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Ellen R. Malcolm

Ellen R. Malcolm is the president and founder of EMILY’s List, a political organization whose mission is to elect pro-choice Democratic women to all levels of public office. She was also the president of America Coming Together (ACT), a 527 committee, from 2003 to 2004. Previously, Malcolm was the press secretary of the National Women’s Political Caucus and worked in the Jimmy Carter administration.

Sara Fritz interviewed Malcolm on September 24, 2007.

[EMILY’s List has] always been a PAC [political action committee].

Correct.

But have you created, as many have, other allied organizations like a 527?

Well, yes. I don’t remember when we first had it. But for a billion years we have had a 527 nonfederal account, because we do federal and nonfederal activity. And under the FEC [Federal Election Campaign Act] law, we pay for the rent and the salaries and all of that on a 50/50 split of federal and nonfederal money. We are the largest PAC in the country in the sense that we raise the most hard money. And we raised — I don’t know what the multiples are — but significantly more hard money than soft money.

You were often criticized, when you were first organized, for being bundlers.

Right.

Did you ever feel actually threatened by efforts to get rid of bundling?

Oh, yes. In ’86, after our first election, they started looking at that. And after “The Year of the Woman” in ’92, we were like the big heroines of the ’92 election. Next thing I know, they are trying to stop us from raising money for candidates. And I never thought it made any sense. Because basically all we are doing is holding fundraisers through mail, in a sense. We are giving people information. We send them profiles on the candidates. They make out their checks to the candidates, whoever they want, and send them back to us.

We never put the money in our bank account. We have no control over what people do. So what we were doing, and continue to do, is to bring small donors into the process and give them the information to get them to participate. So in the last election we bundled, or raised for candidates, about $11 million. And the average contribution, I think, is about $97. So it’s how a teacher in Des Moines can find out where there are women running for Congress and help.

Do you still rely on direct mail? Or do you do a lot of Internet stuff now?

We do a lot everything. We do events. We do Internet. We do some telemarketing, the whole gamut. And a lot of people now give through our website. Because if you are going to do three checks, it’s a lot easier to go do it online than it is to get out your checkbook and write three different checks.

You have been pretty darn successful. Will there ever be a day when we’ll have 50-50 [men to women] in elective office?

There will be, but it is slow going. And the biggest problem we have has nothing to do with gender. It has to do with the power of incumbency and the lack of opportunities with newcomers in office. So when we look at where we can play, we can run against an incumbent knowing 99 percent who run for reelection get reelected. So that’s not a very good way to go.

Or we can look for open seats. After redistricting in the last census, about 200 districts now are solidly Republican. That doesn’t help us. So instead of having 435 opportunities, we really have 235 seats where there might be open seats. So we typically look at about 20 congressional districts to bring people into Congress. As you can imagine, when we see an open seat in a Democratic-leaning district or a marginal district, we go for it with every resource we can muster. Because we know that’s the only shot we have to add a new woman.

That’s your real limitation?

Yes.

I haven’t paid as much attention to women candidates in recent years as I did many, many years ago.

Back when I was at the [National Women’s Political] Caucus, that’s just how far we go back.

Right, a long time ago. What are the characteristics of a campaign by a woman Democrat these days? I mean, what are the characteristic strengths and weaknesses you have seen?

They aren’t all that different now from the guys, I think. By the time you get to the U.S. House and Senate and governor, our top races, typically you have had experience. You certainly have a political network out there to run from if you are going to be successful. And we help you learn how to talk to the media, raise money, get ready for debates. You know about public-policy issues. And we can help hook you up with people who help you on particular issues.

Women now coming in are pretty seasoned and experienced. They are not novices. And they often are very realistic about where they are going to run. They know how hard it is. And they are not going to take fliers, for the most part. They are going to look and see. So you can see, when the environment shifts, more and more of these seasoned, experienced women getting into the races, which is one of things we saw in 2006 as it became stronger and stronger for Democrats. You started having people going, “Hmm, yeah, OK, maybe I will look at this more seriously.”

