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John Kerry

John Kerry, a Democrat, is a fourth-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts. He was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Before his election to the Senate, Kerry was the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. He is the chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

Jules Witcover interviewed Kerry on June 13, 2007.

The first thing I would like to ask you [is] your views on the future of the matching-funds system. Do you think that has any future? Do you think candidates who don’t opt out of the system can have any kind of reasonable chance to be nominated?

Providing you have a sufficient base, based on an issue of the moment or your own record and experience, it’s possible — I underscore “possible”— for a matching-fund candidate to win. But it’s much more difficult unless the matching funds are, themselves, reformed, so that you have a sufficient level of match that is guaranteed and a sufficient total level of funding timely delivered in the appropriate quantity. If that doesn’t happen, it is doomed. And frankly, it’s flawed, because it forces battleground-state campaigns rather than national campaigns. In my experience, we had to ration money, and in fact even pull out of three states where we were perilously close. And I believe if we could have stayed and afforded to stay, it would have made a world of difference. But the finance situation doesn’t allow that.

Was that because you only got money from the system as you got into particular states?

It’s because, in terms of the match, you have a fixed amount of money in the general election. And in my case, I had a 13-week general election compared to their 8-week general election. So we had to ration our funds for an even longer period of time. The inadequacy of the current situation is it cuts in when you accept the nomination. Our nomination was the end of July. Theirs was the end of August. So they had a shorter period of time with more money. That’s flawed.

But you are talking about looking toward the general election.

Well, you have to look toward it. If you are involved in the match and you take federal money, you take federal money — I mean, if you take it in the end. In the match, in the primaries, it’s slightly different. But a match in the primaries is not enough money. It’s just not modern. It’s not up to speed. And you never knew if it was even going to be adequately funded. So you put your candidacy at peril, in essence. I think that the inadequacy of the funding is the most important thing, particularly absent comprehensive reform. If 527s are allowed to be out there blasting away at you, and you are limited in what you are able to control as your message, you are screwed. And so unless there is a comprehensive reform, I wouldn’t recommend to some candidate to go off and commit suicide.

How would you reform it?

You have to have a comprehensive reform. You have to have a limitation on these individual groups and the nature of their attacks. And you got to have some kind of response capacity. I mean, we ought to get back to some sort of equal time or other free advertising time. There are any number of options that have been on the table through the years. This lowest unit rate to candidates is a joke. I mean, the lowest unit rate is exorbitant. Campaigns spend tens of millions of dollars and the media, which are licensed by the federal government, walk off with these incredible amounts of money.

I have advocated that ever since I came here. I was one of the leading advocates of full campaign finance, public funding, full funding reform. I wrote the bill with [Senators] David Boren [of Oklahoma] and George Mitchell [of Maine] back in the ’80s. We actually passed it at one point. And George Herbert Walker Bush vetoed it. And I went with [Senators] Bill Bradley [of New Jersey] and Joe Biden [of Delaware] to visit with [Bill] Clinton in 1993 in the Oval Office to persuade him to do campaign-finance reform when we had the majority of both houses and the White House. And he declined to do that. And I think we paid an enormous price for not having done that. But you have to have a comprehensive reform. I am not for Band-Aid reforms anymore. I am not for coming in and limiting Congress and what they can do here, and then individual groups can go out and just murder you on their own. Enough of that.

Getting back to the question of the people who will take the matching [funds]. The theory is you do well in the — this time around — first four primaries and caucuses, and you build momentum. But when is the time to build the momentum?

I don’t think that theory is applicable anymore. I think that’s a rationalization, not a legitimate theory. The fact is that in the modern structure of our primaries and caucuses, if you are not able to compete early and compete equally, you are not able to compete. First of all, every campaign is different. I know a lot of candidates are running around looking at the model of what I did in Iowa and New Hampshire. I don’t think that model fits again, number one. And number two, I don’t think you ever win the presidency by running the last campaign. I think this is going to be different, because the schedule is different. The states’ lineups are different. And the dynamics are different. The issues are different. And so I wouldn’t count on that at all, personally.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that, at least on the Democratic side, the nominee will be known by February 5.

Absolutely, I’d believe that.

But what about the possibility that you have three candidates who raise a lot of money and are doing well and have good profiles splitting the delegates in those early states?

You could have some division.

You could have a proportional representation on so much of the delegates.

