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Michael Deaver

Michael Deaver was an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and served as his deputy White House chief of staff. He died on August 18, 2007, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Deaver’s second book, A Different Drummer: Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan, was a New York Times bestseller. At the time of his death he was the vice chair of Edelman International, a public relations firm.

Jules Witcover interviewed Deaver on February 23, 2007.

Would you start out telling me what you think about the state of the current public-financing system — whether you think it can survive, and if there is way to make it survive, what would have to be done?

I’m not sure I know the answers. And I think it is abominable right now. I think we started tinkering around with it after Watergate. And my own feeling is that we have enough technical ability today to instantly record any contribution and require that any contribution be recorded within a 24-hour period, and that we ought not to have limitations on what a person can do to support a candidate of their choice. I have always thought that when they started screwing around with it, and they did after Watergate, and then they set these PACs [political action committees] up. And then these PACs got abused, and now they are going to come up with some other gimmick for it. Why they ought not to have unlimited contributions, as long as everybody knows about it — I mean, if Hillary Clinton wants to take $25,000 or $1 million from Mr. [David] Geffen, and she got the check yesterday and we’d know about it tomorrow, that is fine with me. And the same is true of John McCain. If some defense contractor wanted to give him a $25,000 contribution or $100,000, that’s fine with me as long as we know. We know they do it.

But it seems to me that we set up all of these procedures and regulations and laws that simply complicate it. And Congress and others lawyers take a couple of years to figure out how to get around it. And then we are right back in the same mess again. Of course, I think another great change would be to require that all of the money has to be raised in the district you are representing. I’m not talking about president, of course, but if you’re talking about Congress and Senate.

What about the rationale for limitations to create a level playing field to help the people who won’t have the money or don’t have that kind of access, to at least let them get into the starting gate?

Well, we do that now with the voluntary checkoff. But nobody remembers that. A congressman getting ready to vote on a tough issue doesn’t have somebody look up and see how many people in his district did the checkoff and [say,] “I’ve got to remember them.”

Well, that’s for the presidential.

That’s just presidential? Yeah.

And it’s dying on the vine.

Well, why shouldn’t it?

Something like 5 percent [of all taxpayers participate], I think it is; it may be a little more.

I mean, if Hillary and McCain can raise $500 million a piece, why would you give another buck? I don’t know. You don’t think that there are enough organizations that represent all of the people who want to be represented? I mean, there is AARP, and there is Common Cause, and there are labor unions. I thought that’s what COPE [the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education] was doing. You don’t think the public employees union and the postal workers . . .

You don’t see a lot of those organizations really weighing in, in a period when there are a bunch of early candidates, primary candidates, who need to get off the ground.

Well, I think labor has gotten pretty strongly behind Edwards. But there is nothing that doesn’t allow them to do that.

But in terms of some kind of incentive, you don’t find very many people who are not in politics. One of the clichés is that, well, if so many good people in the country could do a better job than the people that are there, whatever the administration is, they won’t get in it because it’s too messy. It’s too expensive, it’s too dirty, in their mind. So I am just raising a question. Is there a method to try to reach people like that and widen the universe of potential candidates?

Well, I’m not sure I know what the government can do to do that. And maybe you take the checkoff money and have an ad campaign. But I think everybody in America — at least it used to be the case, I don’t know whether it still is — was taught about the franchise and how important voting is and involvement in politics, supporting your candidates. It’s there. I remember during the Carter administration when people in the media were talking about maybe this job of the presidency is too big for one man. We’d come through the Nixon thing. And then we had Carter and so forth.

And then with Johnson, some would say it wasn’t big enough. And John Connally; it was always the joke about John Connally.

Yeah, and then Reagan came along. And he was almost bigger than life. And nobody talked about that anymore. Now we are back to nobody is satisfied with any of the candidates running again. And you go back in presidential history, you see every four or five presidents, you get this giant of a person who really makes change in the country. And the rest of them sort of occupy the office and can barely escape. I think that’s pretty much a pattern. But the ability is there for anybody to change that if they want to. I don’t know that we have to do something or change a law or regulation to make it easier.

So I take it that you don’t have any qualms about the campaigns starting earlier and spending more money.