There are some financial problems. But I think we have tremendous respect now from the sort of political infrastructure and the party infrastructure. They rely on us now and know that we make the women stronger. So they really see us as a real partner in a lot of ways.
They didn’t used to. And nobody holds back against women anymore. Early on they were like, “Oh, you can’t go negative against a woman.” Well, that is long gone. They take the negative ads coming in just like anyone else. But they know how to fight back and win.

And they don’t get hung up on their husband’s finances anymore?

No. No. No. It seemed to me, as voters got more and more comfortable seeing women run and seeing them in office, a lot of the gender stereotypes disappeared. In California, for example, where there are so many women in office, if you get into a House race there, nobody is going to ask you like they used to: Who is doing the laundry? And what does your husband think? And who is picking up the kids after school?

There still seems to be a significant focus on what women wear, but other than that, you break through and you are all of a sudden like, wow, this is historic. What is that? Like Nancy [Pelosi] becoming the speaker. A lot of the gender stuff comes back. There were like reams and reams of paper on what she is wearing, what the grandchildren are like, all of the old stuff.

So every new level, you get it all over again.

Right. And one of the advantages of Hillary [Clinton], I think, is she went through all of that when she was first lady. We were obsessed by her hair and all of that. And in a funny kind of way, it’s sort of been done, for her, so I think people see her more and pay more attention to what she is saying. It still comes up, and there are still stereotypes. I don’t want to say there aren’t. But some of the gender-related things have been dealt with, because she has been in the public eye for so long.

I have known a lot of women politicians. And generally, as time goes on, they become control freaks. This is such a perilous situation that they are facing, that they often try to control everything. Even somebody nice like Nancy Kassebaum [now Nancy Kassebaum Baker] just always was like this all of the time. And I would say that Hillary, my own analysis is that to some extent filled that stereotype in my head as well. Do you see that as a problem?

I think that is true for politicians, men and women. There is an entire system on Capitol Hill to make sure the member doesn’t get in trouble. It is a real mindset. And in fact, I would shy away from hiring people off the Hill, because they have so much of a protective mentality, as opposed to let’s get out there and make it happen and break-through-the-barrier mentality. So I think it’s true for men and women. And it’s not only the elected, but it’s the people. It seems to me that people who work on Capitol Hill, part of their professional identity is they keep their member from getting in trouble.

There is no question about that. So they come from that. Talk to me about Hillary’s strengths and weaknesses as a woman candidate. Her gender strengths and gender weaknesses, how do you see that?

Well, ironically, I think one of her biggest strengths is that people underestimate her. They think they know her, because they saw her at the White House. And they saw all of the trash from the Republicans; they spent tens of millions of dollars trying to bring the Clintons down. The independent prosecutor spent $40 million investigating them, [and there was] never one charge against them. It’s just breathtaking.

So the issues of so-called divisiveness and the negative piece are because people have low expectations that they are going to like Hillary. And they are going to think that she is terrific. The reason I say it’s a strength is because when she goes in and meets voters, and they see who she really is, they are delighted. They are just surprised. They are taken aback. They like her. They think she is fantastic. And they move to her.

She is going into Iowa and New Hampshire. And you see this in a lot of the reports of the events, people coming out and saying: “I went in. I didn’t really think I was going to like her so much. Wow. She knocked my socks off.” I think the expectations game works to her advantage. If you look at [Barack] Obama, I think people go in with an expectation that he is going to be a cross between Martin Luther King and Jack Kennedy. 

And he doesn’t live up to it?

Maybe the first time you are excited. Over three times, maybe it’s not quite as exciting. And the expectations go the other way, like, Where is the moment that’s going to change my life? So I think the expectations work to her advantage. I think Hillary Clinton is the child of the ’60s, as I was myself, who looked at the world and said: “I want to make a difference. And I am not going to go out and smoke dope at Haight-Ashbury and drop out. I am not going to go throw bombs. I am going to work within the system to make a difference.”

