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Michael Lux

Michael Lux is the chief executive officer of Progressive Strategies, a political consulting firm that he cofounded. He also created and runs the Progressive Donor Network, which advises donors on the evolving political landscape. Previously, Lux was the senior vice president for political action at People for the American Way and was special assistant to the president for public liaison in the Clinton administration. He recently launched the progressive blog OpenLeft.com.

Josh Israel interviewed Lux on June 29, 2007.

Would you start by talking a little bit about your experiences? You worked for President Clinton.

Yes. I was in Iowa for many years working for Citizen Action there and for the labor movement, for the AFL-CIO. But I also did presidential politics, because pretty much everybody in Iowa who cares about politics does presidential politics. And in ’92 I ended up going down to Little Rock and working as part of Clinton’s team down there, part of the war-room operations and the whole nine yards, and I came to Washington after we won and worked at the White House. I did the transition as well as the campaign and then worked at the White House for about two and a half years, through the middle of ’95. Then I took a break and slept for three months and was on the finance team, not as a paid staffer, but as one of the vice chairs of the finance team. And then I worked as a consultant for People for the American Way for a couple of years after that. And I have been a consultant ever since.

And your organization now is Progressive Strategies?

Yes, my consulting firm is Progressive Strategies. I wear many different hats. I have a consulting firm, Progressive Strategies, that does work with a lot of nonprofit groups in progressive politics — environmental groups, choice, civil rights, civil liberties, labor, all the kinds of usual suspects in progressive politics. But then I also run something called the Progressive Donor Network, which is a network of donors who care about progressive politics. And we keep people informed about what the trend lines are, what is going on in certain national politics and on Capitol Hill, and polling trends, demographic trends, organizational trends — what’s going on with different organizations and new projects they are taking on. So I keep in touch with a lot of the donors in that realm.

Was the Clinton campaign the first time you were involved in the presidential fundraising excitement?

I was very involved in Iowa for [Walter] Mondale in ’84. I was on Paul Simon’s staff in ’92 and Joe Biden’s staff before Joe kind of blew himself up and took himself out of the race.

In ’88, you mean?

Yeah, in ’88. In ’92, I was on Clinton’s campaign. But in none of those staff jobs did I do a lot of direct fundraising. I was one of the political people who would sometimes brief donors or work with donors on different special projects. I certainly had a role in that way, but I didn’t actually work with donors more directly until my White House years where I was in the Office of Public Liaison. And our office basically dealt with you. If you weren’t an elected official or a reporter, we dealt with you. So we dealt with CEOs. We dealt with labor union folks. We dealt with trial lawyers. We dealt with public-interest groups. We dealt with trade associations, multi-client lobbyists. We dealt with everybody, including donors.

So we did a lot of work just kind of keeping the donors in the Clinton world informed about what was going on, letting them know what was happening about the issues they cared about. So that was really my first major contact. And then, of course, I was on the finance team and helped in the raising of what today sounds like a really tiny amount of money: $43 million back then. So that was where I first got really connected to the donor world. And then I have done one kind of either fundraising or donor outreach or, in some cases, just serving as an honest broker and adviser to donors ever since.

Having sort of been involved in the donor world from both sides, what, in your experience, are the reasons that donors get involved? Why do they give?

Well, there are a lot of different kinds of donors and reasons that donors get involved. The stereotype is that most donors do it out of self-interest. They work for the pharmaceutical industry, and they want to make sure that their interests are protected, or the oil companies or defense contractors or whatever. And that is true of a ton of both donors but especially the [fund]raisers, the people who bundle money and raise money from their fellow corporate executives or their fellow lawyers at their law firm or whatever.

But there are also a great many donors who are in it for issue reasons or ideological reasons. They get involved in politics because they are passionate about the environment and they want to help pro-environment people. Or they are passionate about the choice issue, and they want to help candidates who are pro-choice. Or they are just sort of, on the Republican side, all-around conservatives, or on our side, there are a lot of folks who are just all-around progressives. They just want to help progressive politicians win, because they care about a lot of different issues. So there are a lot of different kinds of motivations. And I haven’t even mentioned things like star-[expletive]ing. I mean, there are those kinds of motivations, too. And let’s just be honest about that. There are certainly folks who care about stuff like that.

People who want to have their picture taken with the president or senator?

Yeah, absolutely.