But at some point somebody is going to get up and run. I think it will happen in early February, personally. But it may not. It may go on a little longer. It’s certainly going to have two candidates who are significantly funded, on our side. I think they’ll have several on their side. But that’s all gaming the sort of current process. That’s not the way to look at this. The way to look at this is, How do we want to elect the president in America? How do we want to have campaigns in America, for the House and Senate? That’s the way to look at this. And clearly you want to allow for living rooms and VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] halls and barns and basements and kitchens, and kind of a grass-roots ability to let people get to know your stuff. And the more you concentrate this toward money and media, the more we take democracy out of the hands of Americans, I think.

So you have to find a way to create competition, I guess, is the word. And I have always believed that if you have a good set of ideas, and you have got a good record, and you are fighting for the right things, people will know it, ultimately. And barring the kind of funded distortion that we saw in 2004, that part of our problem in 2004 was we didn’t have the funds, you can’t control the message of the independent groups. So the message that we were able to control, we didn’t have the money to spend to respond. So if you had an independent group that’s voraciously attacking you, but no other independent group steps up to take it on, and without coordination that’s sometimes hard, you are stymied.

Didn’t some of the Democratic 527s try to come to your aid when you were attacked?

I don’t believe [so]. I mean, I don’t know the details, to be honest with you, because I am running around and doing six rallies a day, but I don’t believe there was any direct answer that was ever nearly adequate. No, I don’t. And, of course, you are not allowed to talk to them. And we adhered to the law. I am not sure others did. But we did adhere to the law. And if you obey the law, it’s very hard to control the message that’s thrown at you.

Do you think it’s destructive to have other organizations, whatever they are, to be able to speak for the candidate without authorization?

Absolutely. But more than that, under the First Amendment, obviously it’s a very difficult line to draw. You can’t strip people’s voices. But you could control how direct they can be. And we did this in the McCain-Feingold [law], so I guess we have the 60-day limit we originally put in. And we broke that. And I think there are ways to skin that cat. And I think the Supreme Court would uphold a legitimate interest in the quality of the discourse to have that kind of separation. So you can talk about an idea, but you can’t specifically talk about a candidate.

But if you want to go out and sell health care or sell immigration or counter or whatever, go do it. But attacking a candidate specifically doing something with tens of millions of dollars which don’t fit under the campaign rules is, in my judgment, a campaign expenditure that’s illegal.

Do you think that the matching system needs to be scrapped now?

Well, if you are not going to reform it, it’s going to be scrapped by the candidates who will choose not to do it. It needs to be reformed. The campaign-finance system needs to be fixed. But the primary thing you have to decide to do is adequately fund the campaigns. The votes aren’t there to do that today. The votes are not there to provide public funding in large amounts for campaigns.

If George W. Bush hadn’t opted out in 2000, and again in 2004, would you have been able to have a winning campaign under the law?

I am not sure what you mean. He hadn’t opted out and we had? Well, that’s conjecture. I mean that’s pure conjecture. That’s speculation. I can’t go back and tell you what would have happened.

Granted, would that have factored in your deciding to opt out if he hadn’t done it in the primary period?

Well, in the primary we didn’t . . .

[Howard] Dean opted out.

He didn’t have a primary. We opted out.

Yeah. I think it was after.

Howard Dean opted out first. And once Howard Dean opted out, really there was not a lot of choice. We needed to opt out if we were going to compete. If we hadn’t opted out, we just wouldn’t have been able to compete.

Do you think that the presence of money in campaigns inevitably means campaigns are going to become more negative?

No. It’s entirely up to the nominee. I was highly criticized because I ran a positive convention. I thought America wanted to have a positive view of where we ought to go. And we didn’t spend our time bashing Bush. We spent our time giving America visions of the future. And, I might add, we came out of the convention five points ahead of Bush, which was about the maximum that was available. I mean, there just wasn’t much greater leeway. So it was a very successful convention. And in fact, if you go back and review all of the comments of the pundits post-convention, they all were superlatives raving about how we accomplished what we needed to do.

So I don’t think it does depend on the negative. I think you can come in and do something that you choose to do. In my first campaign for the United States Senate I did not mention my opponent’s name. I didn’t do a direct negative ad against my opponent when I ran in 1984. So you can make that decision. You can just say, “Look, we are not going to do this.” When I ran for reelection against Bill Weld in 1996, he and I sat down, and I challenged him to do an agreement. We agreed to limit our campaign expenditures. We fixed a total amount we would spend. And we agreed further that any independent expenditure spent on our behalf by someone else would be docked against that total, which gave us each a major incentive to call some group that thought they were helping us and say to them, “Stop, because you are going to deprive me of the opportunity to control my message.” We arrived at that voluntarily. So the answer is, it depends on the candidates.

