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Fred R. Harris

Fred R. Harris, a Democrat, was a U.S. senator from Oklahoma from 1964 to 1973. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and in 1976. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico.

Nick Kotz and Josh Israel interviewed Harris on August 20, 2007.

We’d like to start out a little bit by having you reflect on your career. Oklahoma Senate, ’56 to ’64. You ran for governor in ’62.

State Senate ’56 to ’64.

Right. Elected to the Senate in ’62.

Sixty-four.

Excuse me, special seat in ’64.

Reelected in ’66.

And served in the Senate through ’72. And in ’72 and ’76, you ran as a Democratic candidate for president. And you also did a stint as Democratic National Chairman. Would you talk to us a little bit about what you consider to be some of the most significant events of your political career?

Well, in the Senate itself, the one thing that I was involved in, at my request, [Senate Majority Leader Mike] Mansfield appointed a Senate Democratic Reform Committee and named me the chair of it and put on it [Minnesota Senator Hubert] Humphrey, who had come back to the Senate after losing the ’68 presidential race, and [Georgia Senator] Herman Talmadge.

Among other things, we set up a procedure by which a very small number of Democratic senators could call a conference. And the result of that, among other things, was that the senators started having regular Democratic caucus meetings, which they had not done. Lyndon Johnson, for example, used to have only one Democratic caucus meeting a session. And he did all of the talking.

I made a motion, too, as a chairman of that committee in the Democratic caucus, that we decline to seat any Democratic senator in our caucus, meaning they’d lose their chairmanships, if they had not supported the Democratic nominee for president in the last general election, or if they were members of Democratic Party in a state which did not admit African-American members. We lost that vote in the caucus by one vote.

But I think it began to sort of change the atmosphere a little. And that’s one thing that I did. I also began to hold hearings just on my own as a senator, toward the end of my term, on a lot of things like campaign-finance reform and other things. And, of course, as a member of the Finance Committee I was active in favor of tax reform and welfare reform, but there were a couple of things outside the Senate that I was particularly involved with.

One, I was a member of the Kerner commission, the president’s national advisory commission on civil disorders, which Johnson appointed partly at my suggestion. And I was a member. In addition to that, I was the chairman of the Democratic National Committee and reformed the party. I named the McGovern Commission and made its membership in such a way as to assure that reformers would recommend it and make, among other things, the Democratic Party . . .

Let me stop you there for a minute. And let’s dwell on that and then come back to whatever you want to talk about on other subjects. The McGovern Commission that you appointed and its recommendations really started to change the way that the Democratic Party selected presidential candidates.

Yes.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and reflect on what sort of changes took place? How you look back on that, the whole process of picking the candidate?

At the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the convention itself outlawed the “unit rule,” which had been in effect at that time, by which the majority in any delegation could vote the entire delegation straight, the way the majority wanted to; in other words, disenfranchising anybody else.

For example, that year I remember the delegates from Philadelphia, [Mayor] Jim Tate for Humphrey, [and] there was one member of that delegation who was for [Robert] Kennedy. But they invoked [the unit rule so that that delegate’s] one vote didn’t even count. So the commission outlawed the unit rule. That action [to eliminate the unit rule] I supported. And it mandated the appointment of a commission to reform the Democratic Party and make it more democratic.

But what happened up to that point was that a big part of the delegates were appointed or were chosen because of some public or party position they already had. And there weren’t any rules to speak of, national rules, that required a democratic process — and, for example, [they] didn’t prevent exclusion of African-Americans and others from the delegate election process.

All of that was changed. And we required affirmative action in regard to African-Americans and other minorities. And we required that there be as many women, generally, as men in the party and other positions. And the whole process had to be open and democratic selection, whether they use the caucus method or primaries. And all that was a radical change in the party. The Republican Party lagged behind. But they later reformed their processes considerably also.

As the states played that out, wasn’t the outcome of that most states going to primaries?

No, in a number of the southern states, they went to primaries right away. Later on, some other states changed to primaries, too. But in Mississippi and some other places, they went to primaries because Democratic politicians could not agree to sit in the same party meeting with African-Americans. So they changed in some of those states to primaries. That way they didn’t have to. But there were other states that went to primaries, too.

