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Richard G. Lugar

Richard G. Lugar, a Republican, is a sixth-term U.S. senator from Indiana. Before that, he was the mayor of Indianapolis, a member of the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners, and a manager of his family’s food machinery manufacturing business. Lugar was a candidate for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination.

Sara Fritz interviewed Lugar on July 12, 2007.

In your essay [“Why I Ran for President,” published in The Washington Post on July 10, 1996], you cited a number of structural problems you faced at the very early start of the campaign. The real difficulty in raising money [is] if you don’t have a national network, the press focuses on the horserace, and the candidates focus on extraneous issues that appeal to the base, but not necessarily focus on the problems of the country.

Yeah.

If you were to write that again this year, would you have that same analysis? Or would were there be some things that you would include or exclude? Or has it changed at all, in your mind?

I think the only thing that I would supplement is that I think at the time that I wrote that piece in June of 1996, I didn’t realize how important it is to start early and, probably, if you’re serious about it, to devote yourself entirely to the presidential campaign. And I say this because I was, at the time — and I don’t get into that in this article that I wrote — managing the farm bill on the floor of the Senate. I felt that was very important. I was chairman of the Agriculture Committee at the time. I thought politically, obviously, it would be important to the people in Iowa that the person that was managing the farm bill was also campaigning in Iowa. I think it was only marginally interesting to the people of Iowa. Whatever I was doing with the farm bill, it did not make that much of a difference. But it did make a big difference in terms of my time commitment here.

In other words, I was continuing to try to make all of the roll-call votes and to carry on the duties not only of a senator who was voting, but also the chairman of a committee of the majority party at that point. And I don’t think it works, the commitment that’s required for the organizing of the fundraising, quite apart from the individual calls or the things the candidate does. There is no way all of that can occur simultaneously with a relatively full-time legislative schedule.

I just really had not thought it through. As I say, I responded to the call of the New Hampshire meeting early in ’95, because everybody was going to be there. And it was sort of the impression that everybody who is out there is not going to be included really in the subject. But I had come off of the ’94 campaign, and I did not really have in my [mind], as I campaigned for reelection [in] ’94, running for president through all of ’95. So that really came after the campaign was successful.

And then I began to survey what was occurring over in the presidential thing, and hopes began to rise. But as I say, I think if I were to advise somebody who is serious about all of this, it would be to think through, over the course of several years, what it takes to build the organizational elements, politically to build the fundraising apparatus that is going to be required — the kind of work, for instance, done now by either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or maybe even [Mitt] Romney. They have extraordinary organizations of people who are involved to produce all of these numbers of individuals, quite apart from the discovery of the Internet and other things that were not as much in currency, probably not at all, really, in ’95, ’96. But the George [W.] Bush campaign, [the one that] the current president won, had the benefit of the apparatus of his father’s campaign, who could get out and raise the same sort of money, arouse the same people, and so forth.

Somebody who is not involved in that way, either Hillary with her husband or George with his father, Barack’s thing is much more interesting, simply because it really does start from scratch, but with the prodigious organization. I think those are the things that, to answer to your question, I would supplement in some way. I was just not knowledgeable enough by June, really, to understand all of what had hit me, I think. And in due course, I began to understand why I didn’t raise more than $5 million or $7.5 [million] with the supplement.

Because you needed that infrastructure.

Yes. And that time frame and with the amount of time I could give to it individually, that was just not going to happen.

Of course, John McCain proves that even that sometimes doesn’t work.

No. No, that’s right.

But at least that would have been something that obviously would have been helpful. Now they say that the amount of money that you need this time around is . . .

Is $100 million.

So remarkable that even that might not work.

Yeah. It might not. But that’s sort of, as it stood, why the campaigns that had a little more organization — Lamar Alexander, for example, had been campaigning in New Hampshire throughout the previous year, as I recall, in 1994. After Lamar left the governorship of Tennessee, if I remember from his own memoirs, he went to Australia or someplace like that with his family for a while. They sort of thought big thoughts and pulled things together and so forth. And then he came back into the picture, but not the plaid shirt and all of the business. And so, in fact, Lamar’s campaign in New Hampshire was potentially a winning campaign under the right circumstance.

