Countdown

Home > Interviews > Rich Galen

Rich Galen

Rich Galen is a Republican strategist and a senior adviser at Manning, Selvage, & Lee, an international public relations firm. He was the press secretary for then-Senator Dan Quayle and the communications director for Speaker Newt Gingrich. Galen writes a conservative online political column several times a week, at Mullings.com.

Sara Fritz interviewed Galen on February 20, 2007.

[I’m not planning to be involved in the 2008 Presidential raise in any way, in] particular, other than watching what goes on.

Are you sure?

Yeah, I am positive.

I mean, isn’t Newt [Gingrich] going to get in? You are not going to do that?

No. No. I mean, there is not enough money in the world. I’d have to stop doing everything else that I do. But, I have to tell you that my son is the deputy campaign manager, the number two guy, in [John] McCain’s campaign. I am not a McCain loyalist, but I have a rooting interest in that campaign maintaining itself for as long as possible, because he’s getting paid.

And you won’t be in any way involved in Newt’s campaign?

Well, no, not any more than anybody else’s. I mean, you get to a level in Washington, as you know, that everybody calls everybody on both sides. And so somebody says, “What do you think we ought to do about this?” I am trying to think of an example of that happening. Something came up, and one of the campaigns called and said, “What do you think we ought to do?” And I told them. But I mean, it was just because I had had to do this stuff, and I understand what the reaction was likely to be. But no, I am not going to; I mean, never is a long way. If there are a lot of commas involved, I would have to rethink it, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

And I know you are doing a website.

Yeah, it’s an online column three days a week, Mullings.com.

I’ve been there. You are a little hard on McCain and on [Rudy] Giuliani, or on Mitt Romney. But what is your work now?

I am half-time here, and we do a lot of health care stuff that has nothing to do with it. After the ’04 election, to back up a step, every big advertising agency and public relations firm rolls up to one of three or four gigantic firms: Interpublic, Thompson, and we roll up to an outfit in Paris called Publicis, created back in the ‘90s. They all decided. And Saatchi & Saatchi is part of this and Burnett is part of this. And after the ’04 election, they needed another senior Republican. They wanted to hire me. I said, “I am a terrible employee. I mean, I try to be a good employee, but I am just terrible at it. So, thank you, no.”

I wish I had thought of that line a few years ago, because I am also a terrible employee.

Yeah, then you know what it’s like. So, they came back to me and said, “Well, could we buy half of your time?” And I said, “Well, I guess. What’s half of my time worth?” And they told me, and my knees got weak. But because I was the best student in gimmel, that’s third year of Hebrew school, I knew not to give away my stuff. So I said, “You know, that’s a little thin. You are going to have to throw in parking.” “Oh, yeah, of course.” So, here I still am. But I expect every day somebody to come in and say, “OK, it’s done. Thanks. Get out.” So, I do this. I do the column, which is pretty successful. It’s paid for both by advertising — which has become a much less important part of it; back in the dotcom days of 2000, it was a huge deal — and by subscriptions, which are like NPR. You can listen for free, or I can guilt you into paying $30, but you don’t get anything extra. And people do that; a lot of people do that. And it’s also a marketing tool for speeches, which is where a significant amount of it comes from.

Right. And it looks to me it gets picked up a lot. I did a Nexis search.

Yeah, it gets cluttered pretty quickly.

You are very fluent in the newspaper quotations.

Well, this is instructive for you. When I went to GOPAC in 1998, I was looking for some mechanism. GOPAC was Newt Gingrich’s PAC, and it had a dreadful, dreadful reputation with the Washington press, just awful. I have had a great reputation and a great relationship with the Washington press corps, even though I have been Newt Gingrich’s press secretary and Dan Quayle’s press secretary. And when I do lectures and tell people that, their eyeballs get this big. And there is a very good reason for this, that in my three decades, almost, coming up in August, I have never lied to the press to protect my boss. And I have never sold out my boss to try to create favor with the press. I have always played it absolutely straight. We have all grown up together. I mean, we were all kids together. We have known each other for 25 years, so people that are now bureau chiefs, we all were hanging around Iowa in 1979 and stuff. So, I looked for some mechanism to be able to get the GOPAC name in front of the Washington press corps without them actually foaming at the mouth. And so I started this [website]; it was originally called Talking Points, and I changed it to “Mullings” for two reasons. One, I was looking for some catchier name. And the only people that use the verb “to mull” with any regularity are AP headline writers: “President mulling budget cuts.” I mean, nobody ever says I am mulling whether to have Chinese or Thai.

It’s kind of a lost word.

Yeah, this is during the Monica Lewinsky days. And she wrote those talking points for how to answer grand jury questions, so I wrote that she had wrecked the Talking Point title. And Mullings has two definitions; one is to consider or think about and the other is to add spice, as to mulled cider or mulled wine. So, that hugely long story, I promise.

I see, I see. It’s a double meaning.

Yeah, a double entendre. So, it became pretty popular with the press corps; it still is popular with the press corps. That’s how we got into this whole thing. But it’s expanded to about 35,000 people getting it by e-mail.

That’s fabulous.

Yeah. It’s really a nice, and it keeps me out of the bars.

How nice. I mean, you are your own boss.

I am my own boss. People say, “Well, how many newspapers is it in?” I say, “None.” “Well, wouldn’t you like to be in newspapers?” No, because I would have to be in like 500 newspapers just to get to where I am now. And I don’t have any editors, except my wife.