Just following through with just one more question in this vein, talk to us about the system today, including the frontloading of the primaries and so forth. How do you look at the current system that we are using in 2007–2008?

One time NBC put out some kind of a picture book or almost a coffee-table book about the convention system. And they said, “somehow it works.” And that’s kind of the way it used to be with Iowa [as] the first caucus, and then New Hampshire the first primary. And I was always opposed to a national primary and or even four or five regional primaries, because that restricts who can really run and who has a serious chance to those who are already very well-known and very well-financed.

The haphazard sort of system that grew up somehow worked. And you could run in Iowa, and sort of like running for governor of a state, one county at a time. And in the process of becoming well known in the county race, you had become well-known in the state at the same time. And if you did well in the first county, you could raise enough money to go on to some more.

I am really very disturbed about what’s happening now. This thing is going to be over by February 5. And that greatly favors those who are already very well-known and very well-financed. And furthermore, I think there is something pretty good about a process that lasts over a period of time. I know the media likes to write “Well, it’s too long of a campaign, and people are tired of it,” and all that.

I think what’s better about a longer process — and I am talking about once the actual voting starts until the convention, or until we know what the decision is — the longer the better in a way. It seems to me there is a real contest, because it gives everybody — the press and everybody else — a chance to really look these candidates over and find out a great deal about them long before we ever get to the general election, weeding out those people who have some kind of serious deficiency. So I am worried about what’s happening. And we are going to have to give a lot more thought to this in the future.

Senator, tell us about your own experience running for president in ’72 and ’76. Was this very different than raising money, for instance, for a senate race?

It was. What made it possible for me to run for president was the public financing provision in the campaign-finance reform law. When I was still in the Senate and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, Lyndon Johnson had all of the Democratic members of the Finance Committee down to the White House. We met with him and some Cabinet officials, including Ramsey Clark, the attorney general, and others to talk about public financing of campaigns. And we all agreed that that’s what we ought to do.

And then Johnson had Ramsey Clark and somebody else, I forgot who on his staff, argue opposite views about whether or not the law ought to — if we passed such a law — apply to the 1968 presidential campaign. And Ramsey argued that, yes, it should, that if this is worth doing, it’s worth doing right away. And that became our view. And the Senate Finance Committee did pass such law. It applied only to presidential campaigns. We couldn’t get anybody to go along on the idea of public funding of congressional campaigns, as we should have done.

Anyway, we passed that. And it became law. And Johnson signed it. And the idea was, just like in the present law, that people, in a sense, voted whether they wanted such a law or not by earmarking a dollar of their tax money. And that way you could say, well, if people don’t want this, they won’t put up the money. Anyway, we passed it. And the money would have gone to the parties for the general election.

Then we got — my seat mate and closest friend, or next to closest friend — together with Walter Mondale in the Senate. Robert Kennedy edged more and more toward running. And he and others were opposed to Johnson’s reelection; Johnson was becoming increasingly unpopular and hadn’t yet announced out. They introduced a bill to repeal that campaign-financing law. And we repealed it the very same year we passed it.

So we didn’t get campaign-finance reform again then until 1974, after I was already out of the senate. But the matching funds provided in that law, the ’74 law, is what made it possible for me to run.

Well, tell us about that. You are running. You are from a small state. And how did the matching funds allow you to run? And how did that experience affect the way you feel about the way we are financing campaigns today?

One of the worst handicaps that’s true of any candidate who doesn’t start out at the top of the polls, in my case was, “Well, I really like [what] you say, but you don’t really have a chance.” And the campaign finance reform [legislation] of 1974 with those matching funds helped me get over some of that with people. I was able to say: “Look, I don’t have to have as much money as everybody has right now. And I don’t have to have all of my money for Iowa and New Hampshire. I just have to have enough. And I can raise enough money. It will be double, in effect, out of the federal treasury. And that’s what allows me to compete.”

