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Richard Viguerie

Richard Viguerie is a conservative activist and a pioneer in using direct mail on behalf of conservative candidates and causes. He is the author of several books, including Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause.

Jules Witcover interviewed Viguerie on August 14, 2007.

I would like to just have a little conversation with you about the state of campaign finance reform — whether there is any future for it — and if you think that there is anything worth salvaging or there’s a way to salvage the campaign-finance laws as they exist today.

Well, there is nothing that has caused [John] McCain more problems in this election than McCain-Feingold. I mean at the national, state, and local level, that is a big deal. I mean, you may not realize that. But the intense feeling of negativism that came out of that whole battle there — conservatives, you don’t have to be the head of the NRA [National Rifle Association] to feel that way.

Why do you think that is?

Because we saw it as an attempt to silence conservative critics. It was an incumbent protection act. It was to guarantee the reelection of incumbents. McCain wanted to burnish his image after the Charlie Keating affair. Kind of like the Democrats. When they came into office here in ’07, one of the first things they tried to was to silence the conservative critics. People like me. And it was almost a thinly veiled attempt to silence me here with my agency work. And we were able to stop the legislation from going forward. They wanted to require any [501](c)(4) organization that raised more than $25,000 to jump through all of these hoops.

Congress is accused of all kinds of bad things, corruption, immorality, et cetera. So their solution is to go after those who are being critical of them and try to silence the critics. And the fact that you can’t be critical of somebody 30 days or 60 days before the election, I mean, that’s when people are paying attention. That guarantees the reelection of the incumbent. It’s just an outrage. It’s not only the George Wills of the world who are angry about that, but conservatives literally at the grass-roots level know about that.

In terms of the future for campaign-finance reform, it’s an article of faith by every conservative I know that there’s basically only one campaign-finance reform that we would support, that we feel is acceptable. And that’s sunlight — just instant, quick confirmation of whatever has happened — on the Internet, et cetera. And other than that, we don’t want anything.

Well, do you think the average voter cares about who contributes to a campaign?

No. No. No. I really don’t. There are others who can speak to this better than I can. But I think it was John Heinz, when he was running for reelection in Pennsylvania. And his opponent was accusing him of trying to buy the election. And he had spent another $1 million or $2 million on TV ads and denied he was buying the election. People don’t pay attention to that, I don’t think. It didn’t hurt the Jon Corzines of the world or this or that one.

So I really don’t think that people are focused on that. I mean it could hurt you if you don’t have any substance to your campaign. If your campaign is not about much other than your ego, then it could. But if you are talking about ideas, and I think people are going to focus on that.

How do you feel about the matching funds? It looks like that’s going down the drain now.

Yeah.

Do you think that there should be any way at all that these lower-tier candidates can survive?

No. No. No. I really don’t. I think that’s a test of the marketplace. If you can’t get traction, I don’t think the taxpayers should be funding it. Taxpayers agree; only about 10 percent of them check it off even though it’s free to them. And so there is the marketplace; the public says, “We don’t want it.”

I know almost all of these candidates on the Republican side. And some of them are pretty good friends of mine, second-tier candidates. And they are not qualified, the vast majority of them, to be president. They wouldn’t know how to be president. The fact that they can give a stem-winding conservative speech, that’s great. That doesn’t mean you are qualified to be president of the United States. And they only raised $400,000, $1 million, or whatever. That’s because they are not qualified to be president. That’s the marketplace speaking. And if you really are qualified, you can raise the money. I don’t think that somebody who is just a really good speaker should have $5 [million], $10 [million], $20 million to run for president.

Well, on the other hand, do you think that having money is a qualification to be president?

No. It’s not a qualification, but it says something. If you can have those type of contacts, if you know that many people who think that well of you that they will give $1,000, $2,000, $4,000 for a couple, it says a lot about you. George [W.] Bush had hundreds of “Rangers,” et cetera, there. It said something about you, that there are hundreds of people who know you, who will go out and try to raise $100,000 or $200,000, says a lot about your ability to function in the White House.

Doesn’t it also say that your daddy was president and he’s got a lot of contacts?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But in a country of 300 million people, I don’t know any other way to do it. It reminds me of what Churchill said: “Democracy is absolutely the worst form of government, except for all of the others.” And the system that we have is flawed. But it’s better than anything else. And that’s the issue. Are there problems with it? Absolutely.

Well, what are some of the problems that you do see?

Well, the fact that people do raise large sums of money from lobbyists and special-interest groups, the unions, this business group, that business group, these people have an inordinate amount of influence over the legislation. We saw that people accuse Karl Rove of polarizing politics, which I don’t see a problem with that. But the wedge is used. Well, the only time I can really think the wedge was used was against his own party on immigration. It divided the big donors, [the] big-business community, from the grass-roots conservatives. The big-business community wanted the immigration legislation. And they are the financiers of a lot of money for the party there. So that’s a downside.