I really didn’t know this was possible. Really, it’s one of those things that is a new phenomenon.

Yeah, since TomPaine[.com], there is no barrier to entry. And people will e-mail me and say, “You know, I am thinking about doing something with this. Would you mind?” I mean, I know I’ll be a competitor. Hey, there are 300 million people. At the end of the day, you have to be a good writer, and you have to have something to say. You have to have some voice that people want to read, or else they just won’t read it. That’s why all of these blogs that people go crazy over, who reads that crap? I don’t know.

So, have you ever actually worked in a presidential campaign?

Yes. Well, tangentially, when Quayle was running for Vice President in ’88. And I was on [his wife] Marilyn’s tour.

After he got the nomination?

After he got the nomination. I was on Marilyn’s tour because nobody else could get along with her but me. It’s true; and now, even I can’t get along with her. That was kind of interesting, because nobody in ’88 wanted Quayle for vice president except for George H.W. [Bush]. So, to go back, we were all down in New Orleans and the announcement came. And what happened was that they kept calling people, and I kept getting calls from reporters saying, “Well, it’s not going to be [Pete] Domenici.” And I forget who was the last guy standing before Quayle. But I was having lunch, and some guy from ABC called and said, “So-and-so has just called and said it’s not him.” I said, “Well, the only guy left is Quayle. I guess it’s going to be him.” “Are you confirming that?” I said, “No. I’m having lunch. I am just doing the subtraction.” But what happened was, if I had one ounce of the ability to do things, I would write this book: The first 24 hours of that vice presidential campaign changed Quayle for the worse, forever. He never got over that first 24 hours, because Jim Baker didn’t want him. Charlie Blacks, none of those guys, they all had their own candidate. And there were these questions raised. Here is what would have happened: in real life what happens is Lee Atwater, who is now dead, he would have called everybody in and said, “OK, you go talk to Janet Hook. You go talk to Paul Taylor. You go talk to Adam Clymer. And you go sell Dan Quayle as the guy.” And we all would have got out. And that meeting never happened. And so right from the get-go there was this scent of blood in the water. And it just exploded.

I was writing the main story for the L.A. Times that night. And, I might add, I am embarrassed to say this, we were previously assigned people. And Quayle was one of my assignments. And everybody told me, “Forget it.” So, I hadn’t boned up on him.

Yeah, but that’s exactly right. If everything had gone the way it should have gone, somebody would have been assigned to you and said, “OK, I have worked for Dan Quayle for eight years. Let me tell you what he’s like. I am going to tell you what the good points are.” But that never happened.

I do remember it as being the most frustrating experience I have ever had in journalism. Because we had people fan out all over the place. And we had some pretty good stuff, military stuff. We even had one guy who told me about how he supported legalization of marijuana. Just all kinds of things were falling from the sky. And my editors were scared to death by all of that stuff. So, Dan Quayle was, in part, saved. I mean, when I finished writing it and walked out, I ran into Dan Balz and a couple of people and they had had the same frustrating experience I had, which was that all of this stuff was so incendiary that editors were . . .

But that’s true. Everything in there had been in the campaign against Birch Bayh and then in the reelection campaign. It had all been shown the light of day. But this is where Barack Obama is going to find trouble, I think. This business about what lies in wait. Or Joe Biden, who should know better. He has never done anything in his whole life except been a U.S. senator. But the level of scrutiny and the amount of magnification on everything is so huge that he never got out of it. He was a very confident guy. Remember, this is a guy who beat an 18-year incumbent for the House. And then, whatever it was, five years, six years later knocked off Birch Bayh, a serious guy. I mean, just kicked his ass. It was over in 20 minutes.

He lost his confidence entirely.

Never got it back.

And what I am saying is it could have been worse. Because you are right, nobody came to us and said, “Let me tell you about this guy.”

That’s right; it never happened.

We were simply working on our own devices.

Anyways, that’s the only time I have actually been on a payroll. But I have worked for the House.

You ought to write something about that.

The NRCC [National Republican Congressional Committee], that first 24 hours were just . . .

I followed Geraldine Ferraro during her first 24 hours, and it was the same.

Yeah, that was similar. We were in San Francisco together.

Confidence and then just — it was terrible. Anyway, this was getting me behind myself.

This is what happens when two old farts get together and start trading war stories.

Right. But I think you are in a great situation to see what goes on in these.

Yeah. I was going to say I have worked with the RNC, and for the NRCC, and briefly for the senatorial campaign committee during these adventures.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the role of consultants in presidential politics. We see too much money going to too few people, special interests being served one way or another, negativity, all this stuff.

Well, let’s start with the last one, because I’m not sure that fits into what you are trying to do here. I have a strong theory about the whole negative advertising business, and I take my share of the responsibility for bringing that into politics. Well, it’s not bringing into it; we all know that this has been going on forever. It’s just now with television, it’s a lot easier to do it. I believe that people are hardwired. I actually checked this out with a psychologist friend of mine. People are hardwired to love gossip. We all pretend we don’t, but we love it. “Did you hear what my partner . . . ?” “No, tell me.” And negative advertising is just unbelievably highly-distilled gossip. And that’s why it sticks with people. The thing about advertising and politics is it doesn’t matter how clever it is, how memorable it is, how creative it is. All that matters is does it move votes. And for professionals in this business, that’s all they care about. You can have a flip chart. You can do an Al Gore flip chart and if it moves, well that’s a great ad. You can have the most hotly produced, the Air Force coming in, and if it doesn’t move votes, the ad sucks. Negative ads move votes and that’s why they stay there. That’s why they are in the game. And frankly, candidates won’t do it on their own. It’s very tough. Especially new candidates; they hate it. But there is an old saying that nobody ever uses any more: “We are going to turn mother’s picture to the wall. And we are just going to go after this guy and just tear him up.” You need deniability. The candidates need deniability in the name of consultants.

