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Ira Forman

Ira Forman is the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, an organization representing Jewish Democrats. He was the director of congressional relations in the Office of Personnel Management in the Clinton administration, worked on several political campaigns, and was the first political director for the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Josh Israel interviewed Forman on June 26, 2007.

Would you give us a little sense of your background? I know you worked on the [Bill] Clinton campaign, in some capacity.

No. I did some minor advising in ’92 about the Jewish community in the Clinton campaign.

That counts.

I have runs campaigns. I started off in the late ‘60s volunteering, in high school, for campaigns. By the early ’70s, I was being paid in Ohio for various campaigns. I was involved in [John J.] Gilligan’s races for [U.S.] Senate and [Ohio] governor, in ’68 and ’70. I ran state [legislative] races in Cleveland, a congressional race in Cleveland. I was a scheduler for a mayor’s race. I ran Jimmy Carter’s field operations in the fall of ’76 in Ohio. I was a lobbyist here and a political director for AIPAC [the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee], AIPAC’s first political director in the late ‘70s.

I ran the New York office of the largest Jewish PAC in the country in the ’80s, had my own consulting firm, did some political fundraising as well as lobbying. I worked at the Center for National Policy as editor of a book called Democrats and the American Idea, which is a 200-year history of the Democratic Party. I ran a gubernatorial race in 1990 for the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio. I did some economic work, economic analysis. What else? I went to the Clinton administration as head of congressional relations for the Office of Personnel Management, then in 1996 came here.

And you have been here since, as executive director?

January of ’96.

And I saw somewhere that you were involved in Heartland PAC? Was that the PAC you were talking about?

That was a [voluntary undertaking]. Heartland PAC was one of the pro-Israel PACs; we founded Heartland out of Cleveland.

That wasn’t Tom Vilsack’s Heartland PAC?

No. No. It was out of Cleveland.

And you are now with National Jewish Democratic Council. Can you talk a little bit about what NJDC is? How it’s organized and so forth?

We call ourselves the voice of Jewish Democrats. It’s a 501(c)(4) that has two missions. It represents Jewish interest and values within the Democratic Party, and it represents the Democratic Party within the Jewish community.

And do you have any affiliated [501] (c)(3)s or PACs or anything?

We have a (c)(3) called the Solomon Project, which put a book out a few years ago called Jews in American Politics, which is the only real compendium of Jewish participation in the American political process. We sponsor some trips to Israel through the Solomon Project. And it was educational, obviously, (c)(3). Technically, they share offices. That’s the only affiliation, really, we have. We have a separate unaffiliated PAC, called the NJDC PAC. We have a 527 that’s fairly inactive called the Victory Fund.

And how does a group like NJDC work with the national party?

Well, we talk to the national party. We talk to various candidates. During election times, we need to be very careful that we don’t coordinate or take any direction from candidates or parties. So we have limited communication during an election, per se. We advise the party. We give them the benefit of our knowledge. We send them our material. That type of thing. But again, particularly in an electoral context, we have to be careful of that, since we are a (c)(4), not to coordinate with them.

So, for example, during the [John] Kerry campaign, we knew all of the people in the Kerry campaign. But it got to the point where even if it was something I thought was totally kosher, etc., I was very loathe to talk to anybody within the Kerry campaign, particularly their Jewish outreach program.

And there are pretty significant restrictions?

Well, it’s coordination. So it’s particularly important that the NJDC is never in the position of taking direction from a party committee in election context or a candidate committee.

Are you, personally, not in your capacity with NJDC, involved in NJDC PAC?

I am. I don’t get paid by the NJDC PAC. I am on the allocations committee. The PAC has not been very active since 2000. There is minimal, minimal activity in the PAC. Our PAC does endorse, where our (c)(4) doesn’t endorse. So even when we don’t give money, we do endorsements with the NJDC PAC.

And does that include presidential campaigns?

In a general election, yes, but we never endorse in primaries. Never. If a neo-Nazi runs against [Democratic U.S. Senator] Carl Levin in a primary, we are not going to endorse. Now that doesn’t mean that our individual [members] involved [do not endorse].

I would imagine in that situation in particular.

Yeah, I would imagine, especially if it were a close race.

Given that, as a PAC, you do have the ability to coordinate with campaigns to some extent as a 501(c)(4) NJDC doesn’t, what kind of line do you have to walk between those two roles?