Her entire adult life has been doing that, primarily for children, but certainly for women, and a longstanding interest in health care. She has a core belief and a core of experience on these issues that gives her tremendous confidence and expertise. And voters see it. They see it. And I so identify with this, because I was doing the same thing. Bill [Clinton] graduated in 1969, and so did I. When Hillary got out of law school, and all the law firms were coming after her, she went and worked for the Children’s Defense Fund. I went and worked for Common Cause. I know what that is, that moment in time of the ’60s where we all thought we could make a difference and change the world for the better. And she has never stopped.

She has a core value system and belief system and experience that carry her through a lot of this. Now, over the years, she has learned to be a pretty savvy politician. She has both learned what it’s like to be knocked around and knows how to fight back. I was watching her with Chris Wallace [on Fox News Sunday] yesterday when he asked her this long question about the Republicans this and the Republicans that, and why are you and Bill so hyperpolitical? And she just fell out, started laughing, because who wouldn’t? What are you talking about? These people have rained down these attacks for 15 years. You are saying why am I hyperpolitical? She has a real sense of humor in there. She knows how to do it.

One of the things I say to the members of EMILY’s List is [that] if you look at the stage at the Democratic candidates at the debates, she is the only one on that stage who faced the entire weight of the Republican attack machine and came out the winner. They spent $40 million in the Senate race in 2000. They didn’t want that woman in the Senate. And they could not keep her out. So that gives her a level of confidence, I think.

Your point was that as women rise, there is a new kind of scrutiny that comes through the gender thing. It seems to me that the biggest thing she comes face to face with is the toughness-versus-niceness dichotomy, whatever you call that. Is that going to be a problem for her?

I don’t think so. Because the evidence is, when voters really see who she is, as opposed to this kind of cardboard cutout that the right wing created, she is warm and funny and gives a good belly laugh, as she did with Chris Wallace. There is a very genuine appeal to her that voters are drawn to.

In 2006, when she ran for election, she carried more than 30 counties in New York that Bush had won two years earlier. She won over Republicans, independents. She was winning in rural areas, suburban areas. I think the advantage, actually, for this campaign for her is that people are really going to start paying attention to her — not the stories, not the attack messages, but who she is. And they are going to like her.

Now is EMILY’s List or you, personally, raising money for her?

Yes. EMILY’s List endorsed her the day she said she was getting in. And I am one of five national chairs of the campaign.

So you are both.

We are all working, yeah.

She has shown a lot of competence in that area.

Oh, yes.

I am interested why she didn’t catch this fraud guy.

Hsu?

[Norman] Hsu, yeah, who is almost identical to the people who got her husband in trouble.

What I understand, what they said about the process of the campaign is they researched him, as they do the big fundraisers. And I think they were kind of shocked that they didn’t get it. But I think it’s tricky when you do this stuff, and you search on the Internet. If you don’t have exactly the right name and the right combination of letters, you don’t get it. And he was, at different places, referred to as different names. So they missed it. I think now they said they are doing criminal-background checks. But that’s a big expense.

There are hundreds of thousands of political contributors. And this is a bad apple. But the truth is, I met the guy. He was this nice, quiet guy. I have seen him in California. I have seen him in New York. So it’s not like he came in and was some shifty, weird, obnoxious guy with a machine gun in a violin case. I mean, he was just like one of the gazillions of people you meet at fundraising events.

You were running ACT at the last election. And, of course, we all know that ACT just got fined $775,000 or whatever it was for violations.

Right.

A lot of people say that ACT knew that it was violating the law and did it anyway to catch up.

Oh, don’t get me started on that. I want to tell you what it was like to operate in the 2004 elections. It was horrifying. First of all, the Republicans created an entity that they called the ABC [Americans for a Better Country] and asked for an opinion from the Federal Election Commission basically describing what they thought ACT was going to do. Number one, the Federal Election Commission is not supposed to act on hypothetical situations. And ABC never raised any money, never did one thing. It was a big sham.

The Republicans spent a lot of time trying to keep people from supporting ACT. So they were running around saying it’s illegal and all this sort of nonsense, and filing suits and naming donors who then receive the big multi-pound copy of the thing from the Federal Election Commission. I mean, just total intimidation. The FEC came out with an advisory opinion that had one set of standards: “promote, support, attack, oppose.” You couldn’t make sense, out of reading the advisory opinion, about what you were supposed to do, really.

