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Lamar Alexander

Lamar Alexander, a Republican, is a first-term U.S. senator from Tennessee. Previously, he has been governor of Tennessee, president of the University of Tennessee, and President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of education. In 1996 and 2000, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

Jules Witcover interviewed Alexander on March 28, 2007.

Why don’t you talk a little bit about what your feeling is about the whole idea that there is too much money in politics and that it leads to corruption and excessive influence, in various ways.

Well, I think there is too much money in politics. But I think the place there is too much money in politics is in the lobbyists around Washington and their contributions to members of Congress on such a regular basis. I have been surprised, frankly, at the amount of time many of my colleagues have to spend raising money to buy television. And they spend it in meetings and two or three times a week with small groups of lobbyists who give money. That was new to me. I mean, my experience with money and politics was running for governor and running for president. So, I hadn’t realized it had changed that much here.

But isn’t it also true for presidential candidates?

Well, I think it’s a different problem there. And I think the problem in the presidential race is, ironically, there is too little money. The limits on campaign contributions actually turn the race into a money race. And they do it in this way:

First, if you want to run for president, the first thing people say is you have to raise [money]; when I ran in the mid-’90s, you have to raise $20 million or you can’t be considered. That means you are not on the front page of The New York Times. That means nobody votes for you. That means nobody gives you money. That means you are out. The best example of that, I went to see John Kerry when I was teaching at the [Harvard University’s] Kennedy School [of Government] in 2000. Graham Allison heard me make a talk along these lines. And he said, “Would you go see John Kerry?” And so we went over to his office. He said, “Tell Kerry what you said to me.” And I said, “The first serious presidential candidate who ever spends his own money will have an enormous advantage, because it’s a money race.” And I said, “And that could be you, because all of our candidates up to now who have had access to a lot of personal money and can spend unlimited money either haven’t been willing to do it or weren’t really serious candidates.” And that’s exactly what happened to him. He got to a stage in the Iowa race, where I have been before, and where [Dan] Quayle was, and where Elizabeth Dole was, and where many candidates had been, when he was out of money. And it looked like he was out of the race. And he got $7 million of his own money, he and his wife’s, put it in the campaign, [and] won the primary.

The other thing the limits on money require is they are the main reason the race is so long, because in order to raise these ridiculously large amounts of money you have to start early. So you have this sort of dog-chasing-his-tail situation where you start two years early identifying fundraisers and raising money so you can run a two-year campaign. And if you weren’t doing that, you wouldn’t be running a two-year campaign. You would start later. I went to 250 fundraisers, I think, in 1995, in one year. So what would be better?

The other thing the money does is [that] it squeezes out unpopular ideas or unknown people, for the most part, unless they are movie stars. Now that may turn out to be less true in the Internet world, but probably not. I remember testifying with Gene McCarthy up here about 10 years ago, before a Senate committee on this subject. And McCarthy was saying he was against limits on gifts to presidential campaigns. Because, he said: “If Stewart Mott couldn’t have given me $1 million, I couldn’t have run. I was an unknown candidate, with an unpopular idea, running against an incumbent president on the Vietnam War. But because he gave me $1 million, I was able to get in the race, be seriously considered, and actually affect United States history.”

I said there is always some risk that if someone gives you money that you are indebted to that person. I think all of those problems mean we would be much better off if we made sure that every serious candidate had plenty of money to run. And therefore, money wouldn’t be the issue. You couldn’t write and say, “Well, Elizabeth Dole can’t run, because she can’t raise the money.” She would be able to. Someone would be attracted to her, or to me, or to whomever is running. And then we would be judged on other criteria. One compromise of that, which I had suggested, was for the first $10 million, maybe now $20 [million], that you raise running for president, that you allow candidates to take contributions of $10,000, or $20,000, or $25,000. So you still have limits, but you allow them to raise enough money so that the big newspapers and the big reporters, like you, would say: “OK, we have 15 candidates, all of whom can raise startup money. This is a startup fund.”

Well, wouldn’t public financing accomplish the same thing?

Well, public financing would seem to accomplish the same thing. But I have never seen a practical way to actually do it. I mean, the first question always is, to whom do you give it? And the second is, when? See, in my race in ’95, you had been given it, whatever you gave, to Bob Dornan, Morry Taylor, Alan Keyes, Pat Buchanan, me, [Bob] Dole, and everybody else who wanted money. And so they would be sprouting out of the logs. I mean, in the primary, I don’t know how you pick and choose [among] all of these people. And in a general election, we have public financing now, which works partly.