You decide you are going to run a certain kind of campaign. You can run a certain kind of campaign. Now unfortunately, most of the consultants in the business today will walk in and tell you that you have to slash and burn and take people down. And there is strong evidence to that effect that that’s what works. That unless you are attacking somebody and going after their character, you have to make people not vote for somebody rather than vote for somebody else, which is the theory of a lot of consultants. And tragically, it works.

Is there an increasing danger that consultants get ahold of campaigns and take them over from the candidates?

First of all, in the end, that’s up to the candidate. And the candidate, whatever happened to my campaign, I take the blame for it, because ultimately it’s my decision. But the old adage is, “Don’t be your own campaign manager.” So you hire people. You trust them. You listen to their advice. And you go with them. But in the end, it’s my responsibility, not theirs.

Senator, what do you think the impact of the Internet is in terms of money? Is it possible with all of these new voices now out there talking about campaigns for candidates to tap into that and have to buy less television? 

Only in certain circumstances. Only certain candidates, right, left, or center, will be successful in tapping into that medium, to that energy. And there is only so much room on it. So it is a definite powerful source of funding for certain candidacies, and a very powerful democratizing force all across the board. No matter where you come from, it’s very democratizing. And it’s very important, a certain power. It’s very significant to the grass roots of the country. And it’s created a new accountability tool, outside of the traditional money avenues and media avenues of our politics. That’s significant. And I think it’s very important. And I think for the most part, salutary. However, you have a problem for those whose candidacies may be too new, too unformed, without an initial impetus that taps into it. They can get much behind very quickly and never get going. So you will see a huge differential between e-mail lists in the Internet fundraising bases and website hits between different candidacies. So it’s not a complete equalizer at all.

What would be the distinguishing differentiation between . . . you mentioned left, right, and center? What is it about a candidate, wherever he comes from, that makes him or her likely to be able to maximize the advantages of the Internet?

Well, first and most important is the compelling issue, which taps into their motivation for going to a particular site or caring about being involved. The second is a certain level of notoriety, celebrity, fame, whatever you want to call it, that gives people a reason to open the e-mail or listen to you and not treat it as spam. It’s a pretty straightforward equation.

I am glad you are doing this. It’s an interesting topic. I do think the Internet has changed the title of your book. The notion of the buying of the president — I think certain candidacies avoid buying the president. I’d like to think mine was one of them. We had an enormous Democratic base, so diverse. I mean, the numbers of people who gave $50, $10, the numbers of kids who went out and spent their summer raising 600 bucks selling bracelets or posters or something, it was huge, absolutely gigantic. And the impact of money is diminished because of McCain-Feingold. So the money raised was in sums that were much, much smaller. And you are not going out and collecting $100,000. Now some people bundled money. And, obviously, bundling creates a certain focus of some of these fundraising [events].

Would you outlaw bundling?

Doesn’t bother me, as long as it’s recorded and accountable. I think you have to know who is doing it. I think you have to have complete transparency in fundraising. I have always believed in that. I think you have got to know who is giving — no secrets, no hidden roots, nothing. So people can discern and make their own judgment.

But I don’t want to stop some firefighter from being able to go out and collect a bunch of money from his fellow firefighters because they believe in collective bargaining and come in and say, “We are with you.” I think that could be a Democratic process also. And I think the limitations on total funds are important, that you can’t have the most powerful interest funding an entire campaign. I can remember back when Gene McCarthy ran, you had five or six people funding the deal. And they would run out of money and go to one of the three or four people. You knew them.

Isn’t bundling kind of a dodge?

No. You can have all kinds — anybody can go out and . . .

It’s not the firefighters who are having that major impact. It’s people who are in the Pioneer club and those other clubs that Bush put together, who are bundling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But I think that when you are running a huge multimillion-dollar enterprise, a hundred million or whatever you are doing, huge sums of money, a $100,000 [contribution] is not . . . I have rarely had a fundraiser come to me and say, “I really need your help on this or that.” I can’t tell you how many people have raised money for me who have never asked me for anything.

I think that is a general misconception that everybody I have talked to pointed to. I asked them to give me an example of somebody who really wanted a quid pro quo. They have a hard time coming up [with one].

I’ll tell you what. I have more people who come in this office [who] ask me to do something, who I know voted for the other guy, who I know are Republican, hard-core conservative, whatever. And they come in here and ask us to legislate their monopoly or something. Far more people have asked me to do things for them who never supported me than people who supported me.