Countdown

Home > Interviews > Michael D. McCurry

Michael D. McCurry

Michael D. McCurry is a Democratic communications strategist and a partner in Public Strategies Washington, Inc., a Washington lobbying and consulting firm. He was White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton and worked on the presidential campaigns of John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, Bruce Babbitt, and John Glenn. He is a member of the board of directors of the Commission on Presidential Debates, a tax-exempt organization that was established in 1987 to sponsor and produce presidential and vice-presidential debates during each general-election period.

Jules Witcover interviewed McCurry on March 16, 2007.

Could we start by just having you say a little bit about what you think of the state of the campaign-finance system — whether you think any part of it is survivable now, and if not, what can be done?

Well, I take a contrary point of view on this. I think presidential campaigns are very different from other levels of politics because the money has, frankly, less of an impact on the real political outcome. The presidential campaign attracts such an overwhelming amount of media coverage that what the campaigns spend their money on to try to drive their own message is, frankly, less useful and less effective than just what the general media covers given its own involvement in the campaign. That’s true now of the general election. I grant you, in the primary election, candidates that are well=financed and have a lot of money can make a difference.

But I take a very optimistic view of what’s happening here. I’ll take a second and kind of spell it out a bit. Ungodly amounts of money are being raised. They are going to blow the limits. The federal financing limits and the federal financing system for the presidential campaign, in effect, no longer exists because nobody is going to live within that system in this cycle. But at the end of the day, after all of this money gets raised, it’s going to be proven to be less effective than what happens to really stimulate a response at the grass roots.

And the reason for that is that I think we are rapidly moving out of the model of old politics of the 20th century that was reliant on conventional media — 30-second spots, the traditional forms of television advertising. And we are moving into a brand-new way of doing politics, which is much more democratic. I think that’s a good thing. We saw the beginnings of this, I think, a little bit in 2004. People are raising all of this money.

First of all, why are the candidates raising so much money? Answer: to put it on television. Is television advertising effective? Well, it still has a very important role. But it’s far less effective now than it has been in the past, because there is so much of it. It cancels one candidate’s message and ads. All of the other groups on the outside, the independent-expenditure campaigns, I think drown out each other. And so the citizen is left trying to scratch his or her head figuring out, “Well, who do I really listen to?” And increasingly the premium is going: “What do they hear at church? What do they hear at the PTA? What do they hear when they are at the supermarket shopping?”

So the role of the grass-roots communicator is the influential person that the campaign has working in the neighborhoods, kind of hearkening back to a much more old-fashioned model of politics. I think that’s where we are headed. I think we are headed to where the involvement of organizations on the ground will be much more important. And the interesting thing is that will be driven in part by new technologies, Internet-based. So your ability to mobilize a large constituency using advanced techniques of social networking on the Internet, and online organizing, and some of the stuff [Howard] Dean started to do last time around, we’ll see a lot more of that.

[Barack] Obama has already a huge amount of that going on. I can give you a great example. There is on YouTube right now this wicked little video clip that is a takeoff on an Apple ad. The title of the commercial is “1984.” And it’s a whole bunch of people sitting there, zombie-like, listening to Hillary Clinton give a speech. And then in comes this athlete with a sledgehammer and throws it up against the screen to obliterate Hillary. And then up comes the little icon that is the Apple multicolored insignia, because it’s kind of a takeoff on what used to be an Apple ad, with a big “O” for Obama.

Now I don’t think it has anything to do with Obama’s campaign. I have to believe that Obama’s campaign wasn’t behind it all. But it is a very effective little piece of media. It probably cost absolutely nothing to make. And I’ll bet you that’s been seen already by more people than any commercial than anyone ran in 2004, just because of the impact of YouTube. Remember, YouTube did not exist in 2004; this company started in January 2005. YouTube already carries, just at the YouTube site, more traffic than the entire Internet carried in 2000.

Wow.

So we are going to see a dramatic change in the way in which people get their message out, deliver a message, just the way in which traditional forms of political persuasion work. And the good news relating back to this good topic of campaign finance is the marginal cost of these Internet-based targeted deliveries of messages is far less than the very inefficient 30-second television commercial on television that mass communicates to an audience, 60 percent of whom are not voters. So I think you are going to see a real change in techniques and tactics. And the overall cost of campaigning will get lower.

Now, I guess Obama and McCain did an interesting thing in which they said, “Look, if we run against each other, we agree that we will live within the federal spending limits.” I think every candidate could make that pledge. Because at the end of the day, if my theory holds correct, large budgets for television advertising don’t matter that much in presidential campaigns. What matters is your ability to really generate enthusiasm to get strong, positive coverage, to control kind of what’s the storyline of the campaign, to really take advantage of these new techniques that are Internet-based to drive your message out to the grass roots. It is a brand-new world.