Well, that’s interesting. The PAC is fairly inactive in raising money. In 2000, we did a fair amount of bundling, but that was mainly because our people were giving money anyway. And they were happy to bundle through us. Now, the PAC does mainly public endorsements. It might do some communication, periodically, about a campaign or something to its mailing list and e-mail list, but it doesn’t really have a major financial component. And therefore, we don’t.

Usually communications with campaigns are educational. We’ll tell them things like kind of theory. We see a lot of the Democratic — not so much incumbents — we see a lot of challengers and open seat candidates on both Senate and House and some gubernatorial candidates. We usually talk to them about the Jewish community in general and their local community and try to give them advice on how to work the Jewish community. And we’ll follow some races. For example, in some congressional races we saw openings to go after [conservatives], and we did. And we did it, usually, as the (c)(4). No communications with the campaigns.

And how does an organization like yours divide the fundraising process? I imagine you have sort of a core membership that probably would be supportive of your entities. Do you have people that donate just to one?

No, the vast majority of our money is raised by the (c)(4). There are people at times who want to give to a (c)(3) entity. And I have to make it clear to them that if you give to the (c)(3), there is going to be no partisan activity whatsoever. The (c)(3) can only do educational work, so again, a trip to Israel with people. We are, right now, trying to look at taking some heads of the progressive-organization-types to Israel. Give me $10,000 (c)(3), I’ll be happy to take it. But [that money is] not going to help any candidate or any Democrats, etc. This is strictly going to go to educational work. It’s going to publish a book. It’s going to take some people to Israel. But it is not going to do that.

Unless the people in Pennsylvania read the book.

Yeah, but if you read the book, I have Republicans writing in that book as well as Democrats. So it’s not like a screed that’s going to help particularly Democrats in any way. I would guess 90 percent of the money that’s raised, maybe 85 percent to 90 percent is going to the (c)(4).

And because it’s a (c)(4), that’s unlimited and reported to the IRS? But donors don’t have to identify themselves?

That’s correct. 

And how do you go about raising money for an organization, (c)(4) in particular? Is it mostly small memberships?

We’d like to expand our small membership base, but the majority of money is from large donors.

And is it sort of a core group that . . .?

No. People don’t give $100,000, six-figure gifts, by and large to us, so it’s going to be less than six-figure gifts. So you can’t be too small of a core if you are going to run an operation. You have to have a fair number of people giving you $1,000 checks, $5,000 checks, $10,000 checks, things like that.

Could the Internet change the way you raise money?

No, it hasn’t changed it for us yet. It certainly changed how we reach people. We raise a little money on the Internet. But fundamentally, it’s not changed our fundraising.

So you mentioned that, in a primary, NJDC would not take sides.

That’s correct.

And in the general?

Well NJDC, per se, won’t take sides in the general either. But we are here to communicate to the Jewish community about the Democratic Party and its candidates. So in a general election, the PAC sometimes endorses, and people can use that. And we do kind of voter information stuff. So we do voter guides and that type of thing. We communicate with our members about our candidates and Democratic candidates. And we put out information. But we make sure that we don’t do direct advocacy, “vote for” or “vote against” type of thing.

Is that typical of (c)(4) organizations in presidential races?

I am not an attorney. But the minimal standard has been for a while, in terms of Federal Election Commission, is no direct advocacy, voting for or voting against type of language. So that’s important. So like I said, I am not real familiar with other (c)(4)s. I am familiar with us. And that’s the type of communication, voter guide information or some issue stuff, which we’ll talk about candidates. But we won’t tell you how to vote.

Why do donors give to an organization like yours?

Why do donors give? Well, there is no one reason. Some of it is social networking. People like to meet with and be a part of an organization which they, in general, have general ideological ties to. There are a lot of people who are concerned about the direction of the country and want to [make] some change in this era. They want change or more progressive change. And they are usually identified pretty strongly with the Jewish community, so one of the ways that they can be most effective is through a Jewish Democratic organization.

We do events where they get to meet members of Congress. We had an event where all of the presidential candidates came. People are attracted to that type of thing. So there is no one way that you raise money. But there are multiple ways, multiple reasons that people will support us.

