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Frank Moore

Frank Moore is the senior vice president for government relations in the Washington office of CodaOctopus Group, Inc., an underwater-technology company. He was the national finance chairman of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign and then worked in the Carter White House as assistant to the president for congressional liaison.

John W. Mashek interviewed Moore on March 21, 2007.

Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere in 1975 and ’76 not only to win the Democratic nomination but to win the presidency. In raising money back in those days, you had to get qualified in many states, since you were taking public finance, by getting money from small donors. How did you do it?

Well, to put it in context why I ended up with this job, I worked in the governor’s office. Hamilton [Jordan] was executive secretary, or chief of staff, for the first two years, and I was the last two years. And so I went to many meetings — Southern Governors’ Association, Democratic Governors Association, and National Governors Association, Appalachian Regional Coastal Plains — and got to know the governors from the South and their staffs. And so, as you know, when you are raising money, you reach out to people you know. And so I went to Texas to see Governor [Dolph] Briscoe and his aides, and they agreed to put on a little fundraiser for us. We went to New Jersey, and [Governor] Brendan Byrne actually had a fundraiser at the capitol — the governor of Delaware, I mean. Delaware is hard to remember . . .

It was an early state, too, in caucuses?

Well, I can’t remember. [Sherman Tribbett] was the governor, and the first governor to endorse Carter, by the way. But it was somehow in the Coastal Plains Regional Commission, part of the Southern Governors’ Association, [which] went all of the way from Delaware to Oklahoma. So I knew him, and he helped us raise a little money. And they were $25 checks. That’s what we asked for. We’d take $5 or $10, but the increments of $25 . . .

In those days you had to raise what amount of money by what number of donors to qualify for matching funds?

The threshold was $250. Somebody could give you $500, but only $250 of that counted. And then you had to go get people with joint bank accounts, so you get you and your wife for $500; it counted $250, so you got the whole credit. So we really didn’t want $1,000 donations. We would rather have four $250 donations because we were trying to qualify for matching funds, which was brand new. This was 1976. And once you qualified for matching funds and you reached a certain percent in the poll, you also got Secret Service protection.

And it’s not that anybody was going to shoot you, but if you chartered an airplane, you could charge four or five seats to the Secret Service and charge them first class. So, essentially you paid for the airplane with . . .

In those days, as I recall, and you may recall differently, Jimmy Carter was running against some Washington-type candidates who could probably reach out for money. I am almost certain that Mo Udall, Birch Bayh, and Fred Harris were in there, too, but certainly Udall with all of the friends that he had on Capitol Hill . . .

And Scoop Jackson, don’t forget.

And Henry Jackson. They could reach out. I mean, Jackson, with his contacts, with the labor unions and also with the defense contractors.

Labor was really, really big with Senator Jackson. And people also forget that [Hubert] Humphrey wasn’t out yet, at that time.

He was still toying.

He may or he may not. He made an announcement. I remember we were on the road, we were on an airplane.

When he said he wasn’t running?

Yeah. And we got it. Maybe you or somebody passed it on. “Humphrey’s just announced he’s not running.”

Well, there have been several presidential campaigns since then, of course. But I have the feeling that Jimmy Carter may be the last president to come out of nowhere, 1 or 2 percent in the polls in ’75, to be elected president. Now, with the thrust for money, the big names that are in there, is it going to be possible for anybody who is not significant in the polls to be elected?

I disagree with you.

OK, I am glad you do. Run it by me.

I think I disagree with you for this reason. And this is very contemporary. Last night I went to Senator Clinton’s fundraiser; I gave her $1,000. A thousand dollars five years ago would have put you in the VIP reception. Now this is just what used to be $250, it was the cattle call for $1,000. But I looked around the room. I had a lot of people come up and speak to me. I recognized them. And getting out of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, I thought, well, they are all Clinton people. Many of them had been Carter people. But if she stumbles, they will give $1,000 to whoever they think can win. It doesn’t matter where they come from. And they can get in very, very late. Actually, Bill Clinton came from nowhere, if you think about the people he was running against. He was a three-time governor of Arkansas. And he had been chairman of the National Governors Association.