But McCain-Feingold is far worse. People began to notice me because of one piece of legislation. And I think it was overrated in terms of the impact that I was having there. But after the 1974 campaign-finance reforms, they looked at Nixon and said: “Well, W. Clement Stone gave him a million dollars. And so Republicans have all of the fat cats. We’ll put an end to that. We’ll put a thousand-dollar ceiling on donations.” And they thought, “Well, we have the unions, so we don’t get million-dollar donations.”

And of course, I had figured out this $10, $25, $50 donations. And we did that very well, very effectively. And the left never caught on to that for years and years. Ronald Reagan was, at best, the fifth choice of the Republican establishment in 1980. At first it was George Bush the first, Bob Dole, Howard Baker, John Connally, et cetera. And Ronald Reagan was a serious candidate for president in ’76 and ’80, because he had the $10, $25, $50 donors. He had 250,000 of them.

Why do you think it took the Democrats so long to catch on to that?

Well, I think that we caught on to it, because as the cliché goes, necessity is the mother of invention. We had to. We didn’t have any other source of funds other than the small giver at the grass-roots level. And the left had prospered for years with a number of sources of big funding, most of it involuntary — unions. We all know how much they are funded by the unions. And a lot of that, of course, is never reported. It’s the tens of thousands of shop stewards that take off before every election, August, September, and October. And it is totally devoted to politics.

To this day, the government finances to the tune of several billion dollars liberal interests. And conservatives have never really gotten that money. We don’t want it. And I’ll never forget the Tom DeLays of the world did not cut that funding off. And conservatives just do not understand how, when they have all the levers of power that continue to fund our enemies.

And the third biggest source of funding, of course, was foundations. And they are massively funded by foundations. So the left didn’t have to do that. I used to catch a lot of criticism in the ’70s, The New York Times, Time magazine, CBS, The Washington Post, The New York Times, et cetera, regularly criticized me for my direct mail. They made a lot of criticism of it, one of which was, they did not understand the lifetime value of a donor or what the purpose of raising the money was.

I remember in 1976-77 we had a big campaign for the National Right to Work Committee where we spent a million dollars, and $750,000 came back. It was a loss of $250,000. But we got 100,000 new donors. And the purpose of the mailing was to defeat common situs legislation. That was a big thing, you may remember, in 1975-76. I said ’77, but it was actually ’75-76. And at that time, just very briefly, President Gerry Ford said to George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, and [Bill] Usery, his secretary of labor, “Put common situs legislation on my desk and I’ll sign it.” They did. And he broke his word; he vetoed the legislation.

A friend of mine, who worked in his press office, said we were responsible for 720,000 cards and letters sent into the White House. And at that time, Ford was staring down the barrel of Ronald Reagan running against him. But the purpose of that is that $250,000 loss, you got 100,000 new donors. You achieved your objective of defeating the legislation. And those 100,000 donors probably gave the Right to Work Committee another $30 [million], $40 [million], $50 million over the next 30 years.

So all of that criticism of me in the direct mail stopped within a few hours, and you could just see the curtain fall, or actually rising. It was lection night, November 1980: Reagan’s election, Republicans taking the Senate, big gains in the House, governor races, legislature, et cetera. In essence, they just said, “Aha, that’s what Viguerie and company has been up to all of these years.” And the liberal organizations quickly moved out there to copy the conservatives.

I thought it would take them 10, 15 years to catch up, because that’s how long I had been in it. It took me that long to get where I was. But it was not true. Within three or four years, they had caught up. And in my opinion, for the most part, the liberals do a better job today of using direct mail to advance their cause than conservatives do.

Why is that?

I am not sure. For one thing, as a general rule — these are general rules — the best and the brightest of the left go into the nonprofit community. That’s how they solve problems. Our best and brightest go into the private sector. And there are always exceptions. Ed Feulner at the Heritage Foundation is brilliant. But we don’t, as a general rule, have as good of a leadership at our grass-roots organizations as the left does.

But while the liberals did that in between ’81 and ’85, the Democrats did not. It wasn’t until almost 20 years later that they did that. I saw [then Democratic National Committee Chairman] Terry McAuliffe at the radio row at the Republican [National] Convention in New York in 2004. And I said: “Terry, I have been quoting you the last few months. And I want to ask you if my quote is correct.” I knew it was, because the person who had done the direct mail for the Democrats told me.

I said, “What I have been saying about you and the DNC is that in the first four months of 2004, the DNC mailed more direct-mail letters than it did in the entire decade of the ‘90s.” And he said, “Yes, that’s true.” They had mailed every registered Democrat voter age 40 and over, and had done this and this and that. And then he began quickly to try to kind of explain away why his predecessors had not done this. He said: “Well, Richard, they had this debt. They couldn’t afford to do acquisition mailing, prospecting. They couldn’t do this. They couldn’t do that.”

