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Gary W. Hart

Gary W. Hart, a Democrat, was the manager of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. He was a U.S. senator from Colorado from 1975 to 1987 and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and again in 1988.

John W. Mashek interviewed Hart on August 7, 2007.

Do you think, going right up to the current campaign, that public financing is dead or at least comatose now?

Well, I think, at least comatose. And I hope not dead.

It runs into the kind of basic American notion of private markets and a belief, I think among other things, that if you are a viable candidate you can raise enough money to be heard. That is a premise that’s increasingly in question, and particularly for those like myself who are usually described as dark horses. The only way I could be a contestant in ’84 was to make a showing in early caucuses and primaries. And the only way I could do that at the time was beg or borrow — mostly beg — some basic finances to get through Iowa and New Hampshire. And I did, at the end of the day, just before New Hampshire, violate a promise I had made to my own family, and we put a mortgage on our house in Washington.

And that was the only way I could compete. Now it’s laughable — it seemed enormous at the time because of the risk involved — but it was only $50,000. And without it, I could not have won that primary and gone on to be a viable candidate.

Even allowing for inflation, do the totals that are being raised now by the so-called top-tier candidates in either party surprise you?

Yes. It’s beyond surprising. It’s shocking to me. I simply can’t fathom it. And it is a product both of the size [and] of the early start. I don’t think campaigns are starting earlier. Every four years, everybody says they are starting earlier. They get bigger earlier. It’s more an industry, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for again, the long-shot, dark-horse candidates to be competitive. The tens of millions of dollars that have been already spent — who knows where — mostly for expensive consultants, is very, very hard to believe.

Well, some otherwise serious candidates, on the Democratic side — and I certainly would include Senators [Chris] Dodd and [Joseph R.] Biden, [Jr.,] in that — I would assume that they are going to have to take public financing to even get beyond January 1 or they will just be buried in the dollars raised by the so-called big three.

I would suppose. I have not had a chance to talk to any of them, whom I have served with, both Senator Biden and Senator Dodd. And I don’t quite know how they are keeping going. I gather, at least one case, they have raised enough money to mount a reasonable, though small-scale campaign. I think the debates help with visibility. But again, with that many candidates, it’s awfully easy to get lost.

On the Republican side, I guess there is such a thing as too much money. Phil Gramm and John Connally certainly learned that lesson. But would you think that now there doesn’t seem to be a case for too much money? We don’t know that yet. Although it’s certainly not having enough [that] dropped [Tom] Vilsack and [Mark] Warner out of the race, because they said they just couldn’t do it.

I think that was clear with Governor Vilsack. My impression was that Governor Warner, a wealthy man himself, had other considerations. I am not quite clear.

And he may run for the senate, with the other Warner [Republican Senator John Warner] probably not running.

Yes, he may. But I did not get the impression, in his case, that it was simply because . . .

Because he could raise his own, of course, out of his own wallet if necessary.

Yes.

That’s right. I did forget that.

I think it’s not just the amounts; it’s what kind of money it is. Now, as you know, we do have individual limits on amounts that can be contributed. But people get around that with the so-called bundling. But I think a grass-roots campaign — and here one has to credit Senator [Barack] Obama — that raises a lot of money from a lot of contributors, to me, is kind of a healthy thing. Small contributors in large numbers is a very healthy thing.

Well, I think these debates, if that’s what you want to call them — I call it a platform show with many candidates and not enough time to really debate issues — but in this last Democratic debate, before bloggers, Senator Obama and former Senator [John] Edwards were after Hillary [Clinton] on accepting PAC [political action committee] money. I know Clinton said she’s going to accept it, that she didn’t consider that dirty money, and I assume that this could be an issue as you go along. When you were running, they didn’t have political action committees at this level, did they?

They did. And, in fact, I believe I was the first presidential candidate — perhaps even the only one — to say I would not accept PAC money.