But not a big name in Washington, certainly.

Certainly not a big name in Washington. To flip back, 18 months before Jimmy Carter took the oath of office up here, George Gallup ran a poll. He had 30 Democrats on it who might be president. Jimmy Carter was not on there.
Then, when we were trying to get matching funds, Jimmy Carter was 2 percent, pretty close, six months out in Iowa. Of course, Tim Kraft had been out there organizing, and he was sort of all underground. But he was name recognition.

So I disagree with you. I think somebody could come from somewhere. I don’t know who it would be, but if the front-runners stumble for any reason, I think there is a vacuum on the Republican side now.

Fred Thompson is talking about running.

And a lot of people are talking about Fred Thompson, because they think there is a vacuum there and he might fill it. But the money that is there now is just inconceivable to me.

When you ran in ’76, it was public financing in presidential campaigns, too. And you took it and [Gerald] Ford took it.

Yes, and we were glad to get it. I mean, we had to have it. I remember when we first matched. We stayed up all night down at Bob Lipshutz’s law office doing the documentation to file with the Federal Election Commission. And we were all: “How much do you get? When do we get it? And let’s make sure none of this is disallowed.” Because we had to have every penny.

Have we seen the last of public financing now, with nobody really interested in it among the big names?

I don’t think so. I think it’s like nuclear energy. I think it’s going to come back. Because what we are talking about here is Washington, and we are talking about L.A., and New York, and the big cities. But you travel enough to know that this amount of money is just — I mean, what is it spent for? It’s spent for television advertising. You don’t see anybody, except in the early, early states going around and having coffee, and talking, and standing up in front of a town-hall meeting and answering questions and really getting to know the candidate. Once those first two or three states are over, it’s all television. We spent an awful amount. I mean, we didn’t even have bumper stickers because we spent it on television, [Jerry] Rafshoon did, and it worked. Good ads.

No big names. But people would ask us, “I would like a Carter bumper sticker.” Well, what we had to do was go to someone else that’s running, a senator, or a congressman, or a governor, and say, “So-and-so and Carter.” And people weren’t sure whether that violated this new law.

Was any money raised by direct mail in those days?

Yeah. We didn’t really raise that much money by direct mail until after we had won a couple. I was there the first 12 or 13 months. And then Morris Dees came. He’s from Alabama. He was a direct-mail expert. And we raised a lot of money in direct mail. But people now spend a dollar to get back a nickel. We got back a lot more. It was maybe 25 cents.

You know, the right-winger Richard Viguerie is called the godfather of direct mail. And, of course, he was made in direct mail for conservative causes. But you just put your finger on it: Is direct mail just too costly now, given the Internet and other ways of raising money?

I don’t know. I get some stuff that has to be random. I am a Democrat, obviously, and registered. I get Republican mailings that must cost $2 a piece, because they are four or five pages. They are four-color, five-color.

But is it candidate or is it cause?

It’s party, it’s just the party. But you wonder how much they get back on that. Of course, you can go back to them again and again. Say you have 100 people, you can go back to them, and maybe 50 of those people will give a second time or a third time. So it’s more efficient.

Do we have political action committees then?

Yes, we did.

Sun Oil Company had had the first one. And mostly the people who had them were labor unions, not business PACs. There were some small ones. Goldman Sachs had one. But mostly they were labor unions. For instance, UAW [United Auto Workers] is one of the few unions that supported us. But they had one in Alabama and one in Tennessee and one in Georgia. And they had one in so-and-so. And, of course, it was much easier for a labor union because they did payroll deductions. You know, a dollar a month or whatever. So they accumulated some money. It was amazing how much cash was still around then.