Now as it turned out, why Pat Buchanan came into this with so-called base and blew [Bob] Dole off, because essentially, Dole was not campaigning that much. Dole had to come to New Hampshire, as I recall, and would fly back to Washington that night. It was not a boots-on-the-ground type of thing. Which initially, you made some encouragement, as I wrote in this article, that if Dole went the whole route, pitched the full game, whatever I said, he was going to be the winner. Because he really had people obligated to him. He served the party well.

And they went out there. And it was not just a question of raising money. In those days, there weren’t so many primaries and a lot of caucuses and all. But my own impression from Dole was that he probably appreciated a majority leader role, enjoyed that a whole lot, as a matter of fact, and when push comes to shove, was not going to go the route.

Now that basic assumption was wrong. He did. But that would be true for all of the rest of the candidates, too. In other words, Buchanan, after the one splurge in New Hampshire, was not that much of a factor. Lamar did fairly well in New Hampshire, and for that matter, was present in Iowa, too. In the straw vote, Dole was clearly the big winner out there as the neighbor [who] always sort of dominated Iowa. And that was taken for granted.

Steve Forbes is an interesting situation, in which he did have considerable money, and he spent it. But it was a narrow program, and therefore, although there was some register in the early innings, there wasn’t much there after a while. I think as I look back on it, it was still, I felt, all over after the Yankee Day primary [March 5, 1996]. I stayed into it for two weeks after New Hampshire for those primaries and, as I think I said, I got 13 percent of the vote in Vermont, which was the high-water mark. But it was apparent to me that at that point, parenthetically, Dole was the nominee.

So this one may be sort of like what we are looking at coming up here. Sort of the first week of February we will be hit with 25 primaries all over the country, in New England. But in that particular one, that really was the end of the trail.

You were, obviously, a nontraditional candidate.

Yes.

Mainly because you weren’t giving them the raw meat that other candidates were. And it strikes me that Barack Obama, although he’s got quite a following and is a very charismatic guy, is also trying to do that. Do you think he will eventually just be sucked into the ideological maelstrom there and not be able to separate himself from that?

I don’t know. But I think if he does, he will not be the nominee. I think his strength really is the perception that this may be something different and may be something better. And I think that Mrs. Obama is helpful in that respect. She is an independent spirit and speaking the same sort of thing. But I don’t know. There, I beg the question — this is always raised — that even if this is a remarkable phenomenon, he still has just been in the Senate a couple of years. How can somebody try to hope to be defender of the free world and arbiter of all of our economic affairs with so little experience, relatively?

Others will point out, “Well, lots of other people have run without a whole lot of experience.” I think thus far, that has not been a stopper. The other more experienced people really are not doing particularly well. But it’s because Barack has this extraordinary organization and the money. So Barack is not only saying: “I have got sort of a new path out there, but I am also better at the traditional skills, like raising money. I am raising more than Hillary Clinton, for example.”

Although he’s doing it in somewhat a nontraditional way.

Yes, exactly. But then he makes a point of investing an asset. If you have got 250,000 [people] giving you small gifts, for the public as a whole looking at this fundraising, that’s a lot more wholesome than the few people giving lots. And so it’s a way of even making a plus out of the grungy business of the fundraising.

Are you encouraged by that? There are a lot of people who see that as possibly the best thing that they have seen here, the idea that one person can raise money that way.

Yes, I think it’s a very healthy development. And so, as I say, I don’t know that much about it. I just read along with everybody else. I am intrigued by the organizational skills of getting the word out to all of these 250,000 people or so forth — how physically he has done that and what kind of people he has been able to bring to his campaign that, in fact, are doing the grunge working all that.

The other thing is the suggestion that they are a younger crowd, too, which wouldn’t be too bad.

Yes. Well, it may or may not.

We don’t know yet.

But there is that impression that he is young. And certainly the pictures of him at his rallies, it appears there are a lot of young people there.

The thing that your essay points out probably most of all is the fact that competence is never much of a category.

No. And it still, without gilding the lily too much, appears to be unfortunate, because then when you have a problem — take the current presidency, people would say, “Well, now looking back on it, President Bush did not have a great deal of experience in foreign policy.” In fact, some would say that his experience was limited in lots of ways.

So this is the reason, then, supposedly that his father or his wise men suggested somebody like Dick Cheney as vice president and [Donald] Rumsfeld as secretary of defense; in other words, a lot of old hands who have been around. They have been chief of staff in the White House before, for example, or have run wars, whereas Bush has not been involved in any of this. But at this point, after six or seven years, the writers routinely go through how tragic all of this is.