And it cost me. It cost me both politically and, certainly, financially. And it was a self-imposed handicap. But at that time we were in a reform mode. And I felt very strongly, as a campaign reformer, that the situation was out hand. And as early as the early ’80s — these things, as you know, tend to go in cycles. About every 20, 25 years there are scandals, [Jack] Abramoff and so on, and people demand change. And so some kind of compromise passes the Congress; in the case of the McCain-Feingold bill, actually several years ago, [it] was based upon one that I had introduced in the late ’70s, early ’80s.

In 1972, by most of the estimates I have read, [George] McGovern may have hit [$38 million], and [Richard] Nixon probably about $250 million and climbing. And if the Nixon campaign was running short, they could just fly out to Chicago and Clement Stone would write them a check. Were you aware, in ’72 — I am sure you probably were — that you were running into a colossus like this in terms of money differential?

Oh, absolutely, no question about it. Anytime you run against an incumbent, you have that. And Walter Mondale and I had that in [Ronald] Reagan in ’84. We knew what, I think, we were up against. And we knew we were severely handicapped. But in ’72 there was no doubt about it. It wasn’t just the power of money. It was the power of the political structure and the ability to do things for people in exchange for financial support.

Incidentally, the demonstrators that showed up at the McGovern hotel during the convention with all sorts of banners and dressed in a bedraggled way, they were paid for by Nixon, by the campaign.

Well, we found this out in the Watergate years that it was a Donald Segretti operation. Segretti and others went to Miami to disrupt the convention. And you may or may not recall that, in our campaign hotel, the Doral, the night that McGovern went over to the convention to accept the nomination, the lobby was jammed with 800 to 1,000 very disreputable people claiming to be disgruntled campaign workers. And, in fact, they had shown up in the hotel that morning. And I was called out of bed at about seven in the morning to go up to meet with the representative of them in the ballroom. And they claimed to have worked for McGovern all across the country, and that now McGovern was selling them out, and he wasn’t liberal enough and so on. I had never seen any of them, and I knew almost everybody.

You probably knew all the volunteers practically sight unseen. 

Absolutely. So that whole business was a setup from CREEP [Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President].

Of course, all of those excesses of that campaign led to reforms in ’76, and probably — you may differ with this — the [Gerald] Ford-[Jimmy] Carter race [was the first time] that both candidates went to public financing because of the pressure to raise more, more, and more. Do you recall, in that ’76 campaign, that Carter was a dark horse coming in, as he once described, from anywhere to nowhere?

Right. Yeah.

And came up as a former governor of Georgia to win it and didn’t really have all that much money. Frank Moore and Jerry Rafshoon told me that they could hardly wait for the first of the month to come when the government check came in.

I don’t recall. I was in my second year in the Senate, and although I had met with Governor Carter earlier — and he had used a book that I wrote about the McGovern experience [Right from the Start: A Chronicle of the McGovern Campaign] as a kind of handbook for the structuring of his campaign, or at least its grass-roots operations — I don’t recall the discussion of money during that in that period.

Well, we’ll move forward now to 1984, when you did run against Walter Mondale. And Mondale, certainly as a former vice president, had a leg up on having organizational money. But you described earlier how even taking a mortgage out on your house, and then when things didn’t turn around, you scored what the media said was a stunning upset in New Hampshire and Vermont [and] you were able to more seriously challenge [him]. But was there a time there when, because of his background with organized labor and because of the fact that he had been in office like that, that money became a real problem for you?

Well, it was a problem all along from throughout ’83 and beyond. After New Hampshire, we began to raise serious money. And a lot of contributors started showing up, and fundraisers, more to the point, showed up. And we inherited an awful lot of supporters from other candidates, including Senator [John] Glenn [of Ohio], whose second choice was not Vice President Mondale, but turned out to be me.