Then they went into a rulemaking and abandoned the “promote, support, attack, oppose,” because, as one of the commissioners said, “We completely confused the regulating community.” They don’t know what to do. So they went into a rulemaking. And they came up with nothing for a long, long, long, long time. Meanwhile, we are all sitting around saying: “Well, what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to do this?”

So they essentially undid in public statements what they had done in the advisory opinion. They didn’t come up with a different set of rules that anybody could make any sense out of. And frankly, we were just trying to figure out how to win an election and get the voters out.

Your critics would say the 50-50 split was pretty clear, in a way. I don’t know that.

No, I don’t think that is correct that it’s clear. No, it certainly was not clear. We met with lawyers, it seemed practically on an hourly basis. I can’t tell you how many conversations we had with them. At the end of the day, we are big targets, because we raised a lot of money. And in a campaign-reform world, if you raised a lot of money, you must be a lot worse than the people that raise a little money. So they went after it. When you look at the size of the fine, basically ACT was not going to continue. With all the money we had left, we said we wanted to fight it. And the lawyers advised that that was an unending process, and just give them what was left and call it a day.

Is there a successor organization now?

There is not. One of the pieces in 2004 was a coalition called America Votes. And that is still going on.

And they will be doing similar; obviously, it’s a GOTV [get-out-the-vote effort].

Yeah, it’s a way for all of us to talk with each other and try to not trip over each other.

What is the Catalist? What is that relationship?

That’s Harold Ickes’ organization. Essentially, it’s just trying to clean up the voter files, which are a total mess in the states. So when EMILY’s List goes in and does Women Vote, and we try to get the voter file and figure out where the women are and . . .

It’s from the Democratic State Committee?

Sometimes, or from vendors. I mean, that’s part of the problem. It’s sort of a hodgepodge. They were just a disaster. So Harold is trying to clean up the voter files, modernize that whole process. And then anybody can use that material, for a fee. So it’s a business, basically.

Somebody told me that he decided to do it as a business so that it’s not subject to FEC scrutiny.

But that’s also sort of typical. Most of the time you get the files from vendors. Every place is different. I am not sure that the state, itself, owns the file in many places at all. So the vendors do. We go in and those smart people who do politics know which file is the best file in Michigan versus which file is the best file in Iowa. It’s crazy. These files are such a mess.

Years ago we did a Women Vote thing in Iowa. And we wanted to go back and test whether it had worked. So we had them check the voter files and get the women voter files so we could go back and poll it. And we came back. And they sent back the results of what they had sent to Women Vote, and there were all of these men on the file. That’s how crazy this is. It’s like: “Well, wait a minute. You were only supposed to give us women. So why all of a sudden, just like 20 percent of the sample is men?”

Because they were probably on the list.

Because it’s just a mess. It’s just a mess. So Harold’s just trying to fix it.

What’s your view of the state of the Democratic National Committee organization at this point?

As it typically does, it gears up in the presidential year. So what we describe today is not what you will see in October.

But this list thing is something they probably should have done, is it not?

Well, they have done some file stuff, too. Terry [McAuliffe] did one before that. I think Howard Dean is trying to go into the states and build the state parties, which I am in favor of, because they are very weak in 99.9 percent of the states. I think he is trying to make a long-term commitment of organizing in the states. I think that’s a good idea.

Has this proliferation of 527s and all of these things created a new day in politics? And if so, how for the Democratic Party?

Well, it depends on where you are. I don’t know about the Democratic Party. I think from a candidate’s perspective, they never like that other people are out there in any way controlling or affecting the message. They know what they want to talk about at what time. So whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, you don’t like that some group is coming and saying: “Wait a minute. No. It’s not going to be Iraq and jobs. It’s going to be stem cell research.” Well, wait a minute. I don’t want to talk about stem cell research. And now you have all of that money on television. What do I do? I either have to defend myself, or I have to get into this talk about it.