Do you think that this brand-new world can be a salvation for the poor second- and third-tier candidates who are hanging onto the federal subsidy for dear life as the only way they could get into the first two primaries or so?

Yes. And I also think that if they generate enthusiasm, if they have a powerful message, if they are the slightest bit visionary, if they begin to strike a spark, their ability to jump-start an organization and raise money virally through the Internet will make them competitive against some of the better-known candidates. I really honestly believe that.

Do you think they are smart enough? Do you think they are knowledgeable enough to see this trend and take advantage of it?

Yeah. Well, I can’t know all of them that are out there. But I’ll give you a great example. A guy who I think is a very strong candidate, who has a very good case to make for being elected president, is Bill Richardson. Now he is going to lie there, not being able to raise a lot of money in the course of this year. But he has an excellent case to make. And if he can develop a message that strikes a spark at the grass roots and get some traction, he would be able to leverage these same techniques to jump-start and build an organization.

Because nobody, not Hillary Clinton, not Hillary Clinton times two, will be able to raise enough money to be able to compete on February 5 in this cycle. It’s just going to be impossible to run with anything other than sort of a mass-media-controlled environment. Because it’s far less going to be based on what you can put up on advertising. It’s far more based on what’s the momentum, and the flow, and the story being covered in the media and all of its aspects.

Now the hard thing for the candidates is they don’t have three networks controlling 75 percent of the audience, because the network coverage is down to, what, below 30 percent now. But on the other hand, you can get, through the Internet-based techniques, through what’s on the web, through what you are virally sending out through your networks, through what you are building with online support, I think you can almost equalize the odds using the new media versus what would have been the more conventional tactics.

Is there any early evidence that any candidates are really glomming onto this?

I think there is some there. I think Obama’s demographic matches the younger demographic. I think the presence of MoveOn and some of the online organizations can move large numbers of people electronically. There is some evidence that they can play a role, although they haven’t landed on a particular candidate yet. Because they clearly are very “wait and see,” if not outright hostile, to Mrs. Clinton; they certainly are skeptical about Mrs. Clinton. They are waiting to see about Obama, how Obama weathers the pressure of the campaign. There is a lot of support for Edwards. And Edwards is, I think, very effectively using Internet-based organizing to jump-start an organization.

So I think, yeah, on our side there is. I don’t know the Republican side as well and what they are doing virally. But I have to believe some of those candidates will take those techniques and refine them. [Mitt] Romney, I am told, is a pretty savvy guy when it comes to using new media. And my view is, if I am right and we are going through this real transformation in the way in which campaigns and candidates communicate with the public, that the more you are aiming at these targeted electronic-based devices or methods, the better off you are because they are less costly. They kind of drive down the price tag for politics. And if that happens, then you might conceivably get back to a place where you could argue for some kind of public expenditure in a publicly financed system.

The publicly financed system has always been built, in part, around how you provide access to the voter, and the ways in which you can communicate with the voter. And candidates blow the limits because they feel like the current system can’t support the volume and quantity of communication they need if they are going to be persuasive and effective with the voter. So if we interrupt that equation or change that equation because we create new ways for the candidate to direct their message to the voter, then you get back to a place where people can comfortably live with the different kind of financing.

And believe me, there is not a candidate, or a campaign staff, or an operative, who would not prefer a system that was not dependent on doing a lot of fundraising, because they all hate having to fundraise. Every candidate hates making the calls, and groveling, and feeling like a prostitute. Campaigns don’t like having to tailor their agenda to accommodate the various interests that are going to support the campaign. So I think we’d end up in a much better place if we perfected and understood better what the transformation is that’s occurring in political communications. But it is certainly changing. The campaigns in 2008, 2012, 2016, are going to be radically different from what we’ve seen and what you’ve covered for most of your career. I’m being an optimist. I am spinning it well. Now, you could also say: “Well, this thing will be very dangerous. Because it means that you can start telling every voter exactly what they want to hear. Because you know who they are based on what they tell this computer that they are on.”

Well, [you’re] always trying to do that anyway, right?

Well, we have been trying to do that. Direct mail has tried for a long time, anyhow.

In the current system, one of the big villains, everybody that I talked to agrees, is the television stations. They just bleed campaigns something fierce, and there is just no way to deal with them. What would be your reaction to the television stations that have really found a sugar daddy so far in politics, if this trend that you are talking about really takes hold?