So at that point, I would say, about the time of Super Tuesday or thereafter, it got down to a two-person race, even acknowledging Reverend [Jesse] Jackson. And those who thought that the party agreed with me, and the party needed new leadership, kind of came on board. But I don’t think, at any point, did our fundraising catch up with our expenses, because we had a chartered plane. We had press all over. We had to finance a 50-state operation almost overnight. And I ended up, after the convention, in debt. We spent a lot of ’85 trying to settle those debts, pay them off and settle them.

You, generally, were considered to have a good campaign staff. Was it knowing that the structure that Mondale had — and see if my memory is right here — that Dick Moe, who is certainly a personable man, had to scramble for delegates on [Capitol] Hill to get him anywhere near over the top? Is my recollection right on that?

Yeah. The difference was the so-called superdelegates, most of whom had already pre-endorsed Vice President Mondale in ’83 thinking that this was an inevitable shoo-in. So I ended up with 1,200 delegates after and winning 25 or 26 primaries and caucuses, including California.

Weren’t you winning big in the West?

Well, I think I won 11 out of the last 12 primaries, and almost all of the Western states. But the superdelegate structure, which I think counted for about 800 delegates, was virtually to a person committed to Walter Mondale.

It’s pretty hard to run up against the lock of that many delegates.

Impossible.

But the interesting thing was, even at the convention, there were no defections. We did not lose, to my knowledge, one delegate, even as it looked as if Vice President Mondale had it locked up. And you would have thought half or more of mine would have defected. No one did.

[What were your] thoughts on getting in and then getting in again in ’88? Was it partly money, or maybe all money, that you were going to be running up against a real firestorm to get in the race? Because you certainly were, after your strong showing in ’84, considered the front-runner and considered somebody who would be tough to oppose.

Yeah. I think at some point, in the spring of ’87, the polls had me running 15 percentage points ahead of Vice President [George H.W.] Bush, and certainly way ahead in the Democratic side. But things got very complicated, as you know, and money did not play much of a role in any of that.

Now let’s move forward again, to the current time. Do you expect that this year, because there is no incumbent or no sitting vice president or no person way out in front on either side, the debates are going to be pivotal?

Do you mean in the nomination?

In October, when the presidential commission debates go on.

Oh, I think it will be pivotal. Certainly, most people who have been through it say it is, in part, an exercise in avoidance of mistakes. You have a rare chance to hit a home run. But you have an awful lot of chances to strike out.

And I think it causes some candidates, particularly challengers, to be more cautious than they should be. You have got to, if you are challenging the incumbent — and that’s not the situation here — or somebody who is ahead of you, you have got to take some risk and say some provocative things and possibly even try to provoke your opponent, but in a thoughtful way. But I think that an awful lot of people make up their mind in the last 30 days, or even the last seven or 10 days.

I really doubt that the man on the street is totally unaware that [Barack] Obama and [Hillary] Clinton are in a hissy fit over which one is more macho and whether John McCain is imploding. I mean, I just don’t think that’s on the radar screen for most people.

This is all insider’s stuff.

My wife pointed out to me last night that she’d seen a story — it may have been on the evening news — that showed that in the last eight months that neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama had moved at all, despite the expenditure of tens of millions dollars and highly paid consultants and all the rest of it.

They say that — you and I have heard this for years — the reason they use negative advertising is that it works. Do they work, do you think? Or have we hit, maybe, an overload here?

I think many people who believe that politics and government is serious business, and not just a contact sport, wish they didn’t work. I am kind of agnostic. I think the so-called experts say they do. They can point out poll numbers that show it. Vice President Mondale had, at one point, a red telephone ad that questioned my judgment and experience. And I think we’ll see the same thing where Senator Obama is concerned. It may cause some people to kind of look at things superficially, to pause or change their mind. I don’t know. I just don’t know. I think there are legitimate, if you will, critical ads on issues of experience, judgment, and so on, that are not vicious and are not directed at character. So I think there are shades of gray and black here.