It’s the control.

Yes. They don’t like it. It’s a crapshoot. They have no influence over it, and they don’t like it. It’s too risky. Some of the work, particularly on our side, I think has been very helpful in figuring out how to bring voters in to vote. Voter turnout has dropped and dropped and dropped. And the more we have gotten into this media war campaign, instead of the old grass-roots organizing campaign, the lower the turnout seems to have gotten. One of the reasons I loved doing ACT and love doing Women Vote is because we are going out there to a group of people who look at the television ads, get very cynical, say, “Gee, I don’t know who to vote for, I don’t know what to believe,” and try to give them some reasons to go out and vote.

So you are actually looking beyond the base?

Oh, yeah, very much so. There are two types of efforts: One is people who you will persuade to vote for your side, and the other is turning out people who would vote for you, but they don’t vote. So, for example, we did a lot of work after the ’94 elections with low-income women who didn’t have a college degree, because they dropped out in ’94; 16 million women overall who voted in ’92 stayed home in ’94. It’s one of the reasons Democrats lost Congress. Because our good old women and the gender gap, they just stayed home.

So we spent a lot of time — in those days, those women were solid Democratic vote — trying to understand what could you do with these women to help them realize that it made a difference, and it was worth their effort to go out and vote. That’s a turnout of Democratic voters, Hispanic voters, African-American voters. That’s sort of a turnout of Democratic votes. Then there are a lot of groups that are swing voters that are right on the edge. They decide.

Women are usually a disproportionate percentage of the undecided voters. So how do you get those late-deciding women, those preretirement women who are concerned about health-care issues? They are concerned about their retirement security. But they are also unhappy with the values in our society. How do you convince them that they should go over and vote for the Democrats? So there is a lot of effort on these outside groups in talking to them.

Now if you are one of these women who haven’t decided, and you care very much about global warming, if you get a piece of mail from the Sierra Club, that’s a voice that you want to hear and you believe. And you are not cynical about the Sierra Club. So, wow, you are going to pay attention to that. And you are going to come out and vote. If you hear from EMILY’s List, and you are a woman, you may say: “Well, I know they do a lot for women. And I see that they have footnotes on everything. And there is this website I can visit to verify this. I am going to pay attention to what they say here.”

Well, then, that’s kind of what America Votes is going to be doing. They are not necessarily doing the effort, the coordinating all of these different groups, right?

Yes.

In The Argument [Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle To Remake Democratic Politics], the new book by Matt Bai — have you read that?

I haven’t read it.

He said that what the people — starting with George Soros and including Rob Stein and others — set out to do was to create the kind of mechanism for the Democrats that had existed for some time for the Republicans outside of the party mechanism.

I think it’s more that the Republican Party itself has done a lot more work to build an infrastructure to win elections. And on our side, it’s the outside groups that, working together, are the sort of complement to that. That’s why I think, as I said, Howard Dean now trying to build up that kind of infrastructure in the DNC is a good thing.

For years, EMILY’s List [has been] one of these rare organizations, actually, that only cares about winning elections. We don’t lobby. We don’t go up to the Hill and tell everybody what to do. A hundred percent of our time is spent trying to figure out how to win elections. We could never find anybody that knew how to work in the campaigns. So we, in ’93, started training fundraisers, campaign managers, press secretaries, and get-out-the-vote people, building this great, big training operation now, which now is moving into recruiting and training women to run for state legislature and all kinds of things.

We did that because there was a total vacuum on our side. The party wasn’t doing it. Maybe every once in a while they would bring in 500 people for a day and tell them what a campaign was, but when it came to the nuts and bolts of how you are a campaign manager on a House race, they weren’t doing that kind of in-depth stuff. So we started doing it.

And the Republican Party was doing it?

The Republican Party has certainly a leadership training thing that they do through [501](c)(3)s. It has a much bigger idea-generating piece through their American Enterprise Institute [for Public Policy Research] and all that. I think that’s one of the things that the Democracy Alliance was looking at: trying to invest long-term and building some kind of idea capital for progressives in that piece. But in terms of the elections itself, the Republican Party, I think, invests much more in building that kind of infrastructure than the Democratic Party had traditionally.