Well, the economics of the local television business, I mean, they are facing all of the same problems that the media is facing, generally, because of the transformations occurring based on the Internet. I am working in the telecom area right now on a lobbying issue. And we are very soon going to have Internet-delivered television to our homes. I mean, I am getting that in Montgomery County, [Maryland]. I am going to have my television programming coming in through my fiber optic Internet line. I don’t need a local television. I am not going to be watching local television unless they are figuring out how to digitally transmit programming into that Internet network.

So those, just like newspapers, are going to go the way of the dinosaur unless they reinvent their business model. And they are going to have to reinvent their business model in a way that it’s not dependent on milking political campaigns for 30-second commercials. The real crime is the way in which they don’t cover politics. I mean, they cover fires, and stabbings, and mischief in the world. But they don’t cover anything that’s serious. Now, their defense is: “Well, that’s economics. We are having a tough time getting our ratings and getting the advertising revenues, so we need to support strong newsgathering organizations.” But I am not sure how much of that is just a dodge.

In any event, we have to do it. There is a larger conversation. We have to invent new spaces on the Internet for there to be a public dialogue on public-policy issues. I think we need something akin to public broadcasting that will exist on the web. Rather than publicly financing campaigns, I would rather see the government invest in really robust, creative, rich places where public information will be available to citizens for citizen education, and debate, and understanding government, and that sort of thing.

Where does print journalism fit into all of this?

Print journalism has to invent a very rich electronic product that can be available in ink-on-paper for people who want ink-on-paper, but also people who just really crave the immediacy of having an online delivery. You asked the question, so I’ll give you my long sermon on this. Journalism, right now, is based on a competitive model that it revolves around speed. How fast can you break the story? How fast can you get the scoop? Can you beat the competition to the headline?

And among other things, it’s dangerous because editorial standards slip. And you rush into print sometimes with things that are not fully baked. So, since we can’t go any faster than we already go in the 24/7 world, what if the competition was built around thoroughness and accuracy? If you sort of said we have all of these people who have their opinions and their analysis, but we have one place that we know that we go to that is absolutely rock solid, the bottom line, that you can take it to the bank every time. Now that doesn’t necessarily always come out fastest, but it always is 100 percent reliable.

But before the people would go for that, it would have to be clearly demonstrated that what you are getting now, and what’s growing now with the blogosphere and independent voices, uncensored, unedited out there that seems to be satisfying a lot of people, don’t you have to see that collapse before it would happen, what you are talking about?

No. You just have to develop an ethic of citizenship that requires people to say: “All right, we have everyone with their opinions out there spouting. Let’s now turn to the fact book; instead of Facebook, we turn to the fact book,” or whatever we are calling it — you know, brought to you by The New York Times and Google, who are now merged. And you say, OK, that’s the place where you know you can go to get solid, accurate reporting. And it’s got every subject under the sun covered. And oh, by the way, they do commercialized reports for certain industries. Like if you want to get an analytical survey of everything, you can order it up online. It will cost you $25. So there is some revenue model there where the product, the news product, or the content product, can be paid for in some rational way that makes these businesses profitable.

Like Gallup does other business besides running a poll.

Right. You customize a delivery of news for certain consumers who are willing to pay a premium for that content. You have to have some model like that that begins to be a whole different way of how you shape and get the content. And then you would obviously have to take these targeted ways of letting advertisers reach those same consumers, which is sort of what Google is going to do. And if Google, as they indicated last week, moves into television advertising and begins to micro-target the delivery of television advertising, that is going to be a radically different world, too. Boy, I was thinking about that. Think about a campaign in which you know you can deliver exactly the commercial you want to get to a certain type of consumer via television. So you are going to be able to deliver a video message directly to that consumer.

An individual consumer.

Yeah. Targeted one-on-one delivery of the television ad, which is what Google thinks it’s perfecting now, the ability to do that.

Well, aren’t you signing the death knell for most newspapers? Because most of the papers don’t do what you are talking about.

Yeah. But you know why? Because most of them are run by baby boomers. They are not run by the 30-year-old kids who actually know something about how to make this stuff work.

Well, I am talking about the newspapers.

Yes, newspapers. I think newspapers are going to be around for old farts like you and me who actually can’t stand to read this stuff online. I can’t stand to read this stuff online because I can’t figure out which story is important. And I can’t get the sense of placement. But that’s just because we’re old. You can’t get around that. But on the other hand, my 16-year-old kid who is taking journalism, who is very much into news, he reads The Washington Post before I do. He tells me what’s going to be in [the paper]. When I go out and get the paper in the morning, get on the Exercycle to read, he already tells me, “There is a really good story about so and so,” because he read it online at midnight last night, staying up later than he was supposed to. So it’s like there is hope, but it goes to a different distribution system than the journalism we have today, which has to be distributed in a way that gets to the consumer in different ways. Now I am still going to read my newspaper and still would pay a premium to get an ink-on-paper product. But they have to figure out how to market to other places.