So, if the consultant convinces the candidate to do something that he is not inclined to do . . .

That he needs to be able to say, typically to guys at the Rotary Club, in essence, “Well, you know, I would never do this, but my consultant says this is the only way we are going to win it. We have spent all of this money. I got to depend on him.”

And your consultant is right?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Some people believe that the more money you put into a campaign, the more negative advertising you could afford.

Well, it’s the more advertising you do, period. And at the end, it’s likely to be negative because, again, that’s what moves votes. So, negative advertising will always be some percentage of the total buy. It used to be there was a theory that you went negative, negative, and in the last week you kind of did “Kumbaya” ads. Well, nobody does. Now you just drive a stick right into the bastard’s heart right until the polls close.

It’s interesting; your column started out being called Talking Points. Because one of the other criticisms that we get, allied to that one, is that the consultant controls the message so much that the candidate never gets to be authentic.

I understand that. I don’t believe that’s true, certainly not at the presidential level. It may be at the congressional level, and maybe to some degree at the senatorial level. But to go back to where this conversation started, the level of scrutiny at the presidential level is so dramatic that you have to be not just a really good amateur, like Bill Clinton, but you have to be a professional actor like Ronald Reagan to be able to pull that off now for two straight years. I mean, nobody is going to be able to maintain that level of façade for two straight years. At some point they are going to get tired enough, and frustrated enough, and cranky enough that whatever they really want to say they are going to say. So, I just don’t believe that’s true. I mean, I know that’s kind of cocktail party chatter, but that’s from people who don’t understand how this goes.

That’s a very good point. In the Republican Party, and to some extent in the Democratic Party, too, but most in the Republican Party, we see a situation of a consultant [who] will work for the presidential candidate and then will work for a proliferation of other candidates with interest in the presidential candidacy, 527s, all kinds of different things. Is that kosher? And should it be?

They work for a presidential candidate?

Yes, they do media advertising for a presidential candidate.

Oh, in the same cycle you mean?

Right.

Oh, yeah. Well, on both sides this is true. In football there is a phrase that says there are more skilled positions than there are skilled players to fill them. Skilled positions in football are the ends and backs, generally speaking. And the same thing exists in big time politics. There are more skilled positions than there are qualified people to fill them. And it’s the same way in any kind of endeavor. Whoever has the hot hand. If you are running for U.S. Senate in ’08, frankly, it’s helpful for you when you have a fundraiser to be able to say, “Now, Rich Galen, who is doing Newt Gingrich’s media, is also doing my media. And he is also going to come in and talk to us now.” They go, “Rich Galen is doing it, what a great guy.” So, a lot of it is showbiz on behalf of the candidate. But a lot of it is that there are just not that many people that do this stuff at that level. And as you said earlier, the money is so big. I mean, there is so much money, you just can’t afford to take somebody nobody has ever heard of and say, “OK, here is . . .” In the Senate campaign, “Here is $27 million. Go spend it.”

But when they do it through 527s, doesn’t it all become one single message?

Oh, I see what you are saying. I am not so sure that they can do that. I would have to think about that.

I’ve seen it.

Well, I’ll tell you a story. There was a guy named Ben Ginsberg, who was kind of the two or three Republican lawyers. Same thing, everybody wants Ben to be their lawyer, because there are not enough lawyers with that kind of skill. He was the lawyer for Bush and he was the lawyer for the Swift Boat Veterans guys, which he did as a pro bono. But nevertheless, when it became public, I was on Ben-watch time. I got a call from the Swift campaign to go find Ginsberg and baby-sit him for the next eight hours, which I did. And he had to resign from the Bush campaign. I mean, you couldn’t do both. He couldn’t, no matter what the financial arrangements were. It wasn’t a legal conflict, but it was a political conflict, so he had to give it up. I think to get to your point, I suspect it depends on what’s going on. I’ll have to look; the law has become so fuzzy in my mind about what kind of money you have to use for a 527, who can do what. It just seems to me that if a 527 was doing ads in support of Rich Galen for president, and you were the media thing for both, that would be a conflict.

I think Alex Castellanos was doing this in the last election.

Well, Alex has a very big firm, so it may well be that they built a Chinese wall internally.

And you couldn’t really tell where the money was being spent, because they had created all of these extra entities.

Well, that’s only speaking of money. The law is that if I am the treasurer of the campaign, I have to report that I paid you, the media consultant, ‘X’ number of dollars. There is nothing that says you have to say where you put your money. So, a lot of money gets spread out kind of privately, because if you are her consultant, there is no way for anybody to know that you are being paid. I mean, you just have to report to the IRS you were being paid, but nobody gets to track that. So, in Alex’s case, I would have to go back and check. But it seems to me that it’s like a law firm that has a conflict. You build a Chinese wall, but everybody knows that this conflict potentially exists. But these are the steps we have taken. And then you go with it from there.

