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Norman J. Ornstein

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is a columnist for Roll Call and an election analyst for CBS News. Ornstein has written, co-written, or edited several books about politics, including The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How To Get It Back on Track (with Thomas E. Mann).

John W. Mashek interviewed Ornstein on May 4, 2007.

Let’s start off with some current news. Florida is talking about getting a new primary date. And then the concern is, “Well, other states are going to do it, and we are going to end up with Christmas or Halloween as a primary.” But I am mainly interested in whether that is going to increase the push for more money quickly. Or is that already in motion, and it wouldn’t make any difference to the primary schedule? It doesn’t affect people going out to get the money?

It was the moves made by other states before that sensitized people to the need to raise huge sums early. Moving it earlier now isn’t going to change that dynamic. What’s happened is that if you have the bulk of the contests taking place before mid-February, starting mid-January, you have no time once that process is under way to raise and spend money. So the need to have virtually everything that you can use in the bank by the end of the year is just much greater than it used to be.

There is an irony here. Because the old theory that you could wait until you struck it rich by winning one of these early contests, getting the enormous attention and then getting the money, had a big problem attached to it because of the difficulty of just the time frame of getting the money in. The best example of this was Gary Hart. Gary Hart emerges dramatically from the pack with the Iowa caucuses, which he didn’t win. But by finishing third and doing so much better than expected, he carried it through to this stunning victory in New Hampshire. And it was the political equivalent of Rocky Balboa taking the roundhouse swing, hitting Walter Mondale/Apollo Creed right in the jaw and knocking him to the canvas, but not quite finishing him off.

And went all of the way to the convention then.

Well, what happened is that after Iowa and then New Hampshire, Hart suddenly was the golden boy of American politics. Huge numbers of people said, “I would like to give him some money.” And what did do they do? They said, “Well, how do I give him some money?” And they had to take some time figuring out where to send the checks. In the meantime, Hart didn’t have places to receive the checks, so he was setting up offices and having the checks come in, getting volunteers to come in.

And there was no Internet then.

Well, how do you get a check? You put it in the mail. It takes several days for the check to reach there. Then people have to open the checks, endorse the checks, send them to the bank, and get them cleared. And by the time all of that was done, he was dead.

So now we have the Internet, and the money can be there instantaneously. As soon as you push the button, the credit card, the PayPal, it’s cleared. You have access to the money. But the problem is, assume the present schedule: January 14, Iowa; January 19, Nevada; January 22, New Hampshire; January 29, South Carolina, Florida; February 5, most other states.

It’s all over.

And you know that to operate in those states, you have to have an organization on the ground, delegates’ slates out there, and television time purchased, cash in advance. You can’t wait and hit in Iowa the same way Gary Hart did. Even if the money comes in within the next three days, there is no time to figure out an approach, where you are going to buy the television time, and all of the time is going to be gone, in any event. So it’s got to be done in advance.

Let me ask the devil’s-advocate question, I guess. We are increasing the estimates that it may go as high as $4 [billion] and $5 billion in this next cycle. And, of course, the public is shocked by that. But when you consider money spent on advertising for pharmaceuticals, etc., is that too big a price to pay for democracy?

I am not fazed at all by the amounts of money. There are these caricatures of reformers; they want to cut money out of politics. And they are shocked by the amounts of money. That’s true of some. It’s not true of me, because for precisely the reason that you suggest. And I think it’s even more than that. We have such a cacophonous society now. You have 500 television channels, an unlimited number of Internet sites, billboards, satellite radio, noise everywhere, and fewer and fewer places where you have a public square. There is a reason why commercials on the Super Bowl keep escalating in price, even as the audiences don’t increase in numbers. Because finding a place where a plurality of Americans, much less a majority, will actually tune in, and try to get a message that reaches that large group instead of just targeting smaller groups, is increasingly precious.

Is public financing dead, other than with the also-rans?