They say now that candidates have to allot a certain amount of time during the day to what a lot of them say they don’t like to do but have to do: just get on the phone. Did Governor Carter, in those days, allot any time that he just got on the phone and talked?

He did. We gave him a list, but it was more than just: “Give money or I’ll send my son Chip out to see you, and you take him around and help him around and help us raise some money. I want you to give, yourself, but I also want you to go to your friends.” And he started out with the people who he was in the Navy with. We went to the Lions Clubs, any associations he had. And, of course, governors we have already mentioned.

Well, a lot of people, I think, don’t appreciate the fact that Carter, as Clinton did later, used his relationship with other governors, Democratic governors, to very quietly build up his campaign.

That’s the only way we did it. We wouldn’t have gotten it done [otherwise]. I’ll never forget how happy we were in New Jersey.

With Brendan Byrne?

We qualified in one day there $5,500. That was like raising $5 million now.

I mean, I’ve seen it grow. I remember when Lloyd Bentsen had the first million-dollar fundraiser ever. Mrs. Clinton raised $2.7 [million] last night. And it was in Houston. They worked on it for months. And he always said: “Money and politics should never appear in the same newspaper story. It’s not good.”

Well, you probably answered this in a very direct way when you said, “Yeah, I think a candidate can come out of nowhere now.” Money, as we know in John Connally’s case, $11 million for one delegate doesn’t necessarily get you the nomination. And these candidates now, the top three in both categories, are raising tens of millions and saying, “We don’t want matching funds.”

But they were eight years ago, and Howard Dean was governor of Vermont. And he was leading. He was off of the Internet. He didn’t have huge fundraisers until he got way up in the polls. And then people wanted to jump on the bandwagon.

Of course there was no Internet in your day.

No. We didn’t even have IBM Selectric typewriters. We had one in the whole governor’s office. But the Internet was word of mouth. And it was sitting down in the old-fashioned way and taking a phone book, and addressing envelopes, and licking the stamps, and putting them on there, and sending them, and then following up with a telephone call and a $5 check. I mean, it is amazing. You said $250 was the threshold?

That was the threshold, I am almost certain.

But I wonder, really wonder, what our average contribution was. I’ll bet it was less than $250. But it might be less than $100.

Jody [Powell] mentioned to me over the phone that during the campaign itself, to save money, he and others — probably you — took pay cuts. Nobody was making hardly a thing. And, of course, now we have big numbers of consultants, pollsters, you name it. And I’ll bet you not many of those go off the payroll.

Yeah. Well, that was why the matching funds were important. I got paid for the first time in a long, long time. But I wish we would have public financing again. I get calls from U.S. senators. And I think it’s demeaning to the senator and it’s demeaning to me for them to have to call me. I would much rather they were working. I know they are going down the list. And they are sitting in a townhouse off of Capitol Hill making the calls.

I wish that senator were in a committee meeting or in their office. I wish they didn’t have to do it. I don’t think they should have to do it. But they have to do it so many hours a day. I have forgotten how much they have to raise now for a six-year term.

Well, I am struck by the fact that so many people now, on their tax return — overwhelmingly taxpayers write “no” [for the checkoff], many of them thinking this is added to my return, I mean, I have to pay this.

Oh, it’s gone way down. But as you know, these laws usually come about because of a scandal. Certainly public financing came about because of a scandal: Watergate. I think the scandal this time is not going to be illegal money, illegal contributions, illegally raised or illegally given. I think the scandal is just the total amount. I think the public is just going to be scandalized by watching these huge, huge amounts of money. And as you said, who does it go to? It goes to consultants.

Just today, March 21, John Edwards, who is a top-tier candidate but certainly expected to trail Clinton and Obama by quite a bit, is in for $7.2 million. That is a prodigious sum, and yet he is probably going to be badly trailing the other two when they publish their reports.

Yeah. But see, I think Ford and Carter each got about $42 million. I am not sure. But so much of that could be spent on administrative cost. And you just said John Edwards will raise that. He is going to spend $40 million.