For a long time newspapers that did try to develop some hybrid quality by having a website did treat it as a poor cousin and didn’t really figure out whether they were doing it to protect themselves in case of some unknown thing happening that they didn’t quite understand. They knew things were happening, but they didn’t seem to know what was happening. And so they were continuing — the smarter papers, like The [New York] Times and The [Washington] Post and some of the few others — to develop the website at big losses, huge losses. I don’t know how many are even making money on it now.

Well, they are beginning to develop advertising models that work. But it’s clear the other thing that was missing was this: They thought they were delivering a one-way product. That we are taking all of the news that’s fit to print here on your computer screen and we are going to ship it to you. And we have done our job. And the answer is the Internet is an interactive medium. And what they weren’t doing was giving people a way to get engaged in the news. And that’s what you are starting to see a lot more of now.

I can’t do [it] any longer because I don’t have enough time, but I used to be a juror out at the University of Maryland J-Lab. And they had a whole awards thing that they did for creative online journalism. And there were some really great examples. And they have been getting better and better, how you do the investigative series. If you are a citizen and you care about what we just reported to you in this five-part story, here is a way where you can get involved, and give people online tools to kind of monitor what was happening on this issue in their own community and neighborhood. So they are making it more of an interactive thing.

It goes back to the old debates that we saw in the journalism reviews back in the last couple of decades over advocacy journalism or civic journalism. And it’s sort of some of the same job. But it is clear that those aimed at interacting with the audience, and getting the audience to care more about the news that’s reported, that they seem to get some more traction, particularly among younger people who want to act like they want to be involved in things.

Is a lot of the problem an old mindset? I see it with myself. I haven’t completely bought into what’s happening, and the thing that bothers me is quality, lack of editorial control. As an editor, I think you are in the same position, now, as a campaign manager dealing with an independent-expenditure committee or 527 that could go out and do something in your campaign that you may not want to be done. Sometimes it is something that you want to be done. But more often than not, it’s doing something in terms of negative advertising or something that is contrary to your campaign that you are supposed to be running. 

And editors who are in a different business are conveying the most solid and factual information that’s available and dealing with these guys out there who are putting out an unfiltered product, sometimes an extremely biased product, sometimes an extremely false product, without you being able to not only control it but keep it from getting into the mainstream that is supposed to your bailiwick.

Right. Well, look, you asked what’s the role of journalism now, that watchdog function where you actually hold up and hold accountable those kinds of voices, that hasn’t blossomed at a level where we need it. I agree with you there. There should be editorial standards. There should be editorial filters. But that’s not the nature of the beast on the Internet, because it’s self-published. Anybody can get on it and say anything. It’s a speakers’ corner at Hyde Park. You can stand up and say any crazy thing you want to.

Now the answer is there has to always be someone there who is vigilant and holding accountable those who are professing opinion with something called a fact. And that’s where I come back to the same thing. That’s the future of journalism, to get back to hard news, fact-based reporting that strips out all analysis, opinion, editorializing. So you get back to, here is what all of the people are saying, and here are the facts of the matter. And we are not trying to balance our story by presenting one set of arguments and another set of arguments and say: “Look, you come here to get the facts. There is a big debate going on. Here is what the facts are. And this is what you need to know if you are going to make up your own mind.”

Would you throw analysis into that pot?

No. You ought to have a spinoff on that. Whatever this new product is, it is so rigorously fact-based and so devoid of opinion that it becomes the place where everyone goes to settle their arguments. And it kind of gets to your answer: What about all of these bloggers and everybody out there? Look, if they create an argument that stimulates interest, then what you want is for the consumer then to be able to go to someplace to answer the question, or to resolve the debate. We have a debate; who is right and who is wrong? Well, where do we go to get the facts? Well, we know. We have a very valuable institution here that’s branded a New York Times product, because we take advantage of the brand The New York Times.

But nowadays the American press, in general, is not in high esteem. And even The New York Times is constantly getting pounded.

But they get pounded because of the business that they shouldn’t be in, which is having opinions and parading opinions on their op-ed page and having editorial content. So part of this is getting out of the opinion business and getting back into the news business. And I personally think that’s what would work. Now, I am not a news person. But I think if we got back to an old [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan saying, “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but no one’s entitled to their separate set of facts,” because the facts are the facts.

There was a piece, I think it was in the Columbia Journalism Review a couple of issues back, which took part of your idea. But [the author] didn’t separate fact from opinion. He said that it was a requirement for informed analysis, and that who is to say what that is. But at least there needs to be that, because you are not just getting fact and distortion of fact on the Internet; you are getting distorted analysis or wrongheaded analysis.