And you think that’s OK, justified by the lack of talent.

It’s only OK if everybody plays fair. If they don’t, then it’s not OK. But once you get past the original thou-shalt-nots, everything else is open to interpretation. When you say, “Thou shalt not steal,” that covers everything. As soon as you say, “Thou shalt not steal anything worth more than $60 or it’s a felony,” then you start opening things. Well, was it $60 at retail, $60 at wholesale?

What also happens is that you have — even if it weren’t a conflict — a concentration of message.

Right.

And, of course, a lot of consultants get mighty, mighty rich. If they got the media contracts for the president and several organizations, do either of those things . . . ?

It’s like saying how much should a baseball player be paid. If you can throw a slider that nobody can hit, you should be paid as much as you can get. I mean, the market is the market. People will pay what the market will bear. And people should ask for what they think the market can afford. But let’s go back to this Republican-only thing. I mean, George Soros and MoveOn.org is . . .

I said that, and then I reconsidered it as I thought about it. In fact, well, the Post has a piece today about Mark Penn?

I was reading about it. Yeah, Mark Penn, Democratic pollster.

Did you see that?

No. But I know Mark, all of the different things he does.

Yeah, it’s very much as you say with this firm: everybody belongs to somebody.

Yeah. Well, again, when this much money is involved. and not only is it the amount of money, but it’s over the last probably 10 or 12 years, all of these firms — the polling firms, the media firms, the other consulting firms — they have tried to even out the sine wave of on-year/off-year stuff. And you do that by expanding your breadth to get into mostly the corporate world so that if you were a pollster, you could also poll for Pfizer. And that keeps you going in the odd-number years.

And you could keep your staff during the whole period of time.

Yeah, and keep everybody’s skills up. So, media firms do the same thing. And a lot of consultants are consulting on messaging to corporate clients and things.

Is there a substantial impact of the billion-dollar campaign, which is said to be worth talking about this year?

Yeah.

Is there any substantial difference, in your view, between the billion-dollar campaign and the one we saw 20 years ago?

Well, there is a sophistication difference, because the tools are better. But in terms of the scale? No. My guess is if you throttle back to net present value of dollars, it’s probably not grown all that much. I mean, the biggest thing about the billion-dollar campaign is that public financing I don’t think will be renewed, because all it does is lets Dennis Kucinich spend your money.

It’s become irrelevant.

Yeah. I mean, McCain was waiting for Hillary [Clinton] to say she wasn’t going to take it so he could say he wasn’t going to take it either, because as half of McCain-Feingold it was a little difficult for him on his own to be the first one out of the box. But as soon as Hillary said she wasn’t taking it, then that gave him an opening. But the amount of money is enormous. But as other people have pointed out, when you look at the amount of money that’s spent on beer advertising at the Super Bowl, it’s really kind of fairly minor, especially when you are picking the leader of the world.

I’m torn between two questions, but let me follow up just what you said.

Ask them both.

You are picking the leader of the free world. However, the quest for all of that money requires some compromise.

No, I don’t know that that’s true. I don’t know that this compromises. I think politics is a very entrepreneurial endeavor; which is to say, if you have a good message and people like what you are saying and how you say it, they will give you money to keep saying it. It doesn’t matter what kind of compromises you make. If you are an Edsel, you are still an Edsel, and nobody is going to buy the damn thing. And nobody is going to pay you to keep your campaign alive. So unless you are Steve Forbes or Mitt Romney that you can just write a big check, then at some point your campaign will fold up and die. I think, again, at the presidential level, it’s really a function of having a good message and delivering it well. Your record is too closely scrutinized. I mean, that’s what I was writing about Romney the other day. It’s not so much that he was pro-choice. If you are pro-choice, you are pro-choice. It’s that he was pro-choice then he was pro-life. I mean, he was pro-life, then he was pro-choice, then he was pro-life depending upon what he was running for at the time. That’s what I think he’s going to have a tough time explaining to voters in the Midwest.

With the proliferation of 527s, we are told that it’s going to be bigger and wilder than ever.

Yeah, for all intents and purposes, there is an infinite amount of money available for politics in America.

What impact does that have? Some people will say that we no longer command our own man, essentially.

I think that’s right. I think like every single reform that has ever been adopted by Congress, in my entire career, you end up sailing over your own torpedo. You take a bad situation and make it worse. You take a really bad situation and make it a disaster. It always happens. So, what happened with McCain-Feingold, for all intents and purposes, is they took control of the message away from the committees. Where at least, if you are Nancy Pelosi, and the DCCC is doing something you don’t like, you haul whoever the head of the DCCC is this year. You haul his ass into your office and say, “Stop doing that.”

Now you say who are you going to go find? I mean, are you going to go call George Soros in your office? He says, “No, thanks anyway. I have to buy another country today. I can’t be bothered.” So, they have taken it completely out of the hands of where there was some governing mechanism in the way of a governor on-speed. It was a reform that had, as all reforms do, the exact opposite effect of what was intended.

And the impact of that is to make it more divisive?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think Newt probably taught everybody this for the modern era. You can’t go on shades of difference. You have to starkly describe the differences between you and your opponent. Or, in his case, he is more comfortable starkly describing the future if you vote for him and the disaster that will befall you if you vote for the other guy. So that, by definition, is divisive. 