So it gave me a good argument. And as a matter of fact, it was a true and honest argument. So you have to start out very early. I started out, I don’t know, a year and a half ahead of time, I think. Something like that. And we began to particularly organize, not just in those early deciding states, but also in the states where we thought we could raise the $5,000 required. The law provides you have to raise at least $5,000 in at least 20 states, counting no more than $250 a person to qualify for 50-50 matching. So we picked out a number of states, over 20, where we thought we could [raise money]. By the time the Treasury window was going to be open and they would start paying, we could get our 20. And we did.

What turned out, in my case, to be a really serious if not fatal problem was that when normally, on the first of January, the Treasury would start paying out, [Minnesota Senator Eugene] McCarthy and [New York Senator] Jim Buckley had filed a lawsuit and went to the Supreme Court — Buckley v. Valeo — to question the constitutionality of that law in many ways. But one was in the funding provision. And so the payout was held up for a considerable period.

Jimmy Carter, who was running no better in the polls than I was, was able to loan his campaign enough money to keep going and to put paid people, particularly in Iowa. Tim Kraft, for example, who is out here in New Mexico now — a good friend of mine — went into Iowa very early, paid to organize. We weren’t able to do that because of that damn lawsuit, until it was eventually settled. And we got our payout.

But that proved to be a really important thing. It also proved highly important at the end for me, because to keep going at one point, I borrowed money on my house in Washington. And it was only because we had federal matching funds eventually coming in that I was able to pay that out and pretty much wind up even with the board, unlike other people, [Arizona Representative] Mo Udall or Sargent Shriver and others who wound up with debts. I wound up just about even with the board because of the federal matching funds.

Senator, we have kind of seen now the major candidates on both sides both opting out of the matching funds for the primary and the public grants for the general. Do you think there is any hope for the system? And if so, how can we make this revive?

At the very least, what you’d have to do is make the funds more attractive — that is, larger in amount and maybe change the restrictions. For example, Mondale, when he ran, ran into this problem, which is in the law, if you take the matching, then, of course, you limit your expenditures both state by state and nationally. And Mondale ran into the problem where if you spend the maximum in these early states and others, you’ll wind up running up against the national limit.

So you would have to change the limits. And you would have to sweeten up the amount of money that you got to make it attractive enough. And I don’t know what the prospects are, whether there is enough public support of that to get Congress to do it. Another development, I think equally as important as the campaign-finance law, a development for good is the Internet. It takes a candidate that has passionate followers and takes really strong stands on issue.

But if you do that, like Howard Dean did, and we see now with [Barack] Obama, you can raise a ton of money on the Internet. We didn’t have the Internet. Now you could, in those days, do what [George] McGovern did, use direct mail to raise small amounts. But the trouble with that is it takes a hell of a lot of money invested to raise money by that means. And your first round of returns do well to pay off your initial investments.

So that wasn’t something that could be enormously attractive and useful for me. But the Internet certainly would have. I would have been able to raise considerably more money than I did if we’d had the Internet in those days.

When you ran in ’72 — I found online your announcement.

Yeah. I always say I just “jogged.” I ran in ’76.

You said in your announcement speech from ’72 something along the lines of “a lot of people can’t believe America has ever been to the moon, because they doubt the credibility of government.”

That’s right.

Thirty years later, do you think we are any better off on that front?

No. No. Starting with the Vietnam War and with [Richard] Nixon, we have never recovered from the great skepticism of government. I think the skepticism about government is generally pretty healthy. But I don’t like the aspect of it which came out of the [Ronald] Reagan years that government can’t do anything right, and everything you try turns out badly, and so forth. I wish we had a little bit more skepticism of the military than we do. But it’s going to be a while before we build back the sort of confidence in the government that we once had.

When you ran in ’76, you did some unusual things to keep down costs.

Yes.

Can you talk a bit about some of these? The vouchers for White House lodging [should you be elected president] in exchange for staying with hosts during the campaign and so forth.

Yes. I, of course, was out of the Senate in January of 1973 working on tax reform and some other stuff on the outside and teaching a class at American University. And it looked like the possibility that my old seatmate, Walter Mondale, might run for president in ’76. And so I sat down and typed a letter, a five- or six-page memo about how a person ought to run for president and how a person who was a populist in both the issues and in regard to the method or the style of the campaign could be elected president.