So you are saying, where do you go if you want the facts? Well, where do you go if you want beyond that? Which is what the whole reason for newspapers, in the ’60s I guess, was, to get beyond “just the facts, ma’am” and give a legitimate analysis as a response to television. Because that was the one thing that newspapers felt they could do when they were being threatened by the speed of television.

Well, there are ways that you would adjust my model. I think as long as you have that place, which is ground zero for the truth, and I go here and I know I am going to get factually the best presentation of what the reality is, and what the issues are, these are the important questions. And these are the facts that you need to know. But then I get directed to a reasoned dialogue on those issues. So if the Google Times, the new merged Google and New York Times, are sponsoring a dialogue between opposing points of view on this issue, and it’s an authentic, reasonable, and careful conversation that is fact-based so I get to hear both sides presented, I get to make up my own mind. And then I get to vote, which side do I think has made the better case here.

In fact, I am guilty, because that’s partly what we do and what my business is, to participate in some of these phony debates that people throw out their own set of facts and spin it a lot. But if you got called out on that and said, “Now wait a minute, this is not [fact].” By the way, some of this is now happening on the blogosphere. I am lobbying on a telecom issue called net neutrality, and I am on the side with AT&T. And if we put out something, an advertisement, or a blog or something that shades an argument or spins it a little too much, we get called out, instantly, because people say, “This is ridiculous.” They link to it. They say, “McCurry is full of [expletive] on this thing.” And in some ways that’s robust and it’s good.

But I think if you had news organizations mediating that dialogue so that there was some real clarity to the context of the conversation, and it was aiming it at trying to bring people together to seriously reconcile their differences, then the other thing we get is we present the adversarial reviews, but we don’t present any way in which people can actually resolve their conflict and come to an agreement on what needs to be done. This gets tried every once in a while. Some news organizations have done these things, balance-the-budget exercises, where you get everyone together. You educate them on what the compound parts of the federal budget are. And then you sit them down and say, “Now you have to balance the budget just like you are a member of Congress.” And it’s very interesting. And they report that.

In fact, there was one, I can’t remember who, the Chicago Tribune or someone did it, where you could actually go online and adjust the categories in the budget online to make your budget balance. What are your priorities? And if you want to spend more here, where are you going to take away? And you had to get a balanced budget. And people learned how difficult it was to do. I mean, that’s the kind of thing that I am talking about here. You give people a reasoned basis upon which to make difficult choices about the future. And then that would actually be the new context in which politicians would have to debate. Because they would have to come forward and say, look, how would they resolve some of these difficult choices?

Do you see, in terms of your idea, Wikipedia as an illustration of the problem?

Well, what both the problem and the opportunity is, because it’s highly interactive. It requires people to be vigilant in monitoring the truth. But where it lapses is it doesn’t have this editorial filter that you are suggesting we have to have, which I agree with you. I went on my Wikipedia entry. And it was really interesting because about 80 percent of it I could figure out where it came from. It came from stuff that was written about me when I was at the White House. And a lot of it was right. But it started by saying, “Mike McCurry, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1953.” And I said, “Well, wait a minute, I don’t think that’s where I was born.” So for some weird reason it had my date of birth and my place of birth wrong. And I can’t, for the life of me, figure it out because much of the rest of it was completely accurate. And then you could tell people had gotten in, and they would add, “And McCurry now shills for the Republican telecom companies,” and, “McCurry is leading a coalition.” So you could tell that people were getting in and adjusting that.

Well, they can comment on that. But can’t they also change some of the things that are in there? They can say, “He wasn’t born in Oklahoma City, he was born in north New Jersey.”

Right. I actually got on and changed it. I said, if I am going to be on there, I’d at least like to have my birthday right. But anyhow, it’s a good point, though, because Wikipedia is a great example. When I go to speak sometimes, I get people who introduce me, and I can tell that they have actually just looked up my Wikipedia entry and are using that for the intro. So it’s a clearly much used, important device. But it hasn’t developed that very careful scrutiny that you need to have if you are going to produce the editorial content.

Now to get it back to politics, which as you kind of started to take this, well what about these people in the political space who are making false claims or making unfair claims because they are independent expenditures? They are not under the control of any of the outside entities. That’s where I would aim campaign reform. We have the nuttiest set of rules: this stuff on independent expenditures, or the idea that the political chairman of the Democratic Party can have an independent-expenditure fund at the DNC, but he can’t know what they are actually doing. He can get reported on how much they are spending, but he can’t know what they are actually advertising on, or what their message is.