What do the people who are just doing it for the ideological reasons get out of it, and the people you mentioned and [fund]raisers who are doing it for self-interest reasons? What do they get?

Well, part of what they get depends on what their goals are and what they want. The biggest single common denominator that just about everybody who gives bigger checks to politicians or who shows up at $1,000-a-head or $2,000-a-head fundraisers gets is some level of access. And that can be exaggerated. If all you do is write a $1,000 check and show up at a fundraiser, you get to shake the hand of the person, maybe get your picture taken with them. But you will never have a substantive conversation with them on an issue.

The people who get serious access are the ones who are the [fund]raisers, the ones who can bundle 10 or 20 or 30 different $1,000 or $2,000 checks. Those are the ones who get real access. And for the folks who are doing it because they work for a particular industry, that’s what they want. They want to be able to influence members of Congress or people running for president. And the only way to have influence is to have access. The ideological donors care less about that. But they want to be able to influence folks on the broader set of issues they care about. They want to be able to have their input and say what they think. And so access is really probably the single common denominator in terms of what donors get out of the system.

Have you, in your time, seen quid pro quos? Is that a common thing? Do people say, “I’ll give you $1,000, or I’ll raise $100,000 for you if you appoint me to an ambassadorship or make my company more favorably treated legislatively, or if you come and sing at my kid’s middle school graduation”?

It’s an interesting question. I actually have not seen the kind of overt quid pro quos you are talking about. But there is a whole kind of dance that people who play in politics, people who are serious about politics, do get good at. And, in fact, I think you can tell the difference. And by the way, this is my experience. And I tend to deal with more ideological folks. And I know there are instances, obviously, because there are people sitting in jail right now, former congressmen sitting in jail where they have done the quid pro quo. And so I would never, for a moment, say it doesn’t happen.

What I found is that in the world I know, the people who are ham-handed about the quid pro quo kind of thing tend to be people who are very experienced in politics. I have seen this happen; somebody will come in, and they will say to a staffer or a candidate, “Look, I’ll get you $10,000 if you just sign on to this bill.” Any smart politician or smart staffer is just going to say, “Sorry, this meeting is done — not going to talk to you.” And in fact, that person then loses all access he might have ever had.

So the ham-handed folks — Duke Cunningham and his ilk excepted — for most politicians, those folks get nowhere. But what happens is, to the untrained eye, a much more subtle kind of dance. Someone will offer, with no quid pro quo stated, that they are going to raise $100,000. And then later they will say, “Part of what would really help me raise this money is if I could just get a meeting with the politician with the people I am raising from, so that we could really talk substance, because we really want to have a substantive conversation.” And that’s usually how it’s phrased, “substantive conversation.” And then the staffer or the politician agrees to that.

In the substantive conversation, they make their specific pitch for the specific piece of legislation or the specific appointment or whatever. And the politician then tends to say, “Well, I’ll take that under advisement.” Or they’ll say, “Well, let me think about it.” Or they’ll say: “That’s good to know. I’m still sorting this out.” And then later, there’ll be a discussion. “Well, if we don’t do what this person wants, are we going to get cut off?” And the answer is usually, “Well, yeah, probably.” And it doesn’t always happen. But frequently they’ll say, pretty much, “We should do it then.” So it’s sort of a four- or five-step process. It’s not overt. It’s not quid pro quo. But there is a huge amount of that kind of subtle, but still very, very powerful, kind of influence.

And would you say that’s true sort of across the political spectrum?

Yes. I mean, I am not sure exactly how to take your question. So let me answer in the way I take it. There are sort of classic, progressive politicians who are the kind of folks that I like, [Ohio Senator] Sherrod Brown and [Illinois Representative] Jan Schakowsky, people like that, who the sort of business special interest know in advance that they are not having any. They are not going to go against their base. They are not going to go against what they perceive as the public interest. And so they don’t even try with them. And there is a whole group of Congress people that have 95 percent plus progressive voting records that they don’t even make the attempt, because they know the answer would be no.

There is also a group on the other side that is always going to vote a certain way, and they may not even be business conservatives. They may be the social conservatives, Republican Party, where on a whole range of issues they make business a little uncomfortable. Immigration: we just had a classic example. They aren’t going to go against their socially conservative base. So they don’t even try on those kinds of issues. There are a whole lot of other issues and a whole lot of folks that are more in the middle that the sort of influence game tends to happen with. So that’s one part.