And we have begun to see some people say that this divisiveness is no longer appealing to the public.

Well, we had a pretty big turnout.

But it doesn’t matter, does it?

No. I mean, people will vote. Everybody says, “I hate this. It’s turning voters off.” I mean, the same voter blocs vote all of the time. Eighteen to 34-year-olds don’t vote worth a crap. And senior citizens vote all the time. Hispanics don’t vote. Blacks will when it’s of interest to them. But those patterns continue. I forget what the number was in ’04, but it was a pretty big turnout. It was 62 percent, because that was the same turnout as it was in Iraq. And even in the midterm election there was a very high turnout, for a midterm.

Does one have to express some sensitivity to this?

No, the advertising is designed to move votes. Now, moving votes means either I take somebody who wasn’t going to vote and get them to vote for me, or get somebody who was going to vote for my opponent and either to get them to stay home or to get them to vote for me. So, all of those things count as moving votes. Let’s go back a step. It’s like you read anything from NOW [National Organization for Women], or from NARAL [National Abortion Rights Action League], or any of those. No matter what, they are always looking for an enemy. “And if you don’t give us money right now, these guys are going to take . . .” And it’s just negative advertising in direct mail.

But it’s easier to make your case if you can point out an enemy and say, “Come and vote for me so we can defeat that enemy.” And if it works, if your campaign is working well, then it does in fact return. Moving votes can also mean having somebody who was going to vote for you now saying, “I am not going to vote for you anymore,” which is called suppression advertising, and negative advertising that’s specifically designed to suppress the vote.

I think the most famous one from last cycle was the ad in Tennessee, and that was clearly a suppression ad, the one against Harold Ford. That didn’t serve any other purpose other than to suppress a vote for him. As opposed to the Michael [J.] Fox ad in Missouri, which was exactly what I was talking about. “If you don’t vote for whatever-her-name-is, then they are going to take away stem cell research and I am never going to get cured.”

But if I were a presidential candidate, I might welcome the fact that there are all of these 527s out there working on my behalf.

Well, if it’s working. I mean, the Swift Boat guys worked fine. But you don’t know when they are going to get off-track and decide to say something that is so abhorrent that it ends up hurting your campaign. And you can’t stop them. Even sitting here, I can’t remember all the rules that govern 527s. The average voter certainly doesn’t know that. All they know is that these guys were speaking on your behalf, and they are saying these horrible things.

You are old enough to remember this — Milton Berle, remember Uncle Miltie? At the beginning of every show, the audience would be applauding, and he would go like that [waving audience to stop]. And the camera would pull back, and you would see that his other hand was going like this [waving the audience to continue applauding]. It was a gag every week; they did it every week. And that’s the impression people have about 527 ads. That the candidate’s campaign really does know about it. And while they are publicly kind of wringing their hands, privately, out of camera range they are saying, “Bring it on.” So, that’s a danger.

What do you know about the origin of Swift Boats and how far back it went? And how it got started?

I don’t have any idea. Chris LaCivita would be the right guy to ask. By the way, just so you know, one of the secrets to being a success in this town is if you don’t know, don’t try to pretend. And the most recent one who learned that lesson is Andrea Mitchell. She went on [Don] Imus [radio show] one morning and said, “Everybody knew about Valerie Plame.” And then when Fitzgerald asked her about it she said, “I made that up. I didn’t know it.” But she thought she needed to be in the loop. So, she pretended she knew.

A lot of people say things on the radio and television that they wish they hadn’t.

Which would never get in print.

As you look at this system, which you understand pretty well, I think, is there anything about it that bothers you?

Oh, sure. A lot of stuff bothers me. I would like to have some mechanism — I mean, we can’t do it, but if I were reinventing the system — that would put a time limit on these things. I mean, it may well be that it self-adjusts. But nothing, in my experience, says it’s going to do anything but continue to expand backward. So, that would be the first thing. I think that would make more sense. Because what happens with a two-year campaign is that one, I don’t understand what you [are going to] say in December of 2007 that is going to sound fresh after you have been saying it for a whole year, since December of 2006. Or you have to invent some new thing. And people say, “Wait a minute. Hold on. Where did that come from?” I think that’s dangerous. That’s number one. Number two is the danger of the length of the campaign is that nobody pitches a perfect game. And so whether it’s a [Joe] Biden — you know he blew up in three hours? That may be a new all-time record.

But it’s not surprising.

No. Nobody was shocked, other than the speed with which he disintegrated. Teddy Kennedy, I guess, did it faster. He was before he even got in. Or Obama will make other mistakes. And because it’s such a game of gotcha, almost like the Three Stooges where they go “whoop, whoop,” and they stick you in the eye. And that’s what everybody thinks is kind of amusing and fun to watch. Because, as a reporter, if you are going to cover this thing for 18 months, what the hell are you going to write about? You have to write about the horse race. You have to write about whether or not there were five hay bales or four hay bales, or as Maureen Dowd did the other day, whether there was a heater behind the lectern. I mean, who gives a crap? But that’s where this stuff goes. So, I think the length of it diminishes the importance of what’s going on, just because it just goes on for so long.