So I really thought all that out and about how you could do it without as much money as would otherwise be required. That your staff ought to be mostly volunteer and so forth. And you stayed in people’s homes, carried your own luggage, so forth. And I thought that was important, both for the message it sent as well as a necessity in regard to money, and tied right into the kinds of issues which I thought ought to be the issues of such a campaign, which, in my mind, ought to revolve around a fairer distribution of wealth and income and power in the country.

And about the time I had that all finished, and I was going to get it to Mondale, Mondale announced that he wasn’t going to run for president. He said, “I can’t stand the thought of having to stay in Holiday Inns for a year.” So I had a couple of really close friends that I was sort of bouncing some of this stuff off of. And one was Jim Hightower, who headed a Nader-like agribusiness kind of building project, and had once worked for [Texas] Senator Ralph Yarborough. And the other was Peter Barnes, who was the West Coast [correspondent for] The New Republic.

And I later talked to them about that same memo. And they said: “What have you done? Put your own name in it instead of Mondale’s?” And that was about it, really. Hightower said, “If you’ll do that, I’ll take off a year of my life and help you do it.” And Peter Barnes said pretty much the same thing. So I began to circulate that memo, first without my name in it, to a lot of people. And I got encouragement. And that’s how I started.

We opened the campaign headquarters in my home, at first in the basement, and then took over the biggest part of the house. Finally, we moved in two trailer houses in the backyard out in McLean [Virginia]. And finally that got so big, particularly after we took Secret Service protection, that we took over a couple of floors at the old Ambassador Hotel in downtown Washington.

Charles Mohr of The New York Times wrote that I had the largest and most professional of the presidential staffs that year. I had about 131 full-time people. And he pointed out, the biggest part of them were either working for no pay whatsoever or just sort of cost-of-living stipends. And they were really high-quality, very talented people, such as, for example, Frank Greer, who later formed the Greer, Margolis media firm, handled the ’92 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton, for example. And Jim Hightower himself. Barbara [Shailor], [who] is now the vice president of the AFL-CIO for international affairs, and she’s married to Bob Borosage. Anyway, that’s the kind of people we were able to put together.

But the campaign was really a joy. The one thing that I am proudest of about my political career was that I ran for president one time and said exactly what I believed in. And the thing that really went well, I ran in the top three in Iowa, which I needed to do. And I said at the time: “The winnowing up process has begun. And I have been winnowed in.”

But then a funny thing happened. Oklahoma had moved its primary up to between Iowa and New Hampshire. And so while the other people were moving — like Morris Udall, who ran more poorly than I did in Iowa — on to New Hampshire, I had to hustle down to Oklahoma, because Jimmy Carter and Lloyd Bentsen and the others were running like hell. It was a no-win situation for me; it was a “lose” situation, if I lost.

I managed to split it with Carter and defeat Bentsen. But that kept me out of the New Hampshire for a long time. And I didn’t still have the money, so I had to move virtually all of my field staff [and] headquarters to Oklahoma, and then finally bring them up to New Hampshire.

You talked in your book, The New Populism, about the power of moneyed interests. Do you think money buys access to the administration nowadays? And do you think money corrupts politicians?

Yes, I do, in both cases. If you talk to a senator, say, and you say, “Did you vote that way because the oil companies gave you all that money?” Well, obviously nobody is going to say that. But a lot of them will say, or should say, that they’ll damn sure pick up the phone and answer a phone call. And a lot of people say, “Well, that does buy access.” But even if that were all it did, that’s [what] access is.

But the truth is, some will tell you off the record, that it colors your views in a couple of ways. One is the threat of money. You think about voting against the oil companies or really raising hell on it against them, you might decide: “Well, if I just vote against them, they might stay fairly quiet. But if I really push on it, they are going to go down there and find me an opponent and put a lot of money in it.” And so the threat of opposition money has some effect on people.

And also, I know that some will say privately that running for reelection, they don’t exactly change their position, but they may color it a little bit. Nuances will be a little different because of the money. So money makes a huge difference. It is corrupting.