And then there are the allies. There is a conversation among allies where you know going in that this person is 99 percent of the time going to be with you. You still provide resources to those people, because you want them to be reelected. You want them to be more powerful within their caucus by raising more money so that they can distribute more money to other congresspeople. So progressive unions, for example, even though Jan Schakowsky has a district that she’s safe in, most labor unions give to her PAC, because they want Jan to be more influential rather than less. That happens as well in terms of the more ideological donors and even the business donors. There are people they know will vote for them every time. They still give them money. They still want to help them, because money in politics carries a lot of power. And so if you can give a friend money, that gives them more power, because it gives them more leverage.

Since the McCain-Feingold bipartisan campaign-finance reform law changes a few years ago, has the system changed at all, would you say?

Well, the system has changed. New laws and new rules do change the system in a variety of ways. What it has absolutely not changed is the influence of money in politics, which I believe you can’t change. I am one of those cynical people — or maybe it’s not cynical, maybe it’s just reality — that believes that money will always find a way in politics to influence things. Now, having said that, I am totally in favor of public financing, because I think that change would be the biggest change and the best change for really transforming the way politics operate. But even in public financing, money will find a way.

There is an old line from, I think it’s Jurassic Park, “Life will find a way.” Money is the same thing. Money will find a way to influence politics, whether it’s TV ads about issues, or contributions to charities that Congress people like, or think tanks that put together trips overseas for congresspeople. Money will find a way. And there are people who are paid big bucks to look at whatever law has just been passed and figure out how [they] can still influence things. So that hasn’t changed because of McCain-Feingold.

But absent public financing, which is sort of a bigger, longer-term solution, campaign-finance changes always change the system, always change sort of how people operate. But it’s also always a mix of good and bad. Because anywhere you take money out of the system, it goes someplace else. So the best thing about McCain-Feingold is that politicians no longer can ask directly for six- and seven-figure contributions to party committees, which means that the sort of influence-peddling of the people who can write those kinds of checks has gone down in terms of direct impact on folks.

It’s one step removed now.

Yeah. And that’s a good thing, I think. And some of my friends would disagree with that, but I think that’s a good thing. Just to take that one step, to make it a little bit harder to have the direct influence, I think is a good thing.

You mentioned public financing. And with the 2008 presidential election, it looks like the limited public-financing system does exist in American politics. The matching funds for the primary and the grant for the general seem to be basically dead. What do you think?

At least the primaries are. It’s not clear yet whether the general-election financing will be dead. I think it’s $90 million that each party would get. That’s a lot of money to turn down. And it’s not clear to me that they necessarily will. And they don’t have to make that decision until later. They can collect the money now, as a lot of them are doing, putting it in a separate sort of set-aside fund. And at some point later decide, “Well, we’ll give it back and take the $90 million.”

So the general election is not completely dead. But yeah, it’s mostly dead, as Billy Crystal said in The Princess Bride. “It’s mostly dead.” And that’s too bad. What should have happened many, many years ago is that Congress should have changed the formula and made it more vital and more in keeping with modern campaigning and modern financing. And, of course, there are a lot of other things it should have, too. We shouldn’t be having public TV stations getting all of this money for TV ads. There should be free time for any candidate that qualifies. There should be a lot of things that are different.

But the system, as it is, which was written up in the ’70s, is now pretty much defunct in terms of modern presidential politics, which is a very sad thing. There was a lot of good to that system in the days that it worked, when I was coming up in presidential politics in the 1980s. The fact that each candidate had to go and find 20 people in 20 different states to give $250 was a really good way of qualifying people. And it kept people like Gary Hart, for example, and other underdogs with more of a chance than underdogs have today. So, to me, it’s a sad thing that system has deteriorated so badly.

What about the rise of the blogosphere and small-money donors and the Internet? Do you think the increasing numbers of individuals giving has the ability to mitigate some of the influence of money?

Oh, absolutely I don’t think there is any question about it. The ability to raise money over the Internet quickly and cheaply really is changing politics in a very fundamental way and in a very exciting way. I don’t think we would have the Democratic Congress that got elected in 2006 without that kind of Internet fundraising. And it also helps the progressive movement that’s outside of the establishment, in a huge way, because the party committees can no longer dictate 100 percent who the viable candidates are going to be. If the net roots get excited about a candidate, they can help keep them alive, even if the party committee is dismissing them and their chances. And that’s a great thing. We would not have Jon Tester [in Montana] or Jim Webb [in Virginia] or Jerry McNerney in [California] or a whole bunch of other candidates, Paul Yarmuth in Kentucky, without that, because those were all candidates that the party committees, at the beginning, thought had no chance. So it really has changed politics in a big way. And I think that’s a very good thing.