Microtargeting is another example. The Republicans now say they have been microtargeting and modeling the voter file for a number of cycles. [RNC Chairman] Ken Mehlman said in the last election they have every single voter in America sorted on these variables that they have in the microtargeting. Well, on our side, EMILY’s List is one of the leading groups. We did Michigan and Minnesota last time. Through America Votes, we all got together and did a couple of other states. But we are the ones sitting there trying to figure out how to be smart about these things and invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars in doing it.

But it is outside the party, as opposed to the Republicans doing it inside the party.

Right. One of the things we haven’t talked about at all is sort of the motivation of the contributors. And the reason the title [The Buying of the President 2008], I think, is so off-putting is because people are always trying to make the case of people making political contributions because they want some kind of tax break, economic favor for them. In fact, the vast majority of political contributors, I think — and I think you could probably bear that out if you crunched the numbers on who could give — give because they care about the country. They want to figure out how the country can go in their chosen direction.

They’re ideological?

They are ideological. They like parties. They like particular candidates. They like to see diversity. They are sick about the war. They think the Republicans are a disaster. So one of the things you’ll see, I think, in this election — you certainly saw in 2004 — are a lot of people desperate on our side to take the country back.

I think what you are seeing on the Republican side, they are raising money. They have, obviously, a big network of affluent supporters. But they are very demoralized because of the [George W.] Bush administration and what a disaster the Republicans are politically.

It was actually shocking to me that we didn’t win in 2004. When I was out the last 10 days, flying around, going to these different places, seeing people from all over the country, going into these battleground states, and knocking on the doors, I didn’t think it was possible for us not to win, because the energy level was so high. There were so many contributions, whether it was George Soros’ big checks or Harvey Smith’s knocking on the doors every Saturday for eight weeks in New Hampshire. I just thought for sure we had the energy to win.

Do you feel that will be sustained through 2008?

I do. I think how it sort of plays out differs over time. But I think a lot of that energy was in 2006. It didn’t play out in the big, formalized ACT structure. But it certainly played out in voter turnout. Democrats came out and voted. Independents moved over and voted for the Democrats. And I think a lot of Republicans stayed home. I think, as you see now, [there is] a real lack of interest from the Republicans in their candidates out there, and you are going to see that same kind of thing. I think, at least today — and it’s a long way to Election Day — the energy level on the Democratic side far exceeds the other side.

That’s interesting. And do you think Hillary’s going to win?

I do. Because I think what we are looking for on our side is somebody who is going to change the direction of this country, who can defeat the Republican attack machine — and there is no question, they are going to be as nasty as always — and really knows how to make the government work. It certainly appears from the early stages of this that she is convincing everyone across the country, a lot of people, that she is the one to do that. If you look at the polling now, over the summer she is going up. John Edwards and Barack Obama are going backward a little bit. The lead is widening, because she has done a fantastic job in the debates, and as people get to know her, they like her.

Making the government work could be a strong, if not stronger, issue than the war.

Well, it’s not the kind of thing you can run on. But it certainly is the kind of thing that needs to be done. There is a whole story to be written, I think, on the middle management that’s left the government under the Republican administration. Because I know people here who have left the Justice Department because they were so interfered with by these young, know-nothing political appointees, that they finally just said, “I have to get out.”

I travel all of the time. I was out in California, and some guy who did a lot with CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] started talking about all of the middle managers who had left because they were told to put ideology in front of the science. Then another day I heard somebody say there were 2,000 people or something, career service, foreign-service people who quit the State Department because, well, if you create your career on diplomacy and the people say, well, we are not going to talk to anyone, you go do something else.

There is that whole hidden vacuum out there, I think, of the people who know how to make the government work. You just see snippets of it every once in a while, like the stories on Katrina. That great guy from Arkansas [James Lee Witt] left, and all of the middle managers quit, and “Brownie” [Michael Brown] came in.