I find that a political scientist who writes about money in politics takes kind of a Pollyannaish view that, “Well, you can’t show the connection between the vote and the money.” A senator might say, truthfully, “I never once was lobbied on that vote by the oil companies or by the utilities companies or whatever.” And, as I say, that could be truthful. Hell, they knew already how he or she was going to vote. And they didn’t have to go and say, “You remember how you have always supported it.” And so it is corrupting. And it certainly buys access, and, if that were all, that alone is influence.

Do you think with the administration — not necessarily this administration, but administrations in general — and with Congress, quid pro quos are common?

Yeah. More openly in this administration than I have ever seen it. In the [George W.] Bush administration, I swear, I just think sometimes they would accidentally take a position that wasn’t in line with the big contributors and supporters. But they never have. They are just quite open about it. So, as I say, I don’t recall even seeing it quite as blatant as it is now.

I really like what’s happened, as I said, with the Internet and raising money. And we saw it in the Dean campaign. And I think that campaign made some really big strategic errors along about Iowa time that might have made the difference in not being a winning campaign. But the fundraising thing and Obama offer a lot of promise, I think.

You have been in New Mexico for several decades now — a transplant-Oklahoman. And I imagine you have seen Governor [Bill] Richardson up close just a little bit. Why do you think someone like Governor Richardson has had a harder time breaking into the top tier as far as fundraising and as far as being perceived as a contender?

Well, I think the major thing is the wrong year. You probably only have one really good presidential campaign in you. And the funny thing is, for a lot of people the time never comes. Jesse Jackson said, “Our time will come.” Well, for a lot of people the time never comes, because suppose you were a John Edwards or an Obama or Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry had been elected president, why, you wouldn’t be running. Kerry would be elected twice. And then your time wouldn’t come, probably.

This time Richardson has raised a hell of a lot of money, but it looks like a pittance compared to the kind of money that Clinton and Obama have raised. And, of course, both of them are enormously, unbelievably famous. And this phenomenon, Obama, is almost unprecedented, although Robert Kennedy was pretty much like that. And it happens; Richardson runs at the wrong time. Some other year you would say: “Well, gee whiz, Richardson’s raising a lot of money. And boy, he sure has the résumé. And he’s a governor. And governors generally have a better chance of getting nominated and elected.” But I think his main problem of being able to break into the top tier is that this has been a tough year for him because of the other candidates.

Suppose Richardson had been running in ’76, like Carter. He would have started out like Carter: 1 percent in the polls. But he would have a real chance, with the kind of money he has raised now or could have raised then, to bust out in Iowa and New Hampshire as Carter did. I don’t know that he does now. But now he hasn’t.

Sort of overall, what’s your thought on the political-finance system that we have today?

Well, I believe in public financing. And I think it ought to extend to House and Senate, too. But it’s just really hard to do now because of the amount of money you would have to put up to sweeten it so that people would not opt out. I just don’t know how much chance; there is not a whole lot of chance, right now, to do it.

And then the other big problem, of course, with the campaign-financing system is the ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, which this present Supreme Court is not going to ever overrule, which equates campaign spending with speech and holds that the limits in that old law, and probably any that you can think up on expenditures, are an unconstitutional burden on speech. That’s a huge blow to the system.

In the same vein, would you look and give us your view of the effect on who runs for president or the Senate and who decides to stay in once they have been elected? How has that been influenced by the incredible demands of raising money? And how has this affected our system, if it has, in terms of who is in the senate, who has become president?

I, personally, don’t think that’s much of a determinant about whether a person stays in the office. When I was in the Senate, there was an old guy from Oklahoma, [Democrat] Tom Steed, who was in the House. And every two years he would say: “I don’t know why I do this. This is a terrible job. I campaign every two years. And I don’t know why.” I was with him one time and another member of the Oklahoma delegation would say, “Well Tom, nobody’s forcing you to run for reelection.”