Oh yeah, I have lots of qualms about that. We basically are going to have two campaigns now. We are going to have a campaign from now until the first of 2008, which is the primary. And then, even worse, we are going to have from February through November for a general election, with a sitting president. So, you have two presidents in waiting and a sitting president. It’s a mess.

Do you see any way to get a handle on that?

Well, maybe we ought to have some sort of a convention of smart people, graybeards who come up with a recommendation. I mean, we do it on everything else. And it seems to me this is as important as anything. I don’t know why we can’t have a national primary on Labor Day and an election on the first Tuesday of November. That’s a great answer. But it has gotten ridiculous. And part of it, this time, is because there is no sort of assumed candidate. Nobody is vice president or president, so we have all of these different people running, nine or 10 in the Republican Party. The governor of Illinois dropped out today?

Iowa — Vilsack.

Iowa, yeah. But look, I was talking to one of the TV guys yesterday about the problem that they are going to have in covering debates. Can you think of anything more boring than nine of these guys answering the same question?

What do you think ought to be done about that? Is there any way to deal with that proliferation of candidates in a debate?

Well, I don’t know. No, I don’t think there is. I think the League of Women Voters used to have some sort of a standard. But I don’t know how you do it this early on. There hasn’t even been a vote in a primary yet. Maybe you do it by how much money they can raise. But then you are back into another mess. I guess we’ll just have to be bored by the democracy that we are creating.

Do you think that there is any merit in this idea — your party tried it a couple of cycles ago, and I think the Democrats suggested last time — to give a bonus of delegates to states that will delay their primaries? The practical result of that was that these states, the smaller states, didn’t have enough delegates to have any impact anyway, so they didn’t care.

Right, New Hampshire’s going to double their delegates?

They just wanted to get the attention that they got.

I don’t know what the answer is. I really don’t. I think in some way we ought to shorten the campaign season. I don’t know. Maybe you can set a law on when declarations come. Now anybody can do it any time they want to. But if you said that you can’t declare your candidacy until September before the election, at least that would eliminate six months that we have to go through this.

It wouldn’t stop them from doing it, though.

It wouldn’t stop them from running around, right.

I mean, the declarations are meaningless already, aren’t they?

Well, it seems to me that here we are in February, and we have almost 20 candidates announced. I’ll bet you by September we won’t have 20 candidates. Some of these guys are going to run out of money. Some of them are going to be embarrassed. We will have clear winners by then. The polling research will scare some of these people out by September. So that might be one way.

That’s not deemphasizing money; that’s emphasizing money.

Could be. But, I mean, if you are a frontrunner and you are a person of prominence — Hillary [Clinton], [Rudy] Giuliani, [Barack] Obama, or whoever — you are going to raise the most money. How many people are going to give Jim Gilmore money, or [Duncan] Hunter from San Diego? I mean, come on.

It always baffles me about these people who make that decision.

Unbelievable.

I mean, you have candidates like on the Democratic side, Dennis Kucinich, who is not going to be nominated. But at least he represents a niche where he’s going to cover a number of people; antiwar people are going to support him until the end, which they did in 2004.

Yeah, but aren’t they going to support Obama first?

Probably.

So where is Kucinich going to be by September? But, I mean, Kucinich is a different story. The Kuciniches and the [Harold] Stassens of the world are going to run every time anyway.

There is almost always somebody like that.

Right. How many times did Stassen run?

Seven or eight.

And I always heard the story that some wealthy woman had given him $5 million 20 years or 30 years ago and said, “In order to keep this you have to run for president every fourth year.”

Really? That’s an interesting story.

In your experience, have you ever encountered people who give money making a really hard pitch to the candidate for something in return, [like] passing legislation?

No, I never have.

Appointments?

No.

Never?

No. I mean, I cannot say that somebody didn’t hand Ronald Reagan a check sometime and say, “If you win, I want to come and see you about this or that.” I can’t say that never happened. But I never heard anybody be blatant about it.

Or the other way around and saying, “If you don’t do such-and-so, I’m not going to contribute to you.”

No. No. No. One of my favorite stories about a guy — one time, after Reagan was president, we were at a petroleum club in Houston, and about 100 guys were there. This guy was just giving me hell about Reagan’s defense budget and how Reagan was spending too much money on it. So I grabbed him by the arm and I said, “Well, come here.” I went over and tapped Reagan on the shoulder and I said, “Mr. President, this guy wants to tell you something.” And this guy looked at Reagan and said, “Hang in their, Dutch.” They don’t say those things to people like that.