It looks like it’s not going to happen this time.

Well, people are ignoring it. And, in effect, the amount of money a candidate has in the general election will not be the reason he wins or loses. Because both of them have access to unlimited funds, is what it appears.

You said in [a] speech that you thought there would be fewer candidates because of limits on spending. Why would there be fewer candidates?

Because people couldn’t raise enough to run. For example, again, in 1995 and ’96, Tommy Thompson wanted to run. But he couldn’t raise enough money to be seriously considered. He still does. And he still can’t raise enough money to be seriously considered.

So you are seeing a lot of candidates now. But you think they are not going to make it to the starting line?

It didn’t happen in ’95. And look at what happened in 2000. I had done pretty well in ’96, so I thought, “Well, Republicans are conservatives, and maybe the second time around I’ll do even better.” And President George W. Bush was such a good candidate that The [Washington] Post was writing articles in mid-’95 about how he was the next president. So no one would give money to me. And they wouldn’t give it to Quayle. And they wouldn’t give it to Elizabeth Dole. And we all got out because everybody thought he would win. So no one who is perceived as having a little chance to win can raise large amounts of money in small numbers.

Well, was he such a good candidate? Or did he have such a good fundraising operation?

Well, maybe he was both, or we were bad candidates. Who knows? But he was a good candidate. I mean, he was an attractive person.

But he had put together that powerhouse.

He had a powerhouse. I remember going to the Bush Library dedication in ’97. I’m thinking, “Uh-oh,” because they had everybody there from the Republican Party who had any money.

That event up in Ames, Iowa, that they have in the summertime with the straw poll — he had this incredible operation there. He would do everything but get your suit pressed by somebody.

And I would be flying up there in TWA. And I’d fly to St. Louis, and then to Des Moines, and drive over to wherever I was going. And one night I was in one of the counties outside of Des Moines and saw this nice park all set up with chairs and a gazebo. And I said, “What went on here?” They said, “Well, Governor Bush was here last night.” I said, “Oh, he was?” They said, “Yeah, he had set all of this up.” Of course, he had flown in on a chartered corporate jet and gone home in the same day. And I was walking around Iowa, trying to meet people. So the money makes a big difference. Not many people can think of a way to raise huge amounts of money in small amounts. There are just not money people who are able to do that. Bill Bradley was able to do that when Al Gore and he ran. But that was an extraordinary accomplishment. Usually the frontrunner can do it and almost no one else can. That’s what usually happens. It’s not a competitive system.

With some of these candidates now talking about raising $15 million or more, do you think that the subsidy system can survive at all? And do you think so-called second-tier, third-tier candidates, long-shot candidates can get their nose in? Remember Jimmy Carter in ’76 was a long shot. And he did well in Iowa. They had five weeks, then, to build on that. Given the amount of money that some candidates are raising, in the short period of time between events, because of the frontloading, can a long-shot candidate make it or even survive into the spring?

Well, I would have said no in 2004. But it might be yes in 2008 because of two things: Internet and 24/7 television. I mean, the old way to get on stage was to go off-Broadway. I mean, that’s the way [George] McGovern did, and [Jimmy] Carter did, and [Bill] Clinton did, the way I did. I mean, come in third in Iowa and then get this 10-day, huge media rush. And suddenly, I mean, I went from being unknown in California to being 30 percent in the Field Poll without ever having gone to California, in one week, just from coming in third in Iowa. But back then, if I got on C-SPAN I thought I was on national television. Today, USA Today reports that Fred Thompson’s now third among the Republican candidates in America. And he hasn’t come out of his acting studio yet. So if he had a D-Day sort of plan, if he spent between now and September organizing to run for president the way Eisenhower went into D-Day, and then implemented it from Labor Day on, he might be able to just go from Iowa, to New Hampshire, to studio, to studio, and have an Internet and fundraising operation in place that would permit him to compete. Plus, everybody maybe would be so tired of everybody else, by then they are looking for somebody.

Do you think he’s going to do it?

I think he might. At least he’s seriously thinking about it more than he ever did before. But I don’t know if he’ll do it. He’s ahead of Romney. He’s at 12 percent.

People know who he is. Talk a little bit about the phenomenon of blogging, how that has changed politics and whether that has an impact on the money situation.