I didn’t know they could do that.

Yeah, we are in this bizarre, post-McCain-Feingold world where it doesn’t make any sense. And I think we focus on the wrong thing sometimes.

Well, in your experience, was that ever really serious about no collusion?

Oh, yeah. In the Kerry campaign in 2004, poor Mary Beth Cahill sat there every day, and we would have conference calls, and said: “We don’t know what the hell the IE [independent-expenditure group] is doing right now. We don’t know where they are up. We think they are up in X, Y, and Z. We think they are doing this; we think they are advertising this message. But we really don’t know for sure because we can’t talk to them.” And to my knowledge, both sides sort of played by the rules on this because everyone was afraid they were going to get caught or get subpoenaed. Or they would get hauled in front of some court somewhere. Of course, the truth is that the FEC [Federal Election Commission] was probably never going to enforce that stuff anyhow.

A number of the people I have talked to, who are in campaigns, say: “We don’t want that. We want to run our own campaigns. And these guys can hurt us.”

Right. And there was some significant heartburn over some of the messaging that came out of the supposedly affiliated independent expenditures, because it wasn’t right. Or it was not exactly on point.

Well, Roger Ailes continues to cry about the Willie Horton ads, as an example.

Yeah. Because he said: “We didn’t have anything to do with those ads. It wasn’t our guys.” And just like I have heard the Swift Boat guys say, “We didn’t talk.” And [Mark] McKinnon said: “We didn’t know what the Swift Boat guys were actually up to. We knew they were onto something powerful. And we understood the power of it before you guys figured out that you better be responding to it. We knew you should be responding to it when you weren’t.” And we were kind of mystified that you weren’t responding to it. Because we saw that it was working in our polling. But on the other hand, that’s not where we would have taken the message given our preference, because we didn’t want to have a Vietnam discussion.

Let me shift briefly for one other thing that we need for this book. Let’s have a little discussion about the presidential debates, the Commission [on Presidential Debates], the value of the debates, how they have been run, and whether they are now institutionalized in a sense, good or bad.

Well, a full disclosure: You may or may not know [that] Paul Kirk put me on the Commission now.

Yeah, I know.

So I have drunk the Kool-Aid there. And I was excited about getting involved in that, because I think it’s one of the heroic things that has been done in our lifetime, what Kirk and [Frank] Fahrenkopf have done. And they have more scars on their back than people know for having taken on the League of Women Voters and institutionalized those debates. But I think it reached the point in 2004, which was the last serious time that the campaigns tried to take over and take control of the debates themselves. You had two formidable guys, Jim Baker and Vernon Jordan, negotiating kind of their own arrangement. And by and large the commission was able to say: “No, we are not playing that game. These are the debates. And this is the way they are going to go. And you guys can go have your legal agreements, but that’s not where we are. We are going to be putting on the debates. And we want you to show up, please. Thank you very much.” That was a pretty extraordinary moment.

Jim Baker must have been out of the room at the time.

Well, Baker and Vernon.

Baker’s not used to losing those things.

I don’t think people have ever told them, “We are basically not paying attention to your little agreement here.” And that’s more or less what happened. Actually, it was a little more conciliatory than that. And they had some negotiated things about format that were agreed to, and when the vice presidential candidates sat down, the presidential candidates stood up. They had like little lights that went off. There were some things to accommodate what the agreement was between the two campaigns.

But they are hard-pressed to get out of the fact that the country now expects their candidates to sit face to face and to really talk to each other. And one of the real insights is, I think, increasingly the format is to remove the panel of journalists, to get the press out of the way, and to get a guy like Jim Lehrer, who does a masterful job of just putting the issue in play and then letting the candidates answer and talk to each other. And he kept pretty good control on things. But he didn’t stand in the way of them actually having genuine dialogue back and forth.

Do you think that format is locked in now?

Yeah. I think there may be some experimentation to make the look and feel of the debates a little more hip, because they appeal to our generation, post-45 and above. But there is a new vocabulary for the age bracket 21 to 45. I think they see politics in a different prism. And I think we need to adjust for a younger audience to keep the younger audience paying attention. But I think the notion that there are face-to-face debates, that they are properly established and run by a reputable outside third-party group, that both political parties have some say, because they are in the government structure of the debates, I think that’s locked in now. And I think we ought to give Kirk and Fahrenkopf a Nobel Prize or something.

Are they going to continue in that role?

Well, between you and me, I think they are not forever. And I think they both recognize they can’t leave at once. But I bet you that at least one of them makes this the last time around. If that happens, we should give them a Congressional Medal of Honor or something.