But the time for the analysis is probably during the candidacy, as to what are the qualifications of the person, how extensive is his or her background for the job, and how important are the ideas in the campaign itself, unless there is a suspicion that they are simply being thrown out as straw men. In other words, what kind elaboration, academic backup and so forth, is there for this?

In the dog-and-pony shows in which I was involved, along with all of the other candidates night after night during 1995, we would be on the stage together. Depending on how many showed up — six, seven, 10 of us — in those days it was unlike the more, I suppose, humorous sorts of so-called debates they are having now, which the master of ceremonies raises all sorts of quick questions and bounces around.

Ours is a more prosaic five-minute-each or seven-minute-each or that type of thing in which you just sort of go down, and everybody gives his or her spiel. And in that particular time, one of the focuses of most of the candidates was on the government [being] too big. And so some would suggest lopping off the Department of Education as a first start; as I recall, some even would lop off the fledgling Department of Energy or whatever was happening over there. These are examples of how you could really chop this thing down to a proper size.

Obviously, from Republican standpoints, governmental spending was out of hand. And taxes should be reduced sort of in a broad way. Forbes got into the flat-tax idea and pursued that. And I think in the little article that I wrote I indicated that. But the rest, really, had no particular thoughts about taxation.

So when I came along with a different idea of taxation and all, there were a few people who found this to be very interesting. I remember visiting with a number of academics that I had not met and whose work I had been following subsequently, who were too much interested in why productivity in the country had been going down, and why correspondingly the real wages of workers, of ordinary people, was sort of trailing off.

Even at a time which we were boasting we were the pride of the earth — and we were — but still, these were important problems for ordinary people. I think the broad scale of attacks that occurred sort of night after night were just on spending, on big government, on that type of thing, without too much elaboration. And so anyone listening to this, I am not sure what you put your peg on. You come to the place to begin with to listen, because you are for a particular candidate and wanted to cheer him or her on. But the intellectual content of this was sort of vacant.

The press coverage of it, which I mentioned, was equally dubious. Obviously, the horserace was always going to be interesting: who is up, who is down, who has raised money, who hasn’t, that sort of thing. But there was not too much engagement with any of these ideas. And in particular, I remember the drama of talking about president. One of my ads indicated that I was the kind of person that you would want in the White House if you had a nuclear attack. And so we suggest something has occurred, and somebody says, “Mr. President, what do we do now?” And the idea is that I was the kind of person who would be able to best cope with that sort of situation.

Well, in Iowa, there were at least two television stations that would not run these ads. And others had a warning of something like Orson Welles when he had his strange attack on the Earth and so forth, so the people would not be frightened by all of this. Now subsequently, in fairness, I remember a wonderful column by a guy in The New Republic, even a couple of years ago, [who] sort of discovered this campaign. And he wanted to offer an apology that he really hadn’t really done his homework. But this really was very serious. It was good, but really too late as far as my campaign was concerned.

In fact, your tax proposal might have dealt with what we later saw, which was this increasing discrepancy between low- and high-wage people.

Yes.

I wanted to ask you about the vice presidency. Obviously one of the things that got you into this was the fact that you were mentioned as a vice-presidential possibility now and then. And I am wondering if, in the light of what’s happened recently, you think that people are going to pay much more attention to the competency of the vice president?

Well, they may. But the fact is that the vice-presidential thing usually occurs behind closed doors in a way that the public doesn’t have much of a say. It is not an election or a referendum; people really don’t know who is being considered. 

I think in 1980, I can’t recall whether that’s one that I cited in the piece, but [my wife] Char and I knew that we were in the running. Because [Reagan adviser] Lyn Nofziger would come by, and others, and they would advise me to go out to the country. I went out to Ohio to see Ray Bliss [a former chairman of the Republican National Committee] and do some rallies there, or to New York or what have you. If you go out to sort of see how you can do, whether you can raise the chief’s margin any if your name is added to it or so forth; [it’s a] very pragmatic look at it.

So when we got to there, the press were aware that clearly [George H.W.] Bush had to be a factor, because, after all, he had been out there running. But at the same time — I can’t recall the other body, maybe Jack Kemp was still involved and [Paul] Laxalt and so forth —I remember, as I said, in my article, I think David Broder [of The Washington Post] was one of the people who appeared on The Today Show, another one of the biggies. And they were predicting that I was going to be the one.