With McCain-Feingold, and particularly in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling [regarding independent expenditure advertisements], has campaign finance law changed the way an organization like this operates?

Well, yeah. I mean campaign finance always affects us. And we are always looking at it. It’s complex because you can have something like McCain-Feingold, and the courts tend to be pushing to [loosen] McCain-Feingold. While the regulatory agencies, whether it’s IRS looking at a 527 — although we don’t do much 527 — or the IRS looking at a (c)(4) and what kind of activity a (c)(4) [is doing], or the FEC may be kind of working the opposite way.

So you are always trying to make sure you are out of kind of gray areas. But there is a lot of gray area because the environment keeps changing. But, for example, what was changed yesterday, we are neither a labor union nor a corporation. And we have never done electronic communication. We have done a lot of Internet stuff. We have done a lot of print ad. We have done a lot of direct mail. But, per se, yesterday’s ruling doesn’t affect us. I mean most of what we do, though not all of it, is we are communicating with Jewish voters. And when you are talking to Jewish voters, things like Jewish publications, like Internet, and like direct mail, are much better ways to target.

There are not a lot of Jewish-only TV shows?

No, there are some Jewish cable networks. There is a national Jewish network; it’s like in Philadelphia and D.C. alone. But I mean they don’t have large audiences. And frankly, to reach Jewish voters, in fact a lot of Jewish households don’t get any type of Jewish, particularly, media. They don’t get Jewish newspapers. A place like here, I could be wrong on this, but I think the circulation of Washington Jewish Week is like 15,000 households. Well, there are [215,000] Jews in this metropolitan area. I guess that would mean [125,000] households, so that doesn’t get you a lot of the households.

How does an organization like yours make sure that the right affiliated entity is doing a particular thing? Do you have lawyers?

Yeah, we have pro bono lawyers, and I talk to them a fair amount. But most of the time it’s pretty obvious. And most of the work here is being done by (c)(4). I mean the vast, vast majority of the work is being done by (c)(4). And if there is a (c)(3) activity that kind of fits into the purview of the (c)(3)s board, the (c)(3) board meets at least once a year and they give us some direction. We might do that if we have money to do it.

But most of the work is mostly pro-active. I mean a lot of the research and stuff that we might do, a fair amount of that is basic research about Jewish voting behavior. And we do a study every year about Jewish voting behaviors, etc. It’s clearly (c)(3). And we release that stuff to the public.

Most of the stuff here is (c)(4). I mean if there is anything that has to do with endorsing a candidate or direct advocacy, it’s the PAC. But there are lots of questions because, for example, you do something in a state, you may have to be dealing with state laws, not just federal law.

I am not an attorney. And even if I were an attorney, you need an expert on this. And as my experience has been, there is lots and lots of gray area. There are a lot of folks out there who might want to get into those gray areas and push the envelope. We tend not to. And there is not a real reason for us to do so.

As someone that’s sort of been involved in multiple levels of the system, particularly dating back to the Carter campaign, and having maybe not the typical birds-eye view of the presidential races, but certainly an important role in those, do you think the system works for campaign finance for presidential races these days?

Well now I am going to give you totally a personal view. Because the NJDC, as far as I know, certainly since ’96, have never really taken a role in campaign finance, etc., and never lobbied. We don’t lobby to begin with, but we’ve never really had a public policy position.

So my personal feeling is that this system is badly flawed. And I am not sure that I have perfect answers to it. But it does seem that having people with unlimited money having the ability to spend all of their money in the system is unfair. It limits our candidate crowd. It does seem to me that there is an inordinate amount of time spent in American politics raising money. And though one can make an argument, some of that is good as a way of weeding out candidates, I think it may be inordinate in terms of the time that candidates have to spend and the type of communications they have to make vis-à-vis the electorate.

So I will say that, again, in my personal capacity, when McCain-Feingold was being debated, in my personal capacity I did talk to people, Jewish groups. There were people sometimes saying: “Oh, this is horrible for the Jewish community because it will take away the influence of the Jewish [community].” And I said, “That’s silly, really silly.” Certainly you could make an argument that total public financing would diminish some of the Jewish community’s ability to organize in politics or competitive advantage. But none of the McCain-Feingold [bill] was anywhere close to that.