One of the most popular debates, as far as I am concerned, and I believe also the polls indicate, was that debate among [Bill] Clinton, [Ross] Perot, and senior Bush, where they took questions from the audience. And they were able to kind of move around. In fact, I remember Clinton walked out and addressed the people directly. That’s a popular way, but is it a fair way? Was it in Richmond?

I think it was Richmond. And it’s popular, in part, because of the sense — I mean, you cited earlier the low esteem that the press is held in. And even a guy who is reputable, like a Jim Lehrer or somebody, is seen as standing in the way of the real citizens asking the questions. Sometimes the problem is that the real citizens who stand up and ask the questions at the debate ask the same questions that the press would have asked anyhow. But people like that. They like to identify with the person. They see, OK, that looks like a mom who has kids, who is struggling with the same thing I am struggling with, and that’s good, because I want to see what the candidates say to that woman. I think that is a pretty important device.

At the same time, you need these skills of editorial filter and balance to flush out some of the issues that are important. And I think as you know, and I think it’s a valid criticism of the way in which the press covers campaigns, is sometimes the press story gets hijacked off by these tangential issues that really the public doesn’t want to spend a lot of time focusing on. And getting back to those things that are ultimately important and help shape the decisions, this point that getting people back to where you set aside your differences to come to some agreement on what we need to do next, so that we can solve some of these damn problems.

I am telling you, we are debating the same stuff as when I was a kid as a press secretary up in the Senate: Social Security, health care, no energy policy. Jimmy Carter was wearing his cardigan sweater 30 years ago. And we haven’t fixed any of that stuff. And my new speech that I give is it’s time for the baby boomers to get off the stage and get the hell out of there, because our generation didn’t solve any of this stuff. And we better turn it over to the younger leadership. I got in trouble with a certain senator from New York because people thought I was making a case for Obama, which I wasn’t. I was just saying, “Hey, we need to get some younger faces in the mix here.”

Overall are you optimistic about where things are going?
Yeah, because I think we are going to have a really important, interesting, exciting presidential campaign in 2008. And it’s going to remind us of what politics can be. I think we have some very good candidates, on both sides, who are capable of having a serious discussion about the future of the country. And I think people are really upset about where we are in the world right now and the direction we are going. They want this country to get back on a path that suggests that we understand what’s happening in the world, and [where] the rest of the world thinks more highly of who we are as the American people. I think all of that is in play. And I [see] the right kind of candidates who have some real vision about that and have a serious debate. I think we are going to end up making some decisions, finally, about how we are solving some problems. But we are going to have to get some candidates to put the questions in front of us and then say: “Look, we can’t have everything we want. We can’t go on having more government than we are willing to pay for, for example. So we are going to have to make some real choices.”

But in terms of the buying of the president, that lament, do you think that’s going to disappear?

That’s one thing where I part company with the Center for Public Integrity. I never saw any evidence of that. In fact, I saw plenty of evidence that presidents and White Houses deliberately thumb their nose at people who gave them money just to prove that they are independent. It’s kind of like the same thing that people used to say to me about, “Well, the press corps is biased — it’s got a liberal bias.” I said, “Well, it sure as hell didn’t show up to help me out when I was at the White House.” And truthfully, the guy who was the best and fairest in covering Clinton was Brit Hume on ABC, because everybody knew he was conservative. So he bent over backwards to be fair. And the so-called liberal reporters were the ones who gave us the hardest time.

And I think the same thing happens, more or less, flipping it around the other way. I think people don’t feel good about believing that they are in someone’s pocket. And they want to demonstrate independence. And that’s especially true at the White House. Now I think that’s an oversimplified thing. Yes, you get access. Yes, big campaign contributors that represent certain sectors of the economy probably get an opportunity to make their case that they might not otherwise make. But I don’t see the conscious buying-off of decision-making. I think that it’s going to be harder and harder for that to happen in the democratic environment we were talking about earlier, where the Internet has such a role to play.

So for that reason I am kind of optimistic. I think we’ll get more-honest politics. But what we have to do is enforce honest debate and honest conversation about the hard choices. Because then everyone’s got to give up a little bit, including the special interests who are in the process now because there is no purity. When you start making compromise, everyone has to kind of figure out what they are going to bring into the equation to help solve the problem.

Yet we’ve had the administration wracked and rocked by what the Democrats call the culture of corruption. That doesn’t seem to be diminishing.