I wouldn’t say public financing is dead, but it’s on life support. I think there will come a time when there is a critical mass: we are tired of this obsession with raising money, with the influence that’s there for people who do raise all of the money, with the fact that candidates have to spend so much time and energy raising money that they have very little time and energy left to think about how they would govern the country. And at some point, the public will be willing to say, “All right, let’s pay for this or pay for a significant portion of it.” You don’t have to do this, necessarily, through full public financing, which is a tricky business anyhow.

Now, just [Hillary] Clinton, [Barack] Obama, [John] Edwards, and then the top three in the Republicans, [they have raised] huge amounts of money, but it’s going to be needed if they are going to be players.

Yeah, there are ways of dealing with it. One is television time. Now, understanding that, it’s entirely possible that 10 years from now television, in particular broadcast television, isn’t going to be the same medium that it was. It may not be the most significant. But it’s going to take at least that long. And even the fact that broadcast-television viewership is declining, if you are a candidate, you still need to reach the broader audience. And that’s still the place to go.

We are seeing in this cycle with candidates like Obama a really heartening development: 100,000 donors, most of them very small contributors. But if we did what I believe ought to be done, which is to add to this a 100 percent tax credit for small contributions and then throw in a matching fund for candidates who raise over a threshold amount in those small contributions, then you will tilt the system in a way that’s desirable. But you also will reduce the demands for raising so much money.

Given the new members of the [Supreme] Court, what’s your reading on how McCain-Feingold is going to fare?

I am a little nervous simply because I do not see either [Justice Samuel] Alito or [Chief Justice John] Roberts as having the initial predisposition to defer to Congress in this matter that [former Justice Sandra Day] O’Connor had. At the same time, it’s not clear to me that they are going to go back and go through the whole record. And also the oral argument makes one a little nervous. Roberts seems, clearly, to want to move in very small incremental steps away from the status quo where he does move. And if they do that, there is a reasonable way to deal with this.

Not to get into the arcana, but the original provision here that dealt with these sham issue ads was one that my working group had pretty much put together for Senators [Olympia] Snowe and [Jim] Jeffords. And it was amended on the floor, broadening it, by the late Senator [Paul] Wellstone, and in a fashion that we opposed out of a fear that the court would view it as unconstitutional, and the court viewed it as constitutional. It’s one that basically extended the limitations on these ads to nonprofit groups, 501(c)(4)s. If you delete that particular provision and basically say they, like everybody else, can’t use union or corporate funds but individual funds, I don’t have a problem with that. If they make a very narrow exception to a particular class of ads, and it doesn’t include the one that is in the challenge, then there is a way of doing it that is not going to do violence to the system. But if they accept the argument that the Wisconsin Right to Life [organization] made, then they have opened up a loophole a million miles wide.

Well, you have mentioned TV. There was a piece in The [New York] Times Magazine, a chart that said in 2000 the TV advertising, local and network — of course, very few did network — was about $500 million. It’s going to be a billion and climbing. And I think that’s a very conservative figure. Given the time span we are going to have, particularly after February 5, all of the way to the conventions, we know that each side is going to try to define the other in probably a heavily negative way. I mean, we all talk about negative advertising. The people don’t like it. Then it’s used over and over. I don’t know, myself, how effective it is. It probably sank [John] Kerry. But is anybody but television stations getting rich off advertising?

Yeah, the consultants who buy the television time.

Like Bob Shrum?

Yeah. They get 15 percent off the top. And part of the reason we have so much television advertising is because the consultants are not dumb. They keep telling the candidates, “One thing you got to do, you’ve got to buy more television.” If you tell them, “Let’s do more billboards,” they don’t get 15 percent for that. So a part of this problem is the consultants.

You and I should have gone out to California and just done a couple of races out there.

Yeah. We would have been set for life.

Mike Murphy went out there because [Arnold] Schwarzenegger’s wife [Maria Shriver] likes him. And I have to tell you, he’s on a gravy train out there now.

Well, that’s what it is. But I am disgusted with the broadcasters, to tell you the truth. Back in the late ’90s, I co-chaired this Presidential Advisory Commission on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. We decided to take a more moderate tact here and push for reasonable voluntary approaches to political discourse. So I came up with a very modest plan, but one that would have had some significant impact. And it was that broadcasters would commit, in the 30 days before a general election, to doing five minutes of discourse a night.