And as we were talking about before, the ability of bureaus to be able to cover this with any sense of completeness is zero. I had lunch the other day with Liz Sidoti, the new national reporter for the AP, who is working pretty hard. I mean, she is getting good marks from people that she’s kind of looking pretty good. And she’s got to follow [Ron] Fournier and [David] Espo. She has big shoes to fill. And we were talking about Newt. And she said, “I don’t understand how somebody like Newt can wait until Labor Day to get into this thing.” And I said let me give you an example. Let’s say that Sam Brownback and Chris Dodd are going to be speaking Sioux City, Iowa, and you go to your bureau chief and say, “I want to go cover that.” Do you think she’s going to say, “Sure, go get a plane ticket”? Not on your life. “Go send a guy from the Omaha bureau, and he can file.”

Now, if Newt were going to be speaking in Sioux City, Iowa, there would be half a plane-load of Washington reporters on that plane to Omaha driving across the Missouri River to come back and cover it. And that’s the difference. Because resources are so tight, the days of just being able to hop on an airplane at the reporter’s whim are gone. So these budgets get stretched thinner, and thinner, and thinner, and so people that ought to have a look — a Huckabee, or a Brownback, or a Chris Dodd — are just not going to get covered, because you have to plan this out for a year. And as we all know, it even gets worse during a general, because you have to pay your share of the plane. It gets extraordinarily expensive.

And so it’s even more fragmented.

The big names draw the big reporters, and so the big names become bigger names. But, because of that, because reporters get tired of writing, I mean, how many times can you write the same stump speech? You can’t. So you start writing about the ancillary things. And it becomes insane.

That’s why I was happy to retire.

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

To say the media has changed is an understatement. And you are a good example; I mean, you are in the new media.

I am. I am the newest of media.

It’s got to have an enormous impact. Not just what you said, which was . . .

Yeah, but look at what Hillary just did over the weekend. Again, she’s decided she’s going to use her website to make announcements. I forget what she did, but she had some new video up over the weekend, rather than doing it in New Hampshire or wherever the heck she was. I mean, the ability of people to be able to drag that stuff down, my sense is [that the] only two [kinds of] people that look at that are the opposition researchers from the other campaigns and people that are already supporting Hillary. I mean, I wouldn’t. I guess I could go look at it if I was interested. If I decided I needed to write something else about her campaign, I guess I probably would. But as a regular matter, I am not checking Hillary Clinton’s website. That is just keeping your supporters bolstered up. Blogs are a different issue. Blogs are really dangerous, I think, to the system because there is no editorial control as we know, nor do I have editorial control. But what has happened, again, because there are too many campaign events to cover, and you can’t send people out every day to cover every stop of every candidate, the reporters are reading the blogs of the guy from New Hampshire, the guy from Iowa, and whatever.

I don’t read them, because I would rather watch a Law & Order rerun than read that crap. But beat reporters do, because that’s the only way they can get a sense of what’s going on out there. And so if somebody is a good writer, and their stuff starts getting picked up, you know, “Rich Galen wrote today from Nashua about something that Barack did,” that immediately bursts into the legitimate press, if only through the back door of saying, “Should we be covering this?” And then you go and you write the whole damn thing. So, bloggers are important. But traditional journalists read what bloggers are writing to get a flavor of these contents. But the danger is they are being treated like pool reporters, and I think that’s the danger because there is no editorial control over them. And they are like everybody else. They are trying to get their name in print so they can send it to their mom.

It democratizes the situation. We all know what you can say that’s true and also not true.

Yeah. And the thing I wrote the other day about Al Sharpton in Hampton. The guy from McClatchy newspapers wrote, “Some here are saying,” which I think ought to be banned. I mean, I think you can never be covered by a shield law if you ever wrote a sentence that started “some here are saying.” And one of the things that some here were saying about Obama is that he hasn’t earned his stripes; he didn’t earn his stripes in the Civil Rights movements. And I went back. He was born in 1961; he would have been 3 years old at the time of the Selma march. So what’s he going to do? I wrote, “What was he going to do? Go on a hunger strike? Not eat his Cheerios and applesauce?” I mean, who would write that? So, the danger isn’t just the fact that bloggers have no control over them, but the danger also is because of the pressures on newsrooms and bureaus, that the editorial control would have stopped that. If you were the editor, and you had time, you would have said, “Wait a minute. Get me a name that said this or we are not putting this in the newspaper.” But that doesn’t exist anymore. So, what a blogger writes is more likely to be picked up and repeated by a traditional journalist, because there is no editorial control over saying, “Go get me a source.”

Especially if the blogger says this is history, because the knowledge of history is so thin.

That is right. Exactly. And they are not going to do their homework. So in terms of the new media, I think what will happen is somebody will make some horrible mistake and really destroy somebody’s career unfairly just because they picked up something that they overheard in a bathroom. And the next thing you know, somebody’s career goes down in flames, and it turns out to be completely untrue. And that will stop everybody.

If you are the media advisor for a presidential campaign, what does this change do to your strategy?

Well, look at what they are doing. Campaigns are hiring bloggers. They are hiring people to influence the, as they call it, the blogosphere, because bloggers read other bloggers so they can steal their stuff. I have a Google alert on myself to see who steals my stuff. And also because I have an ego the size of Wyoming; that’s a whole other [story]. But I used to have a news Google alert. But then I expanded it to blogs. And then if I catch somebody just stealing a line, I e-mail them and say, “You have to cite me. You can’t do this. This is not fair use.”

How often does that happen?

That happens about once every two weeks, maybe more. But it happens with some regularity. I am a good writer . . .

It’s flattering.