In the Reagan years, how much time did he personally spend in a given week to fundraising? Was he one of these guys who got on the phone and spent hours?

No. When he was president?

Before or during.

Well, he didn’t spend a lot of time on fundraising, ever. I mean, people would put together fundraising events, and he would go to them and do his little spiel. But I never saw Reagan ask for money. I never heard him call somebody on the phone and say, “Holmes [Tuttle] is going to be calling you — we need money.” I just never heard that.

But he was in that special situation where he didn’t have to.

He had people who did that, that’s right.

Yeah, and his own celebrity brought people in. What do you think has been the impact of the Internet on fundraising and generally on campaigns?

Well, I think nothing that happens goes unreported. I was talking to somebody about John Wayne when Reagan was running against Gerry Ford. Some reporter asked [Wayne] why he was supporting Reagan against the incumbent president. And he says, “Because Gerry’s too [expletive] dumb.” That’s John Wayne. And the reporter, of course, said to the camera, “That’s the end of it.” Today, that would have been on YouTube in an hour. And everybody would have known John Wayne had said that, and it would become a big thing for two days.

We always used to say: “There are no secrets in politics. And don’t ever say or do anything you don’t want on the front page of The Washington Post.” Well, today that is really true. So, that’s the biggest effect. I don’t know about fundraising on the Internet. I suppose for those people who spend a lot of time on the Internet and want to support people who agree with them, they will send some money.

More and more people are looking to the Internet for everything, including news.

Well, there is no question about that. You go into this office, we have 210 employees. And I would say the average age of an employee in this agency is 29, maybe 30. We used to, up until two years ago, have stacks of newspapers; we subscribed to everything. We had Posts that high and The New York Times, Wall Street Journal. They are still there at 4 p.m. today. I mean, I am reading them. But these kids come in at 7:30 in the morning, and they scan their set bloggers and news sources they want. And they never look at the newspaper, ever. And they have it all rigged so that if any client they are interested in is in any of the major papers it pops up for them. They don’t have to go looking for stories about their clients. So you are right. The young people all use the Internet for news. It’s just like most of them don’t have anything except a cell phone; they don’t have home phones.

What do you think has been the impact and the money situation of the growth of the U.S. side of the business, people who are running campaigns, managing campaigns, doing media for campaigns, [and] so on? I mean, when I started as a reporter, it was one guy had it all in his head.

Stu Spencer.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s it: Joe Cerrell and Stu Spencer.

Yeah, now it’s a huge industry. And how much has the development of that industry been a factor and a huge cost of running campaigns now?

Oh, I think it’s been a factor. Because most of those guys will, first of all, say to the candidate, “We have to do a lot of research.” So, research has imploded, the amount of research that we do now in campaigns. And you have a lot of campaigns. You have a lot of officeholders who don’t do anything with that research. Bill Clinton used to get overnights every night. I remember I used to take in, I think, [Dick] Wirthlin twice a year to see Reagan and to do kind of a picture of the country. And finally one day Jim Baker said, “Well, you’ve got to get Wirthlin to come in and tell him about his defense budget; we have to stop spending so much on defense.” And so I brought Wirthlin in and the president looked at the figures. And he said, “This is your fault,” pointing at me. I said, “What do you mean it’s my fault?” He said, “You have got to get me out there so I can tell the people where I have been spending this money.” [That’s a] big difference from some politicians who would get that information and change their position.

What kind of a president do you think he would be today if he were in office in this mechanical explosion?

Measureable. He wouldn’t be any different. He’d still be who he was.

You don’t think he could have taken great advantage of the Internet, with all of these sites now that don’t just give a text of what somebody says [but] have a video on them?

Right. Yeah, I’m not sure how much emotional power there is in that, though, as there is on the larger screen. But I think Reagan believed something that is sort of getting lost. And that is, it doesn’t matter the medium; he knew he was strongest in television, but the medium was the same. And if you believed the camera didn’t lie, or the microphone didn’t lie, then that was sort of the basis for how he communicated. And I think there are politicians today who think they can fool the people through the media.