Well, I don’t know [if] the problem was more or less out of control. We had a guy who was a complete creep named [Jack] Abramoff, who did stuff that he got held accountable. I mean, he was doing outrageous stuff trying to play both sides of Indian gaming disputes. He was doing a lot of stuff that was just crack. But that does not at all represent the majority way that business gets done in this town. And the problem is, there is a legitimate role for people who have businesses to run and employ millions of people. They have serious issues. They’d better work hard to have people who have to make decisions understand what their issues are. But there is also a public interest. So there needs to be a strong public-interest sector that represents what the contrary view might be. And again, it’s a place where we need more serious conversation and authentic debate about what the real solutions are. But you don’t see many people getting bought off.

I mean, on this telecom issue I have members of Congress and senators who are on both sides of the issue and struggling to try to get the answer right and don’t honestly know what the right answer is. What would help them would be hearing all sides of the issue. And then hearing some real straight talk from both sides of the issue about, you are so far apart, where would you come together, what would you agree on? And by the way, I think we need more journalism that forces that kind of conversation because most journalism tends to be on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand. How do you set aside those differences to actually solve these problems? And what would you do to resolve it? There is a nice guy named Matt Miller who worked at the Clinton White House and writes a bit. He did a really interesting piece in Atlanta about two years ago.

He sat down [Representatives] Jim McCrery, a Republican, and Jim McDermott from up in Washington, two guys who had dramatically different views on health care. McCrery is a traditional conservative Republican, free-market guy. And McDermott was the leading advocate of a single-payer system, a national health insurance guy. And he basically locked them in a room and said: “All right, we are going to come out of here with something that represents health-care reform that both sides could buy into. What would you do?” And the more they got going, the more they said, “Well, if you took some of this and you took some of that.” They cobbled together something that was a pretty rational compromise. And then they both quickly agreed they’d never be able to sell it to their caucus, because there is no trust.

The real problem is that people can’t get out there and sort of take the step toward saying it because they are so afraid they are going to get the [expletive] kicked out of them. It’s just like in Social Security debates back in the 1980s. The Democrats were always going to go wave the bloody red shirt in front of the Republicans. And you couldn’t get entitlement reform because no Republican wanted to take that step because they feared they were going to get crucified.

Well, your old boss was involved in putting something together on that.

He did. He is very interesting, because he represented both sides. In 1982 Richard Schweiker was Secretary of HHS [Health and Human Services] for Reagan and proposed some entitlement reforms. Moynihan went to the floor and said, “We are not going to cut Social Security,” and got a 92 – 0 “sense of the Senate” resolution passed. But then he came back a year later in ’83 and, working with [Bob] Dole and [Alan] Greenspan, put together a series of adjustments and modifications in the program that extended the solvency of the plan. In fact, [they] solved the problem until now. And now we are dealing with it again.

Well, if money and access are not a major problem facing this approaching campaign, what would you say, just to sum up, is the more important problem?

The more important problem is the ease with which candidates duck very difficult choices on the future by not being honest about the tradeoffs that exist in different courses of action. It’s very, very hard for candidates to stand up and speak honestly and truthfully about what it takes to balance the budget, what it takes to develop coherent energy policies, what it’s really going to take to clean up the mess we have made in Iraq now. Those are not easy conversations, because they risk alienating various groups. And our real problem in politics is that we have not provided the kind of accountability we need for candidates.

Well, what is it about the campaign that inhibits that kind of outcome?

Well, increasingly it’s been that you can navigate your way to victory by only telling groups of voters exactly what it is they want to hear. And nothing ever forces the debate, because you can navigate through the Democratic primaries by only taking positions that are going to appeal to the Democrats. Then you just have to figure out, how do I preserve some ability to get a fraction of the independence necessary to get the 50.01 percent of the vote?

And then we are left with this very divided, polarized country as a result, instead of a candidate really working hard in a visionary way, summoning the country to something greater with a strong governing majority where you can actually go out and lead. But to be a president who leads, you have to run a campaign that leads and takes risks. And we haven’t had much risk-taking. It’s not easy.

I think you and I probably spent our first serious time together 20 years ago when I was working for Bruce Babbitt. And Babbitt ran that kind of campaign. He had nothing to lose. So he stood up and he said: “Look, we have to be honest and tell the truth about the budget. We are going to have to cut spending and raise taxes. Here is the way I would raise taxes.”

Well, people say that’s what they want. But is that what they want?

It’s not easy to win with that kind of politics unless you get incentives from people who are willing to rally right behind a candidate like that. It’s the same thing that [Doug] Bailey and [Gerry] Rafshoon and Ham[ilton] Jordan are up to with this Unity08 thing that they are doing. They are presenting a picture-perfect, pure argument about what the people want. But then they can’t produce any evidence in the name of a candidate [who] will produce the kind of momentum and produce the kind of campaign that will actually deliver that. Because the people will stand up and want to follow. Because it comes down, in the end, to who is the candidate that actually you believe will lead you to that kind of future.