Yeah, but I want them to cite it. It’s no less flattering if they cite the column.

There is the allied issue here. And I think I saw it most clearly when Howard Dean blew his top. The people, mostly consultants, who have a stake in the outcome of these elections in Washington tend to very much influence that coverage.

Oh. Well, you have been to major debates. Spin at them. I mean, that’s what you do; you go and you influence the coverage. Now, the spin patrol starts about halfway through the debate, because you don’t want the other guys to get their word out there first. And that’s a reportorial thing. Going back to the Quayle thing, I was in the hall the night of the debate with Lloyd Bensten. The reporters that were in the hall thought Quayle had done well, even with the “you’re no John Kennedy” line. They thought he had done plenty well enough. He hadn’t thrown up on his shoes. He hadn’t fallen off of the thing. He hadn’t broken out in flop sweat. And he held himself up pretty well. And the guys that had covered him in the Senate, he had made a pretty good reputation in the Senate. But when the ABC instant poll started coming out, everybody began to change their [minds]. They said, well, obviously people at home are seeing something different than what I saw. So by the morning it was a disaster. On the staff plane home, there were active discussions about can we get this guy off of the ticket; which, of course, they couldn’t.

But since then, reporters will not sit in the hall, because you have to watch it on TV the way other people watch it. That’s why [there are] these enormous tented areas with 150,000 TVs. But still, even though they get to watch it themselves, everybody goes racing up when Matthew Dowd, or James Carville, or [Paul] Begala, or whoever it is comes racing out to tell you what really happened. And when you are dealing with candidates, even at the Congressional or Senate level, you do this same thing. I don’t care what happened in the debate. If in fact our candidate threw up on her shoes, I want this to be that everybody who has a weak stomach now has a champion in the U.S. Senate. We won; that’s the first words, we won. Can you believe how badly that guy performed? So all of that is to say that the consultants have a role in trying to alter your perception of what you just saw. And to the extent that you sit and listen to it, that’s fine. The other side of it is, Super Tuesday night, I was writing for Vote.com, or SpeakOut.com I think it was at that point. And we were all down in Austin. And by this time it was clear that Bush was going to win. And we had the TVs on, TVs on, TVs on. And Bush came out and spoke, did a kind of a statement. Then he did an interview with Wolf [Blitzer] or somebody. And then everybody turned off the sound and Anne — she used to work for The [Boston] Globe, now she is with The [New York] Times . . .

Kornblut.

Kornblut, yeah. She said, “Why are we turning off the TV sets? I don’t want to be influenced by what the commentators on CNN are saying about what they think. Bush just said, ‘I will do that on my own.’ I just needed to hear that.” But, in real life, she was perfectly happy to sit there and listen to Karl Rove come down and tell us what he thought had happened. So, if a reporter uses it for context, I think that’s fine. One of the games we all play is to have great relationships with reporters, so that when Harry Glutz, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch I have known for 15 years calls and says, “What do you think?” then I can help influence that. Now, if I am working for a candidate, then he knows that. He gets to filter that through his thinking. And that’s why I tell all of these guys about my son. I say, “I am not a McCain fan, but I do have an interest in this campaign staying alive, so he gets paid.”

Well, that kind of ‘say what you want to be true no matter whether it is or not’ has ruined the whole idea of going and getting another point of view in journalism, in my view.

Well, let’s take the debates again, because that’s the purest example. You get to talk to, the last time, Ken Mehlman, and you get to talk to who is running Kerry’s campaign, let’s say Joe Trippi. So, you got to hear both, knowing full well that they were out there specifically to say good things about their guy. And then, as a seasoned reporter, you can weigh that pretty well. And actually use them for color and for context. But that’s not going to change your view. More likely, it’s going to be Howard Fineman sitting next to you when he says, “What the hell is he talking about?” I mean, that’s the guy that you are going to pay attention to, because you have a professional respect for your colleagues. Is this at all helpful?

Very helpful.

OK, because I am making it all up, you understand?

I understand that. But what I was also driving at in this question, and using the Howard Dean example, is that there is a group of people here in Washington, or a group of consultants and people who work for campaigns, both Democrat and Republican, for whom their livelihood is to keep others out. So that some Vermont governor can’t come and overwhelm the . . .

Going back to Joe Trippi, he made a ton of money. Trippi made his money [by getting] a percentage of the action on the fundraising. That’s where he made all of his many millions of dollars. That was a good deal for everybody. Nobody thought he was going to raise that much money, and he did. Now, keeping other people out, I don’t think that works in real life. I am absolutely convinced, in my mind, that Al Gore is not going to sit this cycle out. He is going to win the Oscar for best documentary. He is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, because they are a bunch of left-wing nuts over there, and it’s going to be too much for him. He is going to ride some new wave of popularity, and all 320 pounds of him is going to get back in this race. But it doesn’t matter how much Hillary wants to keep him out. It doesn’t matter how much Hillary wants to keep [Bill] Richardson [out]. I mean, he’s going to get in this thing. So, I don’t know that you can keep somebody out who has decided that they hear the siren call, “The American people need me.”

I am not suggesting that we keep him out, but you can sure keep him from winning.

Well, that’s part of the game. That’s like saying, again, in a football game, if you have a good defense, you keep the other guys from winning.

It was clear that John Kerry was the establishment-Democrat candidate. The Washington establishment had chosen him.