Free time?

Not free time, exactly. And the night defined as 5 p.m. to 11:35 p.m. And the idea was you will do five minutes. You can do it in one chunk, you can spread it through the evening, you can do it in the newscast or not in the newscast. You pick the broadcaster, the races in your communities that need and deserve additional discourse. You pick the formats. You want to give a candidate a minute to get a message across? Go ahead. You want to have a mini-debate? Do that. You want to find a way of covering a candidate’s position on an issue? Do that. Leave them with maximum freedom. Trivial commitment; the number of stations that jumped in to do this was miniscule.

I think Paul Taylor was [supporting] that.

Paul was my comrade-in-arms in that. And Paul lobbied actively for it. And we got nothing.

Walter Cronkite did. But it just fell on deaf billfolds, I guess.

Yeah. We got Walter to do a commercial for us.

Right, I saw it.

And they won’t do a damn thing.

I know.

And I have actually come to a different conclusion now. Paul and I, based on what I put together for our commission, turned that, with the next stage, into a legislative proposal, which is now a McCain-Feingold plan for free time. It’s a broadcast bank with vouchers that go to candidates who raise small contributions and get a matching fund in terms of the broadcast vouchers. And it’s basically paid for by a tax on broadcasters for having the public airwaves.

But I have even turned in a different direction, because it’s not going to happen. And what I have lately been saying is they got the airwaves in return for public-interest obligations. They would operate in the public interest, convenience, and necessity. And they don’t do it. I mean, every six months I get a press release, glossy flyer from the National Association of Broadcasters, “$12 billion a year that we do in public-interest work.” You read it. Of course, it’s a bunch of crap.

But what I have said is I will take your numbers at face value and here is what we’ll do. For five years you will give 20 percent of that public-interest dollar amount and contribute it to a fund, after which point you are relieved of all of your public-interest obligations. You have none anymore. And then we’ll take that money and put it into a trust fund for public broadcasting with a commitment that they will devote a digital channel to political discourse. And we’ll get more than we are getting now. And the broadcasters are going to do no less than they are doing now. And we can get something for it. But other than that, there is no solution to the reality that they hold candidates hostage.

And, of course, the other troubling element of this, which I absolutely believe even if we have no smoking-gun evidence, and I think it started with a California gubernatorial campaign, with Al Checchi and Bob Shrum putting in $60-some million dollars of his own money, which was a shocking amount at that time, all into advertising. He had local stations suddenly being showered with this money. And they realized that the more free coverage they gave to the campaigns, the less need the candidates would feel to buy the advertising. The less coverage they gave, the more the only option for them was to buy advertising. So even as we have seen the advertising going up, the coverage has gone down. Tell me there is not a relationship there.

As we both know, money does not assure success. John Connally and Phil Gramm are testimony to that. And we know now that John McCain and Hillary Clinton being the nominees is far from certain. Does money hit a point of diminishing return? I mean, the candidate now, these gobs of $2,300, sometimes you just say, “Well, maybe there’s too much out there and probably a lot of waste.”

I do think that there is a threshold you need to reach to be a viable candidate. And if you can’t reach that threshold, you either become a kind of standing joke, Dennis Kucinich, or you can’t stay in the race. And, in effect, Tom Vilsack found early on that he just couldn’t get over that threshold amount. And my guess is that you are going to have one or two of the second-tier Democratic candidates who, by the third quarter, are going to be in that same position. Part of the problem is that some of these candidates can get money in an early burst. But, in effect, they have shot their wad. It will be interesting to see if [Mitt] Romney is in that category. Early on, [he received] huge sums maxing out from the people he met when he was at Bain Capital and from the Mormons. But once you are past that, who is next?