You could also have made an argument, I guess the only other thing that could hurt the Jewish community in that sense would be if there was a legislation which prohibited out-of-state, or severely limited out-of-state contributions, because, obviously, the Jewish community’s concentrated in certain states around the country. But short of that, any type of reform, per se, you could argue the reform isn’t good. But to say it hurts the Jewish community is silly.

And I did make that argument. And I also made further that the Jewish community and other minority groups are best served by robust democracy. I am a big believer that it isn’t all rigged and it isn’t a fixed system. There is no question that some of the unfairness of the system, and some of the power realities of the system are based on the campaign finance system. And it’s a far from a perfect system. And I think that broad participation in the political process is really important. Now I do see one very interesting thing in the current system, which is the rise of small-gift donors. And the Internet is helping that a lot. And I think that, generally, seems to be a pretty healthy phenomenon.

As someone who has been a strategist and seen the process, can you talk a little bit about the diversity within the consulting community and within the Democratic Party, sort of a constituency group of the Party? The business of consulting, in general, and the Party leadership . . .?

You mean consultants like pollsters and media strategists, etc.?

Yes, and the leadership within the Party, the people who run the DNC [Democratic National Committee], and the various committees. Do you think that diversity is a problem?

You mean diversity in terms of the racial, ethnic, gender diversity?

Yeah. I mean do you think that the consulting community and the parties reflect America? And if you have seen, the Republican Party?

Well, my expertise is the Democratic Party. And no, I don’t think the consultants nor necessarily the Party leadership exactly reflects the constituency of the country or exactly reflects the Democratic Party, though there have been great strides there. And I think, like anything in politics, there are barriers. But many of those barriers, the types of barriers that existed 50 years ago in this country — race, gender, ethnicity — were dramatically more significant. And those barriers are dramatically smaller.

And it’s not just in politics, but it’s in every aspect of society. And businesses, no matter what people in business think their ethics are or their morals happen to be about discrimination, there has been tremendous pressure that you have to get the best brains, the best business people, into your operation, or you’ll just sink. So that made it much tougher to have law firms that wouldn’t want women, wouldn’t want African-Americans, wouldn’t want Jews. We just didn’t have that luxury, even if you maybe felt that way. You don’t [have] the luxury.

To a certain degree, it’s the same in politics. And now certain professions tend to still attract certain demographics. So I don’t know what the consultancy community is. I can tell you, for a fact, that the Jewish community is overrepresented in a lot of these political professions. And I don’t know why. It’s certainly not because everybody is all committed to what we call the pro-Israel agenda. There is, I know, a mix of ideological agendas, and basis for this. And this was not true 50 years ago.

But 50 years ago, there were certain Jewish professions that Jews were overly represented. Politics was not one of them. Today, it is one of the professions that Jews are very involved in. And it’s interesting to me, and we have looked at it. I don’t really exactly know why, so in that sense, you don’t have perfect diversity in our side. The only thing I know about the Republican side is it tends to be less diverse than we are.

Certainly, in a similar vein, a lot has been said about the diversity of the 2008 presidential field, with a serious African-American candidate, a serious female candidate, a serious Latino-American candidate, a serious Mormon-American candidate, and the possibility now that there may be a billionaire Jewish-American candidate jumping into the field. Do you think having a unique constituency is an institutional advantage? Do you think it’s still a disadvantage for a candidate?

No. We have had the polling since the late ’30s that gives us some measure of prejudice against voting for a candidate for president of various ethnic and religious groups. And we have to guess that it probably under-represents the bigotry. But what it tells us is that since 1960, when you had clearly some bigotry going on in that presidential race, that those numbers have dropped dramatically. In the early ’60s, people [were] saying that they could not vote for a candidate who was x or y or z, African-American, Jewish, woman, Catholic, Mormon, etc. All of that stuff is people who say they don’t.

So almost all of these ethnic, religious groups, something like 95 percent, 94 percent will say, when they are asked the question, could you vote for a member of your own party who is African-American, fill in the blank, Jewish, whatever? Those numbers went from, I think, well under 50 percent would vote for a Jew — I think 37 [percent] or something, high 30s — to a point now where the Jews are the same as Baptists or Methodists. And frankly, African-Americans and women are pretty much the same on that. Very few people, 5 percent or something, say they wouldn’t vote for a person of their own party who is a Baptist, or 5% wouldn’t vote for a Jew.