Yeah, that’s a very good point. Let me give you my theory on this: people vote the way men buy cars. I don’t know how women buy cars. But I am looking for a car now; my wife wants a car. So I drive everything. I’ll drive a Maserati. I’ll drive a Mercedes. I’ll drive a Jaguar. I’ll drive a Hummer. And every car I drive, I think, “Well, this is great. I love this one. Oh, I love this one.” Until it comes time to actually write the check, and then you drive off the lot with a Windstorm because that was right. You always knew that was going to be. So, all of the polling that went on ahead of time that said, “Oh, I love this guy.” But, for Iowans, when it actually came down to buying the car, they looked at Dean and said, “Nope. I can’t. I just can’t do that.” So, even though he was the nominee presumptive in December, six weeks later he was out of the race. But that has to do with when it actually comes time to vote, it’s like juries. I remember when we were all young reporters how I was always struck at how seriously jurors took the judges instructions that you, and only you, can decide how much weight to put on anybody’s testimony. They took it very seriously, and when they went to the jury room, they tried to do their best.

After covering politics, I find covering trials to be, actually, affirming.

Cathartic.

We are getting to the end here. You talked about Trippi getting a great cut.

Well, you can do it a bunch of ways. Typically, for the top guys, you get a retainer or a salary, however you structure it. Plus, you get a piece of the action. Now, whether the action is on the inbound side or the outbound side, that depends on the guy. So, for instance, if John Kasich decides to run for president, which he’s done, and if he hires me to be his campaign manager, I make a deal for a straight $20,000 a month or whatever it is, and then like 1.5 percent of the total TV buy. So, if we end up spending $30 million on TV, I get 1.5 percent of that. Now, where that comes out of, you don’t know. On top of that, again, we said earlier there is nothing that the FEC requires for anybody else to know that. It’s like being Alan Alda on M*A*S*H. You can be the star. And you can be the producer. And you can be the script editor or whatever, the continuity guy. And you get paid out of all of those pots. So, it depends on how big the campaign is going to be and what you think the traffic will bear.

Well, even in your example, you are suggesting that the campaign manager is getting a percentage of the media buy, which is a little untraditional. I mean, it used to be understood that the media person . . .

They also get some, right.

But you are saying that anybody who has the power to negotiate can negotiate.

Right, and that’s become a standard negotiating point, that I want some piece of the buy as well.

And so the more status you have in these . . .

Well, from the campaign’s standpoint, if I say I am going to get 1 percent of a $20 million buy, that’s $200,000. Then the campaign knows that I am going to be beating the crap out of the finance people to go raise enough so that I can get that much on TV. So, it serves the campaign’s purposes well that I have a financial stake in raising the money. In Joe’s point, I mean, I think the deal was that he got a fairly hefty percentage of everything they raised on the Internet, because nobody had ever done that before. And nobody begrudged him that, because they weren’t going to raise it anyway.

It was pretty cool.

Yeah. And he had to put up with Howard Dean. So, I mean, how much is that worth?

How would this system be affected if these contracts or some element of these contracts were disclosed?

Oh, no. They were disclosed. Again, the FEC requires that if I am your campaign manager, and I am being paid by the campaign, you have to disclose every check I get.

But you don’t have to disclose the . . .

That’s right. You don’t have to. Now, the one who tried this was a guy named [Steve] Stockman in Texas. He and his campaign manager, figuring out that he only had to report the first degree of payment, set up a company called Political Won Stop. And he got everything. And then he paid the direct mail guys. And he paid the media guys. And he paid the consultants. He paid everybody else, so that there was no way to figure out what the hell was going on in the campaign. Well guess what? They got sued by the FEC and they had to pay a huge fine, because it clearly was a violation of the spirit of the law. It wasn’t arm’s length. Now, what will happen is that because this new being the producer, and the star, and the writer has become more typical, I think reporters are going to ask more questions. And then it’s up to the campaign to decide. I mean, if you are John Weaver, then somebody is going to say, “OK, tell me how many buckets you are being paid out of.” And then he’s got to decide whether he’s going to tell or not, and what that’s going to cost the campaign. Yes or no, what to tell them.

Journalists are beginning to get closer to that.

Yeah, because everybody, now, has figured out the new system. I mean, if I were a reporter, I would do that. I would go to Obama’s campaign. I would go to Romney’s campaign. I would go to all of these guys and say, “OK, tell me who is being paid out of which bucket, either directly or indirectly?” I mean, one of the things that happened — I guess it was the second Clinton campaign, but I can’t remember the person. It wasn’t [Dick] Morris; he was cut off — somebody was fired from the campaign and it was common knowledge that he was still being paid out of the media. The media contract had been increased enough to keep this guy on their payroll. He wasn’t going to live under the Wilson Bridge.

Interesting. And one last question: do you know of anybody who ever sued for not getting paid?

Oh, sure. I was close to it. They ended up paying. But people do that. It only takes the threat now. I mean, most campaigns don’t want the bad publicity for being a welsher. Now, sometimes you can sue if the losing campaign has no money. And I have been in that. The worst thing is falling in love with the campaign and saying, “OK, put my fee for the last two months into TV. And I’ll get it after.” And then you lose and there is no money left and you go. So, what you learn as a consultant is your time is only worth what you say your time is. But your American Express bill is worth what it is. You have to get your expenses. Because you can’t tell American Express that you can’t pay the bill because you fell in love with the campaign.