And you also are something of a blogger yourself with The Huffington Post.

I am beginning to be, yes.

With the high cost of media time, do you think the Internet is a viable alternative — things like YouTube and blogs that could take some of that need for money out of the political process? Or is it too early for that?

Interesting question. To some extent, yes. I don’t think anything in politics is a complete substitute for anything else. I think to survive in politics, you have to be, literally, multi-tiered, multimedia, multi-channel. You have to be able to do a lot off different things well at the same time. And if your opponent is putting up 1,500 points a week against you and slamming the [expletive] out of you on TV, you can’t survive without any TV presence whatsoever. So is it a complete substitute or does it change the need for TV entirely? Absolutely not. But it is a much lower-cost way of leveraging small amounts of dollars and very modest cost into big publicity, a lot of donations, and an ability to fight back against the traditional heavy-handed TV ads and other kinds of things that are going on.

I do think it’s changing. It used to be that 60 percent to 80 percent of a campaign budget just automatically would go into TV. And that is really changing a lot. And it also used to be broadcast stations. You are seeing now a lot more lower-cost cable, a lot more highly-targeted radio ads. You are seeing Internet ads. You are seeing Google word searches. You are seeing much lower-cost kind of things across the spectrum. And I think that’s a really healthy thing for politics. We may be less than a decade away from this changing, but we are still in an era where TV is going to be a huge factor. But whereas it used to be 90 percent of the ballgame, it’s now maybe 50 percent of the ballgame. Fifty percent is still a lot, but it’s changing. And I think it’s a really healthy change.

One more area I want to ask you about. Through organizations like People for the American Way and looking at your bio, you are clearly connected in a whole lot of different progressive entities of different types. Can you talk a little bit about sort of the evolution of 501(c)(3)s, (c)(4)s, 527s, independent-expenditure groups, as used to be and how they are now, and particularly with regard to the presidential election?

Yeah. That is an area where I have spent a lot of my recent career working in. I think the biggest single change is that 10 years ago most of the independent expenditures that were done were done by single-issue groups. They would do ads on abortion. Or they would do ads on the environment. Or they would do ads on whatever their particular issue was. And that’s really changed. A lot more organizations have been created that are multi-issue organizations. A lot more organizations created for strategic reason are doing their work on a sort of wide variety of different issues or doing broader thematic campaigns around things.

I think the rise of new media has meant that organizations are also diversifying their strategies dramatically, doing a lot more of the things we were just talking about, the YouTube videos and the lower-cost cable ads targeted into one demographic group. So I think there has been a huge diversification in terms of tactics and strategies by the groups. The biggest change, of course, came when McCain-Feingold was passed, where a lot of the money that had been going to party committees went to outside groups. And so those kinds of rule changes were sort of the biggest change.

But the other biggest change, like I said, is you have gone from an era where virtually all of the outside spending was single-issue, to an era where people are much diversified at what they are doing and how they are doing it. The other comment that I would have is there is a lot more on the progressive side of things, although it turns into the Democratic side indirectly; those organizations are working together through coalitions like America Votes much more than they used to.

I point to the 2002 cycle as really sort of the peak of this, where each different interest group would do its own mail and its own calls and its own ads without ever checking if the other groups were doing similar kinds of things. So people were getting 16 pieces of mail all on one day and none on the next from all of these groups, or they were getting 10 calls on one day and none on the next. And a lot of the rhetoric and the pictures and the mail pieces and all that were very repetitive and not reinforcing. But they literally used the same words, because they were using the same vendors a lot of times.

So that has really changed dramatically. There have been some good folks who have done some research and analysis, through America Votes and through other kinds of broader coordinating organizations, that these groups on the progressive side are working together far better than they used to. And that’s a really, I think, healthy kind of thing.

The people on the right have been doing it before.

People on the right, I think, have been doing it together for longer and have been more overt and strategic in their coordinating for a longer period of time. So I can’t tell you for sure exactly how they do that.

They don’t call you up?

Yeah. I am not their friend. But my sense of it has always been that they have a much more coordinated effort, both on the message and on the tactics side.