Well, that’s an interesting question. I don’t understand blogging yet. It wasn’t a factor when I ran for the Senate, even in 2002. Tom Ingram of our staff and a bunch of us went down to Tennessee to help Bob Corker in the last five weeks. The blogs and the YouTube were a big factor. They were a big factor in the same way your columns, historically, were. If I would go to New Hampshire in the ’70s, or let’s say George Romney would go in the ’70s, and you or [Jack] Germond would write about him, then that appeared in the newspaper. And the TV editors would cover him. And the other writers would write about him. So the media was covering the media. And I think YouTube and blogs are, in some ways, taking the place of serious journalists like yourself, and Jack, and [David] Broder, and the people who had the Boys on the Bus role in ’60s and ’70s. And, of course, that affects the money, because you don’t raise money unless people think you have a shot to win, as long as there are limits in place. You just can’t do it.

In that same speech, you talked about free television as one way to improve the ability of some smaller, less-known candidates to run. But you really kind of dismissed it. Do you think that’s not a possibility to look at how television stations wag the dog?

Oh, it would be nice if it were, because almost the entire reason for the huge cost of campaigning is the cost of television. I guess the reason I kind of dismissed it was, again, it’s like public financing, I couldn’t find out how to do it. You might do it in a general election by giving television time to candidates. Even then, you have the question of what time do you give them and who produces the time. In a primary, it seemed almost insoluble to me.

Too many candidates?

Well, and kooky candidates. Everybody could show up and ask for time. And I don’t know how you’d pick and choose among primary candidates. Again, what might change that are the Internet and YouTube and other things we haven’t thought about yet. Because, I mean, if I were to run again for the Senate next year, one of the things that we’ve been talking about a little bit, one of the things that people said to me was: “You don’t need to buy any television this year. We can produce a very good five-, or six-, or seven-minute documentary. State your views and just put it on the Internet. And by the time you get to the end of 2007, you’ll have hundreds of thousands of people who will have seen it.”

Is this a professional political campaign operative who said that to you?

Yeah.

So, he’s really biting his nose.

Well, no, he gets to produce it. 

He would produce the ad?

Doesn’t get to buy the time.

Still gets to buy the time?

He’ll buy the time next year. But I have actually waived whether to go on television this year early. And would it be a good idea to reintroduce myself to Tennesseans in one way or the other? And we decided no. Let’s just put something on the Alexander for Senate website so that gets to be the way people get their information. Then that may give television some competition. It might even help drive down the prices.

Are you concerned at all in a campaign of you as the candidate, nowadays, losing control of your own campaign because of the 527s acting on their own?

Oh, yes.

The independent expenditures acting on their own? And this army of bloggers who can represent themselves as either being for you or with you?

Yeah. I mean, if you think about it too much, you probably wouldn’t run, because anybody can do or say anything. And they have so many more ways to do or say it. So I guess you just present yourself as effectively as you can and try to make that the dominant image people have of you. Or in my case in Tennessee, people have known me for a long time. So it will take the bloggers a while to give them a different picture of me. Well, the thing most people remember about the Bob Corker campaign is the ad of Harold Ford and the white girl who said, “[Call me,] Harold.” Well, that wasn’t the Corker campaign. In fact, as soon as it went on, they called, officially, and got others of us to call on the Republican National Committee to try to get it off, because it hurt the Corker campaign. And it was not conceived of by the Corker campaign. And it ran against the strategy that Corker was using when trying to maintain an appropriate attitude toward running against a very attractive African-American candidate. And suddenly, out of the blue, comes this thing. And it becomes the main thing people know about it.

Well, can you ever catch up on a thing like that?

Well, he did. He won. When it came on, Corker was rising. And he flattened down. And when it went off, he started rising again. So it obviously hurt him, both anecdotally and in the surveys. But it could have killed the campaign.

It’s similar, in a way, to the Willie Horton ad, which at least Roger Ailes said he wasn’t involved in that. He wasn’t involved in the one ad that was put out by, I think it was, the state party.

So that wasn’t a part of the Bush campaign, but everybody remembers it.

Well, certainly the germ of the idea came out of the campaign. You recall that they did run an ad, a famous ad called the “Revolving Door” ad, that showed a revolving gate and people coming in and out of a prison. That was their own ad. But they never mentioned Willie Horton and never pictured him. But this other thing got wide circulation, which even had a picture of Willie Horton. So sometimes you can argue whether that helped him or hurt him. But there is a potential there, that kind of freelancing either by bloggers, or others on the Internet, or by 527s and independent expenditures. It’s very hard for you to control that, if you can at all.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s true.

So taking that into consideration, and some of the obvious advantages, is campaigning going to be improved with the advent of the Internet?

