Or, we are not doing well in the fundraising; we really need to cut back on the staff. He was very much in benign neglect and paid a very high price.

What was the situation there? Bad mix between the old McCain guys and the Bush people they vote in?

A little bit of both. There was bad blood between the old McCain guys. [John] Weaver and Rick Davis didn’t like each other from 2000. I think the biggest problem was for seven years, McCain thought he was the inevitable nominee. And when you really go back and look at what happened in 2000, he won New Hampshire. And New Hampshire has become a maverick state. I mean Pat Buchanan won New Hampshire. He won very few other places: Michigan, which is also kind of a maverick place.

He won in places where there is a crossover vote.

Yeah, with an Independent. Right. And I think he won Arizona and Connecticut, the only other two. He had no delegates. He had nothing. So he has an opportunity, in the sense that he’s got name ID. And he’s got a chance to raise money, which he did. And he got to jump to the front of the line in the Senate. He has been on TV more than anybody else out of the last eight years.

But the idea that you start as the inevitable nominee is nuts. You are the inevitable nominee if you are the vice president. But even then, you take George [H.W.] Bush, I mean he had to beat [Bob] Dole and everybody else. Everybody in the world said: “Screw you. We don’t give a [expletive] whether you’re the [vice president].” And it wasn’t until sort of Reagan put his arm around him, people said, “Well, if he’s good enough for Reagan, he’s good enough for us.” But he had plenty of people in his party who basically didn’t think he could win and were more than happy to go out and get him.

So I think the reality here is there is always a tendency to run the last race as opposed to this race. What’s the environment this time? Who could have predicted an Obama this time?