At least.

Yeah. By himself in the primary, not in a general election.

And now, with the front-end loading, that money is going to come out in torrents this fall and this winter. What do the magazines call it? The superduper primary?

Yeah.

It’s all going to be over on February 5. And then the new spending is going to start for the general.

Yeah. Well, a lot of people have a lot of money they didn’t used to have. I looked around that ballroom last night, and a lot of these people 10 years ago didn’t have $100, much less $1,000. I mean, they were there because they supported Senator Clinton. They know her and like her.

You mentioned Howard Dean. How much would you guess candidates today, with the big names, are able to raise by the Internet? Fifty percent?

I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. The two parties could tell you. I know the Republicans got way, way ahead of the Democrats. And after Governor Dean became party chairman — and [Terry] McAuliffe had done a lot, too; he had done a lot in direct mail and through the Internet. It would be interesting to know. But the thing is if somebody raised $10,000 or $20,000 for you, they get to go to a private reception. If you raise $10,000 in $100 increments, those people are committed to you. They are going to vote for you. They are going to talk about you at the grocery store, and the beauty parlor, and the water cooler.

Did President Carter raise most of his money in the South, in the border states?

Well, the rule of thumb then was that you would raise about 50 percent of your money in the home state and then 50 percent out. And of course we raised a lot of money in New York and a lot in L.A. But you think about it, if you go see someone in California or New York and say, “I want you to raise money,” they say, “Well, how much have you raised in Georgia?” And if the people at home don’t support you, [they think,] “Why should I support you?” So you have got to raise a good bit of money in your home state first. Or you did then; I don’t know now. And Clinton did that as well.

When the Carter people, primarily from Georgia, went into states, sometimes chartering buses, to elicit support for him — I remember seeing in Iowa and New Hampshire — did they do any fundraising, too? Or was it mostly door-knocking?

It was door-knocking. It didn’t have a financial component to it. We had other people doing that. I mean, certainly we’d leave a little card if they wanted to send a donation. But we had, the Carter campaign, the first $100 fundraiser in the history of Georgia.

No kidding.

At the Hyatt Hotel. And the largest one prior to that had been $50. And Andy Young was chairman, with the Urban Institute. And he’d had a lot of big-name speakers come down. And Vernon Jordan and others said, “Let’s go for $50.” And we said: “Nobody will give that in Georgia. You can’t get $50 for a ticket to a dinner.” Well, Andy did it. And we doubled it. We went from $50 to $100.

That wouldn’t get you past the hors d’oeuvres table now.

No. And we had big name entertainment. Phil Walden had Capricorn Records, so he had Percy Sledge and other people up there entertaining. But a table then was 10 people. Now I think there were 12 people to the table. But we had a tough, tough time.

I have to ask you this. This doesn’t deal so much with campaign finance. Going down in every presidential election since yours, the South has been off-limits, practically, for Democrats. And I am reminded, when Lyndon Johnson signed the civil-rights bill, and he was congratulated by Bill Moyers and others, he said, “I have just handed the South to the Republicans.” And that’s turned out to be just about true.

But I think that’s turning around. I don’t think in this next election that will be true. I think you will see Democrats campaigning in the general election in the South. And I think they will have a good chance to carry it.

And border?

And border, yeah. But I think you will see them campaigning there.

Just a question about the Internet now, which has just changed so many things. Is that going to be pretty much the wave of the future now?

I assume it is. You see the ads on it. I mean, my son never reads a newspaper.

He reads it all online?

He reads it all online every morning. He doesn’t have a telephone line in his apartment. He uses a BlackBerry, as everyone in that generation does. So I am a dinosaur as far as the Internet is concerned. But I was almost late for our appointment this morning because I was responding to e-mails.

So we are in a different era.

Well, I still like to sit down and read the newspaper all of the way through.

Good. As an ink-stained wretch, I am glad to hear that.