Do you want to suggest anybody?

No. I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Do you think that the huge amount of money that goes into campaigns these days is a factor in a campaign becoming negative? Does money drive negative politics?

Well, certainly television, which is the biggest expense of campaigns, drives negative politics. The problem is that all of the research shows that negative campaigning works. I think money is obviously a huge factor, bigger than it’s ever been. But I think television is the real difference, still today, in what’s happened in the last 25 years to the politics in America. Not only is it that political and campaign television has changed, but it is television culture, what we watch every day on cable and believe about people. And television is, today, part of the impression. I think cable television, particularly, has made us extremely cynical. And that goes into politics. And it’s very hard for somebody to rise above that cynicism that we have.

Is that because, particularly, cable television doesn’t have any kind of editorial filter?

It has no editorial filter. I mean, they all pray for Anna Nicole Smith to die. It keeps them going for five days. And they say anything they want to, and they cover the tawdriest [stories] and exploit all of the worst. And you get a steady diet. Look at Maury Povich, Jerry Springer, and all of that stuff. Have you ever watched daytime television for a week?

No, I can’t say that [I have].

Well, try it. This is what the American culture is. So, then you bring politics into this every four years. It’s the same people who are sitting there watching this stuff. And that was not true when Reagan ran. We didn’t have cable television, for God’s sake. We only had three networks.

Are you saying that this development has dumbed-down the people who pay attention to politics?

Absolutely. It’s dumbed them down. It’s also made them much more cynical about humanity and people. And unless you get an extraordinary person who rises above that in people’s eyes — I happen to be prejudiced in thinking that the last one we had was Ronald Reagan — they believe the worst about the candidates.

I take it from what you are saying that you don’t see money as a big evil in politics.

Well, if you are talking about presidential politics, I don’t see it. I think it’s become necessary because of what you have to do to reach people in this country. You have to buy a lot of television. You have to spend a lot of money on research. And the sophistication in get-out-to-vote efforts is very costly. I think [Karl] Rove and his people probably spent half of their budget on that sort of thing, probably in four states. And that’s very expensive to pay block workers and maintain that hourly kind of connection they had through the Internet with their people. So I think the technology has made it much more expensive.

But you don’t see money as an eroding element in itself?

I don’t know. I mean, I suppose.

The idea that, whether it’s true or not, that candidates can buy support, not directly by handing out money, but by having so much money that they can overwhelm the opposition?

I think that’s probably much more true in the primary situation than it is in the general election. Was it Hillary who said she’s not going to take federal funds? I think she has. And so I am sure that whoever gets the Republican nomination . . .

Well, it looks like they are all going to pass up federal funds.

Yeah, so what good does that do?

In the primaries, but maybe not in a . . .

[George W.] Bush didn’t take them in the general election.

But some of the Republicans have said they are going to take it.

Well, I bet they won’t if Hillary doesn’t.

Well, that’s the whole thing.

Yeah. What do they get, $70 million? And let your opponent spend $400 million?

I checked with the FEC [Federal Election Commission] the other day, and they said they estimate that somebody who takes federal money in a general election will get about $83 million. Well, that’s nothing compared to what somebody else could raise.

Well, and all of these special funds that you can now set up, too. I think that you’ve got to look at those a little bit.

Yeah. The 527s.

Yeah, because they really are not responsible to anybody. Once again, it’s when we started screwing around with these regulations, they compromised on all of this stuff so that they figure a way to legally have a loophole for people to spend money.

It’s like doping horses, isn’t it? And they find one way to test the horse, they come up the next day with something else.

You follow the horses? There is a horse named Rove, you know.

Rove?

I have watched that horse; he hasn’t won yet.

In your experience, who is the most energetic, shall we say, at a fundraiser and as a candidate?

Bill Clinton. No question.

Why do you say that?

I don’t know. I just think he and Terry McAuliffe were dynamos. And Bill is a very energetic guy who could campaign on four hours sleep and work in fundraising whenever he could. It was primary to him. And then, of course, when he got to the White House, he made it an art — sleeping in bedrooms, and coffees, and selling all of that stuff. So I don’t think there has ever been anybody that was better at raising money than the Bill Clinton. I am sure she’ll do pretty well, too.

Did you ever encounter any candidate who really liked to raise money?