Well, like most advances in technology, yes and no. We talked about some of the improvements. I mean, it may make it easier for unknown candidates to raise money and disseminate their points of view. It may give some competition to television stations who are raking in big bucks. And it may give candidates new ways to become well-known. It is, in a sense, a democratizing feature. It’s a sort of an instant-democracy idea. The disadvantages are it may diminish serious journalism, which has always been a major check on the quality of our presidents. Basically, [it’s] been a relatively small number of elite people who have looked over the presidential candidates and said, “Well, these several are OK to run.” And the rest they dismiss. And so the country doesn’t consider them. Now that function may be not as important. And it produces almost an uncontrollable, wildly out-of-control process.

I have said before, I think what we should do is turn the whole thing over to the National Football League competition committee, seriously, because the impact of television and media has affected every major aspect of society. And it usually affects it by producing large amounts of money. Like if you are a university president, suddenly you have to deal with all of the money you get from going to the Final Four, and what do you do with it? And why do you pay coaches $4 million? All of this [is a] huge distortion. The NFL [National Football League] has had that same problem. Yet they have a highly competitive system, 32 teams every week. They have three quarterbacks who show up on each team. They play all of the games. They check the rules. They end up with a Super Bowl. They have the kind of system we ought to have for presidential campaigns. So I think we ought to just turn it over to them.

Talk a little bit about whether you think people really care about money in politics. Is it the sort of thing that a voter goes into the booth and says, “I don’t want to vote for this guy, because I don’t like where he got his money,” or “He’s spent too much of his own money.” Is it a voting issue? And should it be a voting issue?

By itself, I don’t think your voter will disqualify you because you are spending general money. They might disqualify you because you are so rich that you are not in touch with their values and their everyday life, but that’s a byproduct, maybe, of having too much money.

But you also hear some voters say: “I don’t have to worry about him. He’s not going to be a dishonest politician, because he doesn’t need to be.”

Well, you think of that, Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg, others, people with so much money that you know they are not going to be dishonest. Ross Perot told me that Nelson Rockefeller said that the first generation can’t run for office because of the way he made the money. But the second generation of wealthy families can, because he has the money. He didn’t make it. And everybody knows he doesn’t need it. He can’t be bought. So that suggests that the first generation that makes the money may have to engage in wheeling and dealing and some things voters don’t like. But I haven’t seen much of it. In fact, it goes the other way, especially because of the cost of television and the limits on campaigns, more and more millionaires have big advantages in the Senate and House. The Senate Democratic and Republican committees actually recruit what they call “self-funders,” people — like [Pete] Coors out in Colorado and Corker, who put several million dollars into his campaign — who can support their own campaign. There is this big advantage like Kerry had in the presidential race. If you are rich, you are the only person who can give your campaign a lot of money. And that seems to be patently unfair. It’s not a very competitive system, so it has a big effect that way.

Do you think your idea about lifting all the limits is being advanced by what is happening now with these candidates abandoning the subsidy system?

Well, I think it would advance it or some version of it. And I think the abandoning of the system, the incessant dwelling on how much money a candidate can raise to pre-qualify him for a presidential race, the number of millionaire candidates, superrich candidates running for office, I think all of that suggests that it should make more open the idea. Well, let’s let candidates raise large sums of money, so anybody can run for president, or senator, or governor. I mean, when I started out, I didn’t have any money. And I didn’t spend much money. It would be hard for somebody to do that today.

One of the first journalistic tasks these days is to watch for the quarterly financial reports. And some candidates really suffer if they don’t make a designated mark. Like McCain, right now, is busy explaining why his fundraising has dropped off.

Oh, it has a disproportionate impact. And the fact of the matter would be, if there were no limits, that wouldn’t be a story. Because the only stories would be that John McCain met with 20 rich guys, and they each agreed to either give or raise $1 million to him. So, he has plenty of money to run, so let’s go on to some other issue. And as long as it’s all disclosed, and people know who they are, that seems to be less of an evil than what we have today.

Do you think anything can be done to arrest and reverse the frontloading primaries, which is also, obviously, a money-sucker?

Yeah. The two problems with the primaries are the limits on campaigns and the frontloading. I have thought about introducing federal legislation that would create five primary dates January through May and rotate the states among them or let them pick one of those dates. Now if they all pick the first one, that wouldn’t solve any problem. But it may be an area where the federal government, because it’s a presidential race, has the constitutional authority to step in. It’s a little hard for me to say as an old federalist governor, so I haven’t proposed it yet.

If you can’t even nudge Iowa and New Hampshire out of their traditional roles, how could you bring that off?