It will be interesting to see Chris Dodd, having gotten an early, impressive burst of money from the people in Connecticut, and the insurance and the financial-services industries, and then all around the country, where he is chairman of the [Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs] committee. But once that’s done, where do you go next? But if you can get over that threshold, there is no exact dollar amount. I think it was mostly around $5 million in the first quarter. Then even if you are not anywhere close to where the other candidates are, there is another reality here, which is you can have a half a billion dollars in the bank, and if you lose Iowa and lose Nevada and then lose New Hampshire, you are a loser and you [are] branded as such. And this process moves quickly enough that all of that money that you throw into advertising at that point won’t overcome the reality.

And then the other reality is that a presidential campaign is different. The television can’t or won’t cover gubernatorial campaigns, Senate campaigns, House campaigns. The coverage of the presidential campaign at that point is going to be enormous. The free publicity that will come if one candidate wins the three early contests will be enormous. It will be hard to overcome.

We have already seen the start of stories, “Well, this is going to be the year we are going to have an independent candidate.” [Mike] Bloomberg is mentioned. And, of course, Ralph [Nader] may get in. Is it fertile? Or given the fact that third-party candidates have done zilch, never carried a state except for [George] Wallace in our lifetimes, with so many candidates — and they are going to kick each other around — is there going to be any independent candidate with a force behind them?

I am skeptical. We do have now this Unity08 effort and a lot of other things out there. But I think you have a couple of conditions that make for a meaningful independent candidate. How did Ross Perot rise when he did in 1992?

People were dissatisfied with [George H. W.] Bush and [Bill] Clinton, I thought.

Well, in that case, it was Bush getting dismal approval ratings and a deep uncertainty about Clinton. What it requires is either that kind of dissatisfaction with candidates, because they don’t think they measure up, or the parties nominating people so outside the mainstream that there is an opening in the middle. I don’t see either of those things likely to happen this time. It would be different if George [W.] Bush were running for a third term, won the Republican nomination, and the Democrats ended up picking somebody who brought great misgivings; or if the Republicans, in the end, picked somebody who is just going to be seen by a good share of the country as way too far to the right, and the Democrats do the equivalent. I don’t see either of those things happening.

Take the four Republicans who have, at this point, a serious shot at their nomination: Romney, [Rudy] Giuliani, McCain, Fred Thompson. The first three, it’s interesting, they have more weaknesses than they have strengths. But none of them is outside of mainstream, or seemingly incompetent, or so corrupt, scandal-driven, that you are going to have more than half of the country saying “no way.” The Democrats, whether you are talking about the top tier of Obama, Clinton, and Edwards, the next tier of [Bill] Richardson, [Joe] Biden, Dodd, or Al Gore looming in the background, none of them are incompetent or outside the mainstream. I can imagine one or two raising enormous misgivings. But generally speaking, now, is there a potentially viable candidate out there, if any of those conditions hold? Well, yeah. And that would be Mike Bloomberg. And that’s partly, of course, because when he has mused that he would spend $1 billion if that came up, he is credible on that point.

This is the first time, in probably two generations, that there has been an election that there isn’t a sitting vice president or a candidate that has a formidable background. Does this make the debates more important next year? And make it probable that we won’t have a prolonged debate on debates, and they’ll agree quickly to three [presidential debates] and one [vice presidential debate]?

I think they will end up reaching an agreement. Of course some of that depends on who the candidates are and what position they are in. It does make the debates more important. And I have begun to campaign for something different. I don’t think this is an adequate process in a year like this when we have such enormously significant issues, and candidates who have not been near the White House. So what I proposed is a variation of the [Barry] Goldwater-[John F.] Kennedy idea.

The trouble with that is that the candidates and the consultants, all of them, may say, “Oh, we can’t do that.” They are scared.

They are. Well, what I have proposed is we push this now because there is an incentive for some of the candidates, for an Obama, say, to step up and say, “I am going to commit here and now that if I am the nominee for the entire fall, from the conventions on, I will do a debate a week with different formats on each of them.” And then turn to his rivals and say, “Are you afraid of it?”

That’s a great idea.

What have you got to hide?

But I am afraid they are afraid of it. And they’ll say, “Oh, we don’t . . .” They’ll find a way not to use the word “afraid,” of course.

Yeah, but if one of them commits now and makes a deal out of it, I think it will take on some public cachet of its own.