Now there are two groups that stand out that are still having significant prejudice on this. Last I saw is the Mormons were in the 70s; about 75 percent of the people said they would vote for a candidate from their own party who was Mormon. And gays, which I think last I saw was under 50 percent still, maybe it was about 50 percent. But even that, I think, is probably changing.

And so the bottom line here is there are certain advantages, if you’re part of a constituency that is highly politicized, meaning they know how to organize. They know how to focus their attention. They are highly organized. I mean those are the two factors, really, of how groups get affected in politics. They are, a) highly organized, and b) they narrow their attention fairly narrowly on certain issues. That’s how smaller groups in American politics can gain influence. That’s always an advantage.

But I would say, still, that there is a slight disadvantage for most of these groups, including Jews and including African-Americans and including women. It’s better to be a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man on balance in general. But whereas 50 years ago most of these groups had no chance of being elected to the presidency, I believe most of these groups today, I believe the right person [from] that group could be elected. But if you asked is it on balance a positive or negative? For some of these groups, it still remains somewhat of a negative, but not huge — my personal opinion.

And last question for you. The 2008 presidential race, what role do you think money will play in it? And what role do you see NJDC playing in it?

Well, money will play a major role, just like it has in every election. I mean I guess you could probably go back to 1828 when suffrage really opened up. I can’t think of an election where money didn’t play a role. Go back to what some people think was a watershed or realigning elections. Well, 1896 was considered a realigning election, [William] McKinley versus [William Jennings] Bryan. And by any counts, the Democrats should have gotten slaughtered in 1896, because it was an incumbent Democrat in the White House preceding with what, to that time, was the worst depression in American history.

Democrats in 1892 had large majorities in both the House and Senate. And they probably lost 200-plus seats in the house in 1894 in the off-year elections; ’96, there were a lot of labor strikes. There were all other kinds of problems in the country. And the Democrats shouldn’t have won. But the Democrats nominated someone who totally repudiated the incumbent president and turned the Democratic Party, in a lot of ways, on its head in Bryan. And Bryan captivated the imagination of the country. And up to around Labor Day, past Labor Day, a lot of people thought that Bryan was going to pull an upset and defeat McKinley. But Republicans outspent Bryan by 100 to 1. That was amazing.

That was Mark Hannah’s machine.

Hannah’s machine. Plus, up to that time, there wasn’t generally a major difference in how the parties ran. But the financial Democratic community — historically the Democrats had huge support out of New York and probably Wall Street, etc. — a lot of those people sat on their hands, because they didn’t want a radical. They would support a conservative Democrat like [Grover] Cleveland. But they wouldn’t support a populist Democrat like Bryan. Money was one of, if not the most important factor of overwhelming Bryan by Election Day.

If you look at the elections in the ’20s, I mean the Republicans outspent the Democrats in ’20 and ’24 by huge amounts. That wasn’t the only factor. Democrats were not going to win in ’20 no matter what. But it had an impact on elections. So money has had an impact on American elections for a long, long time. And it will continue to. I don’t see anything in the future.

So yes, the answer is money will have a major impact. We have a situation where we have self-financing now. None of these folks are going to take general election funds, unless a candidate comes and surprises us. And we have a situation that [Michael] Bloomberg — which I am skeptical if Bloomberg gets in, but if he does — people are talking about a half billion to a billion dollars. These are large, large numbers.

Not a whole lot of people can probably spend that much.

No, but clearly he can. I mean I believe everybody in the Forbes 400, now, is going to be a billionaire. And so you would guess that half of those people have a lot more than a billion dollars. So there are 200 people in the United States who could do it. And he happens to be one of them. And there are a lot of people ahead of him that would make his fortune look small.

But in any case, it will have an impact. In terms of our role, it’s what it is every election. We will be trying to get information out about both the Democratic and Republican candidates, given the issue agenda of the Jewish community. We think it’s useful for us to get that information out on a whole range of issues. Not just Israel, but issues like economic justice, social issues, reproductive freedom, stem-cell research, environment, where there will be huge differences.

And the parties are much more ideological than they have been for a long time. Almost certainly there will be huge differences between the Democratic and Republican candidates. And frankly, that’s good for Democrats in the Jewish community. And we will be trying to get that information out through the Internet, through direct mail, through putting some field staff in various cities. And that’s going to be our role.