Now I was disabused of this a bit when I heard an interview with Nancy Reagan later on that morning. And she was asked about me. And she says, “Well, I really don’t know Mr. Lugar very well.” But for whatever reason, that did not work out. And then on the occasion that Dan Quayle was nominated by George [H.W.] Bush, there were rumors it was going to be a Hoosier. And a good number of people assumed that might be me.

I was out visiting with delegations — Mary Matalin was running an organization to get Republican leaders out to see the various state delegations and so forth — when out of the blue, that word came. And George [H.W.] Bush called me and indicated that he hoped that I would not be unhappy but [that] he was looking for a younger person, someone of a different generation, that sort of thing. So that was the forerunner.

And the reason I mentioned in this article, we had a slight brush with the possibilities. And this, therefore, stimulated my imagination when the time came that we might have an opportunity to run. As I said, I thought about the right time in terms of my age and vitality and back then in the Senate and so forth.

There is a book I recommend by my colleague on this project; Jules Witcover has written a book on [Richard] Nixon and [Spiro] Agnew. Talk about getting a pig and a poke.

Yeah.

They did not know what they were getting when they picked Agnew. They had absolutely no idea.

No. And it was just people sitting around a room. And as I understand, people would say negative things about somebody and rule that person out. But I remember that convention vividly, because no one in the Indiana delegation ever heard of Spiro Agnew. But we had Irwin Miller [the chairman of Cummins Engine Company] with us, and Irwin was boosting [Nelson] Rockefeller for president. He was the sort of nominal event effort.

When I was mayor of Indianapolis, he had asked me to introduce Mr. Rockefeller around in the plaza of the hotel up there on Meridian Street, which I did. But when the delegation was formulated, everybody was for Nixon. And that’s the way our delegation was going to vote. And at that particular time, I was excited about the possibility of John Lindsay being the vice-presidential nominee, still wrapped up in my problems with the cities and so forth.

But in any event, of course, things did not work out at all well. The next time I saw Spiro Agnew, when I was head of the National League of Cities as mayor of Indianapolis, he was almost exiled off into a room in the Executive Office Building. There was nobody waiting there to see him. He was sort of delighted that anybody was paying attention. It was just dreadful, that whole business.

Well, of course, the Nixon administration was so closed that . . .

Yeah. No place for Spiro at that point.

You took positions that were not similar to the other candidates. And yet you didn’t emphasize the difference. I am wondering was that also a part of being a senator and having to live in the Republican Party longer?

Maybe. It’s a good point. It’s just in terms of tactics as opposed to strategy, if you are going to make more of a noise in the whole thing, that you try to help people understand the contrast, and that this person is very different and wrong or, I don’t know how far you want to go. But, in other words, I clearly did not do that. Or if I did even try, did not do so well. But [I was] much still more of a conciliatory figure.

You stayed more true to form than . . .

Yes. That was sort of my normal nature as opposed to trying to think through, maybe, sort of my candidate nature.

Finally, as you look over this array of problems, is there anything you think ought to be done to change the way we elect a president?

Oh, I can’t think of anything. I suspect that as rapidly as you try to draw up other guidelines, that people will find ways not just necessarily subvert them, but get back to something they think is sort of tried and true in all of this.

They are just going to find a loophole and revert to form?

Yes, I think so. Furthermore, the people will claim — as they have with the Supreme Court dealing with McCain-Feingold and so forth — before long, someone will claim inhibition of the First Amendment or freedom of speech or expression or so forth. It may be just as well that we not try to make too many constraints on situations. What you always hope for, I suppose, is that the collective wisdom informed by a press corps tends to [do] a better job on terms of information, beyond how much has been raised and moved ahead in the polls.

The press coverage is getting worse, though.

Yeah. It’s not very good. So you really have to scratch to find out what anybody’s advocating, although, in fairness, there are some very good articles. And I clip a lot as things go along just so I can remember, and, in fairness, what somebody actually said or proposed when they get into an important issue. I think, for instance, in the current situation that there is not much being said, again, by any of the candidates on foreign policy beyond either “continue the surge” or “don’t” or something of that variety.

But somebody elaborating on the extraordinary growth of China and India and what that’s going to mean to energy supplies in the world, say, or to our own commerce? Will we be competitive? Will we have enough engineers? All of these are very critical for the future of the country. And the president will have to deal with [them]. It’s really very difficult.