I mean as distasteful as raising money is for any politician, I think, those not already rich — and our system has made it much more likely [that] rich people will be recruited to serve in the House and Senate — as distasteful as raising money is and how politicians hate to do it, it becomes easier once you get elected. It was John Kennedy who said, “Victory has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”

When I first got elected to the Oklahoma state senate, for example, the very next day I had people calling me. And I had a general election yet to go through. I wasn’t actually elected; I was nominated. But I had people calling me. And they would start out by saying: “Senator.” — I had been called “Senator” before; I was 25 years old — “Senator, congratulations. What a splendid victory! What a great state senator you are going to make! I know you have probably got a deficit and I would like to offer to help you on your deficit.”

Well, that’s really the situation. It is easy for incumbents to raise money, and particularly in the Senate but also the House. Gary Jacobson, a terrific political scientist [and professor at the University of California, San Diego] who I like, once wrote that the only limit on how much money an incumbent senator can raise for reelection is need. In other words, there isn’t any limit. You can raise whatever you need to raise.

Barbara Boxer raised last time $35 million for reelection. Could she have raised $50 [million]? Yes. There is a blue state like New Mexico, I believe Jeff Bingaman raised $6.5 million or so last time. Could he have raised $15 [million]? Yeah. So I don’t think that not being able to raise money, distasteful as it is. Senators raise money all the time now once they get elected. And House members do, too. I doubt that could be a major determinant about whether or not they run. The main question probably would be, how much of a hard race am I going to have? What’s the likelihood that I am going to get beat?

Looking at the history of presidential races and who has won over the last, virtually, quarter of a century, what sort of significance do you see or not see? We have had the same two families occupy five straight presidential [terms], 20 years. With the prospect of, if Hillary Clinton gets nominated and elected, we will have had the Bushes and the Clintons in the presidency for 24 consecutive years. Does that have any significance on how the system is running or not?

Yeah. I think it involves both money and name recognition. And it’s been that way forever. John Adams and John Quincy Adams — forever. People like George [W.] Bush were already those people who knew how to run a campaign and knew how to organize from his father’s days. And he knew where the money was and how to get it. And the same applies, of course, to Hillary Clinton.

Name recognition is just of tremendous importance. Polls in these presidential campaigns, early, show primarily name recognition. But that’s highly important, because if you are running 3 percent or 4 percent or 5 percent in the polls, even though that’s just because you haven’t had a chance to get well acquainted, it really curtails your ability to raise money. And if you are running well in the polls, like [Rudy] Giuliani started right off doing and Hillary Clinton did — Obama is somewhat a different phenomenon, but the fame, even in his case — running well in the polls makes it possible to raise the money.

What would it take to make a public financing system work?

I think you need two things. And as I said, I don’t know if there’s a chance of it. The first one is tough enough to pass, and that is to sweeten the amount of money that would be available. I think you probably have to just make it available out of a treasury and not dependent upon how much people checked off on the income tax. And you’d have to raise the amounts enough so that you’d just be crazy not to take the money to avoid the limits.

The other part of it is, I suppose, impossible to do. Because it would take a constitutional amendment to get around the ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, which held unconstitutional limits on expenditures.

Talk to us a little bit about how you think the media has performed, back when you were running for the senate and for president and today. Is the media doing a poor job, a good job? How could the media help this process be better?

Well, a soundbite or an interview I remember, for example: One time I was at about the seventh coffee of the day. This was somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think. And a woman came to me and said, “I need to interview you for television before your speech, because I have to get back to the station.” And she said: “I just have one question. And we are going to have [to be] very brief, because I only have 45 seconds of tape.” That seemed like a short amount.

But today, if she actually were to use anything I said, and most the time they don’t, they just paraphrase. They say, “Fred Harris, candidate for president, today attacked the Bush administration for so-and-so,” and don’t even have a quote from me, I mean, don’t even actually have my words. But if they do, it would be maybe five seconds, or seven at most. That is a major development, I think.

Secondly, the amount of time, total, that the television gives to the campaigns now is much diminished. I mean, the editors simply are not going to allow much in-depth stuff. The debates are wonderful. The trouble is the listeners are low. And the readership of newspapers, as we know, has greatly declined. There is a development, again, which is quite hopeful. And that is the Internet. And these blogs and YouTube and other such developments put a pretty good spotlight on the candidates. And I think that competition may force the more traditional media to do a little more of that, too.