I don’t even mind Iowa and New Hampshire so much. They are sort of off-Broadway. But the logical way, if it were the NFL doing it, they would have a season. And they would sort up the states and make it interesting. And the candidates would have a chance to go home, brush their teeth, comb their hair, and take a breath, after each set of primaries. And then they would have 30 days to campaign. And there would be another set of primaries. It would go on. It not only wouldn’t start so early, it would not end so quickly.

How about the dream of getting the nomination back into the convention?

I haven’t thought about that.

You could take your system of having a series of primaries but somehow persuade only small states to go first so there couldn’t be a buildup of enough delegates to go over the top, theoretically anyway, until later in the season.

Well, that’s interesting.

And New York and California are always complaining that they don’t have any say. Well, if only small states went earlier, and the nomination process, the primary process, went into June, when New York, California, these other large states, five or six of them voted in June, conceivably you could get the nomination back into the convention. Everybody says that’s what they want. They want to have an exciting convention. They want an opportunity to really see the candidates run the whole course. But how do you do it?

I hadn’t thought about that, intriguing about the small states first. Conventions, once they saw them up-close again, might not look as good as they remember them.

Yeah. That’s true.

Somebody would say, “Wouldn’t it be great if we went back to the system where senators were chosen by legislatures?” And I said, “Well, I just read a book on that the other day.” They used to go over to the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville and stay three days, all of the lobbyists and the members of the legislature, and drink, and play cards, and Lord knows what else. And out of that somehow emerged the senator. And I am not sure that’s better.

No. I take my chances on the other.

On the elections?

Well, no. I like the convention idea. It would put life into politics again.

Yeah. Well, the process is really broken right now, because almost nobody has a chance to participate in it. On the money side, the candidates spend a year with people who can give them $2,300. That’s not a very good cross section of America. And the only people whose votes count are Iowa and New Hampshire.

And you see, even if you rearrange that system, the ideal way of putting the larger states last, look at the influence that Iowa and New Hampshire have because the mindset seems to click in.

Yeah. It still is there.

If you don’t do well there, then . . .

You’re down to three, then to two, then you’re out. I mean, that may not change this time.

What do you think about presidential debates with a gang of candidates in each party in the debates? Is that good democracy? As a candidate, if you are in a debate with 10 other candidates, what chance do you really have to tell people what you stand for?

Well, there is some good in it and there is some bad in it. The bad in it, in an early Iowa debate, or sort of late Iowa debate in ’95, I was still at 3 percent or 4 percent. And I was in a debate with Bob Dole, and Phil Gramm, and Steve Forbes, and I criticized both Dole and Forbes at the same time and made some news, and got seen by people who otherwise wouldn’t have seen me. And it helped me. The fact of the debate gave me, an underdog, a chance to move up. After New Hampshire, I remember going out to Arizona. And we were at this big crowd, about 3,000 people. I think Forbes had bought all of their tickets, and Dole didn’t go. And I looked down the list to see who was there. And it was that list I mentioned earlier. I said, “There is me, Pat Buchanan, Morry Taylor, Bob Dornan, and Alan Keyes.” This was for the presidency of the United States. The general election presidential debates I think are good. Because I think television can tell you a lot about a person. And in that setting, for an hour, probably most people get their most accurate impression of the candidate as an individual. That’s my opinion. They have no other better way to do it.

One or two other quick questions: Are you concerned about the campaign industry that has grown? It used to be you want to run for president, you got your brother or your law partner to run your campaign for you. And now you have all of these hired guns who divvy up the different jobs that you have involved in the campaigns.

Yeah, it’s gotten out of hand. A lot of it’s a waste of money. Of course, some of it is in response to the limits on campaigns. I spend 10 percent of the money I raise complying with the federal rules on raising money. So we had to get a bunch of experts to do that. And then we had to have a year-long campaign in order to go to 250 fundraisers to raise $10 million. So I had to hire some experts to help me have a campaign during that time. The limits on fundraising and the need to go on television have contributed to that. But now it’s out of hand. There are just professionals who go from presidential election to presidential election until they wear out. And most of them aren’t that much help. Bush was actually smart. He had his own crew of people from Texas. And they served him pretty well with the campaign, I thought.

Does that drive up the cost of the campaigns?

Oh, yeah. They compete for these big fees. Because they say, “Well, so-and-so has got,” since he’s not with anybody, “Mike Murphy.” Or, “So-and-so has got Fred Davis.” And just the fact of getting a big consultant makes you a credible presidential candidate. That’s news, at least among the other consultants.