I suppose, if the candidates would stay in format of these quick questions they ask, it almost always gets back, on the Republican side at least, to what have you had to say about abortion, and if you recanted, if you modified. How about the gay community; what have you done about that? Or guns — what do you think about guns? So it comes back to the special-interest groups and how people have either appeased them or opposed them or taken 15 different positions depending upon what their status was at the time and so forth.

This may be interesting, in a way, in terms of the character of the person, how constant and so forth. But it means that, on the Republican side, people are finding they are acceptable or unacceptable on the criteria of three or four issues of this variety, none of which, in my judgment, make a whole lot of difference in terms of governing the country.

Now they are important to certain people who may feel that this is the reason that they would do something. The question often being raised now, we see all of these charts on which they’ll ask somebody, Could you vote for a woman? Could you vote for a Jew? Could you vote for a Mormon? Is that possible? And then they go into a big to-do over the fact that it’s now very possible that you could vote for a woman for president. Slightly behind that may be an African-American, still a Jewish thing, maybe, and the Mormon, not so good at all, sort of. Maybe this is the way people finally arrive at it.

But the preoccupation with this sort of criteria seems to be very unfortunate. But I don’t know whether it will ever change.

Well, part of the reason this works, though, is because the parties try to only bring out their voters. We are not seeing this broad appeal to bring more people into the election process.

That’s true. And so given a primary . . .

Do you think that will ever change?

Well, not so long as we have a strong Republican Party, strong Democratic Party. And these are the parties that determine the candidates. You make a very good point that this is becoming even more pronounced in the congressional races. Many writers have pointed out that the primary is the critical time, because more and more districts are being drawn by state legislatures that are not pure Republican or Democratic, but predominantly so.

So the person who is there is going to stay on indefinitely, unless he or she is upset by somebody in the party. Therefore, these so-called base issues or so forth become the critical ones, to the extent that’s translated over to the presidential race.

[It’s] especially unfortunate, because it would appear now that a large number of people, maybe a growing number, declare themselves as independents. So the press would say: “Well, you really are not independent. You are sort of Republican/Independent or Democratic/Independent or so forth,” and with all sorts of variations of independents. But the fact is that there are a good number in this category who don’t have a dog in the fight until you finally get through the primaries. And by that point, you may have people who are very much toward the base and not toward the middle.

Let me just ask one question. You, obviously, were disappointed by this experience. But did it have a beneficial value for you in some ways? I mean it occurs to me it may have raised your profile as a foreign-policy expert or . . .

Well, I don’t think it did that. But I think in my own view is, it was a good experience. And I think I state that somewhere in the essay that, for Char and for me, this was something we wanted to do. So we thoroughly gave it our best. Two of our boys were involved. I remember David traveling all over Iowa. He would complain that in three hours he saw 20 people or something of that sort. But nevertheless, he and John were both active. So that was very exciting to see them interested in this.

When you sort of grow up, as they did, in a political family — they were very, very young when I was elected mayor of Indianapolis. We used to sit, the six of us, at the table for the mayor’s breakfast. And people would ooh and aah over them. They got one year older — sort of came from infancy into boyhood and then into teenager years. They were in the parades for Memorial Day and all that type of thing.

But this is not everybody’s cup of tea. Many children resent the fact that they were in the midst of all of this stuff, feel either exploited or tramped upon or their dad didn’t pay enough attention to their Little League game or the rest of it. So I was very pleased that they had caught the fervor and were engaged.

And Char did a tremendous job, particularly in New Hampshire, where she would spend a lot of time and represented [me]. And she has many, many friends — we both still do the Christmas-card list and that. But nevertheless, we were disappointed in the final outcome. But it did not come as a total shock.

After you have been at this for a year, you can sort of see what it’s like, and you are not sure when the end will come, precisely. And you are always hopeful that the miracle may occur. But I thought it was very helpful, in that respect.

So the personal experience was good.

Yes. I don’t think it made a whole lot of difference in terms of what I am doing in the Senate or generally. Except sometimes these presidential campaigns, the person involved sort of burns out all together, or that’s sort of the end of the trail. And the casualties of the thing are sometimes very sad.

I was able to come back to the Senate, pick up things, and in March or April or whatever it was of ’96, to continue on. So that’s some time ago. And the years since then really have been my best ones, I think, in the Senate.