No.

I can think of a few.

Really?

Rudy Boschwitz, remember him?

Yeah. But he didn’t run for president, did he?

No. Phil Gramm.

Oh, really?

Well, he was the guy who said, “The best friend you can have is . . .”

Jess Unruh.

Jess Unruh said [money is] the “mother’s milk of politics.” But Gramm said, “The best friend you can have in politics” is money. Do you think there is any chance at all for anybody ever to be elected again who doesn’t take special-interest money, doesn’t run negative campaigns?

Pretty hard. I don’t know exactly what you mean by special-interest money.

Well, on either side, labor money, any kind.

No, I don’t think so. Because I think first of all, it’s legal today. And I think that most people come to the presidency with a philosophy. They are either going to curtail, in their minds, corporate abuses, or they are going to be like Bush, and they are going to unleash the free market to do what it does best. They come to the office with those philosophies. And we know that. We know that Hillary is probably not as good for business. I don’t know where McCain would be on that, which is one of his appeals. I hope he doesn’t lose it.

This is an area you have a lot of background in. What’s your feeling about the job that the press and television are doing now covering campaigns?

Not very good. I have great respect for a lot of friends in the media. But I think they are, by and large, lazy today. You don’t see a lot of original, creative work, as far as television is concerned. I’m talking right now. You take the Walter Reed story. I mean, where was everybody? And now they have all covered it all week long, and [the] horror about all of this. Most of the big stories come out of print journalism still. Maybe we ought to have a special category of prestigious awards in television journalism. That seems to get print journalists out if they think they can get a Pulitzer.

There are such awards. But they don’t seem to have the clout that . . .

Yeah, here is the problem. And it’s something I would argue with [Dan] Rather and others about over the years. Television is not a news medium. It’s an entertainment medium. Newspapers are still considered a news medium. But when you watch Oprah [Winfrey], and then you are followed by Charlie Gibson on ABC, you are going from entertainment and you just keep going. And television news ratings are based on entertainment.

Don’t you see that gap narrowing between television and newspapers? Look at what’s happening to newspapers; they are doing a lot more soft news now. They are closing their European bureaus, their foreign bureaus. And they are also moving toward entertainment.

Yes, to some extent.

I think the difference may be that they are not seen side by side like, as you say, from nine to nine-thirty you have a news show, and then from nine-thirty to 10 you got some hokey entertainment show. And it all gets clumped together.

But if you watch the evening news, it’s still the front page of The New York Times. They haven’t gone out and created these stories. So I still think that it’s print journalism that drives the news. And television has to make it visually entertaining.

You remember some years ago, you would have those year-end programs on television. Ed Murrow would bring out all the correspondents from around the world, and they would sit around — that was news, but it was also entertainment, because it was done in the context of news.

Yes. But we learned something from that. And I think we got something new out of it.

Nowadays, a lot of news people go onto entertainment shows. You go to the movies now and there is some news guy playing a part. And it always seems strange to me, that bridge.

Well, they are making lots of money because they have become celebrities. I mean, whoever thought Howard K. Smith or some of the guys who were originally the television news people would become celebrities? But a lot has changed. Who was it? Eric Sevareid, I remember watching him about a year before he died. He was telling me that the first television he ever did, political television, was in Philadelphia. It must have been the ’48 convention. Is that right?

I don’t even know if they had television in ’48.

Well, they did.

I remember they had it in ’52 with Eisenhower.

I think it was ’48 he said. And they did have television.

Philadelphia was ’48.

Yeah. And he said, “We were in a un-air-conditioned hotel room with a white sheet off the bed tacked up against the wall, and we were getting all of this stuff over the telephone.” And that was the reporting. And you look at that, what did that cost him? Probably nothing. Today, what a convention coverage or a major network costs . . .

Well, they do as little as they can. They cut it back so much. But it used to be that they would do gavel-to-gavel, and they would have a host of reporters. Now they really don’t do that anymore.

Right. Thank God.

They look at the convention as entertainment. And it is. Very little news comes out of the convention anymore.

That’s right. These two will be the first conventions in a long time — since what, ’64, something like that? — without knowing who the nominee would be when we went in. Well, ’76 maybe.

Wasn’t ’76, you had a sitting president then, too?

We did, but we almost beat him.