And I said: “Terry, I am sure there is some validity to that. But in my opinion, the primary reason is generational. You’re a young person. You didn’t learn your politics in the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s, even the ’70s. You’re of a new generation. And you are open to these types of things.” And when I was doing it in the ’60s and the ’70s, I was competing against people who had learned their politics, literally, in the ’30s and the ’40s and the ’50s. And it’s just a generational thing. And now you have young people there at the DNC who are with the times, so to speak. Let me just ask you this question: Do you know who Karl Rove was 20 years ago?

I think at one point he was involved in the Young Republicans.

Oh, yes. In fact, he was executive secretary of the Republican Party here in Virginia back in ’72, something like that. But this is interesting. Ninety-nine percent of the very bright Washington political professionals — yourself included — who I ask this question don’t know the answer. I like to flatter myself by saying he was Richard Viguerie in Austin, Texas. He ran a direct-mail company. For 17, 18 years he ran a direct-marketing company.

So the person in charge of Bush’s election in 2000, the Republicans’ campaign in 2002, and Bush’s reelection in 2004 was a world-class marketer. So he put together the marketing campaign — I just heard somebody talking about it today — the whole data-mining thing, where you would go into a neighborhood in Ohio and drill right down into union backyards and find out who was concerned about gay marriage, who was concerned about this conservative issue, illegal aliens, whatever it might be.

Terry McAuliffe was doing broadcasting. They were broad marketing. And Republicans had done that 25 years earlier. Twenty-five years ago they were mailing every registered Republican voter in the country multiple times. But then Rove took it to the next level. Every general, or most of them, fight the last war. And that’s what the Democrats were doing. At the winter meeting at Orlando, Florida, mid-December of 2004, [McAuliffe,] speaking to the DNC group there acknowledged that. He said: “While we were doing this, the Republicans took it to a higher level. And they were doing the data mining and drilling right into our backyard.”

What are you doing now?

I still run my company here. And we have 45–50 employees. And we’ll mail 100 million letters or so this year for various clients. I have a woman who is my president and CEO. And I am spending the lion’s share of my time now trying to restart the conservative movement. Did you ever see the movie The Blues Brothers, with [John] Belushi?

Yeah.

The theme or the idea of the movie was they were going to get the band back together again. And we are on a mission from God. So I tell conservatives, when I speak, I am going to try to get the conservative movement back together again. And hopefully, we are on a mission from God. I have a plan, in great detail. And others out there do the same, and I am working with them, and they are working with me. And we are all trying to figure out how to get the band back together again. But I think I can do it.

In my lifetime, I have been involved in helping to take over the Republican Party three times for conservatives: Goldwater [in] ’64, Reagan [in] ’80, and the Gingrich revolution of ’94. And we can do it again. This time is going to be hopefully a lot different. The conservatives made a lot of mistakes in the last dozen years or so. But number one, in my opinion, above everything else, we became an appendage of the Republican Party. Too many of my conservative friends — leaders — drunk deeply of the Republican Kool-Aid. And they became the norm of the Republican Party. We are not going to do that anymore.

Where do you go? Where else can you go?

Well, I have developed an idea; [Paul] Weyrich and Phyllis Schlafly like it, and they are starting to talk about it. And that is third force — not third party, but third force. In my lifetime, the most successful third force is a public-policy issue: the state of Israel. Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, moderates, independents, everybody supports the state of Israel. But they did not tie that cause to a political party. They pulled everybody their way.

And the left had been enormously successful with third-force projects out there: 350 environmental groups, all of the consumer groups out there, civil-rights groups, the unions, and all of that. Each of these has their own agenda, their own source of funds, their own membership. And they operate independent of the Republican and Democratic parties, pulling everybody their way. And that’s what I want to do with the conservatives. I want us to focus on our own issues, our own agenda, and start hundreds if not thousands of new organizations and pull the political process our way.

Well, what groups would be helpful to the civil-rights groups and so on that you mentioned?

Well, that’s all part of my plan. I am not ready to go public with it, but I’m working behind the scenes, and there are many, many issues. In this last immigration battle there were dozens of anti-illegal-immigration organizations. And there is no reason we can’t have 30, 40, 50 of that. And just many, many, many issues out there. Public-school education, I just have a long, long list of them here. [We can] start them quickly, easily on the Internet. It takes a little more time to do them with [501](c)(4)s and (c)(3)s that are not on the Internet.

But all of that is part of the plan there. But they are going to take six to 10 years. It won’t happen overnight. If I can select the next president of the United States, the conservatives would not govern America. We wouldn’t have a conservative House, a conservative Senate, conservative governors, legislators. So that’s going to take six to 10 years at least. But we can do it.

What has been the impact of the Internet on your work and, generally, on the opportunities of conservatives to put together the kind of thing you are talking about?

Not a whole lot, quite frankly. It’s in its infancy. It will be awesome down the road. When I got involved in marketing and direct mail back in the ’60s, I didn’t have to play Lewis and Clark. The giants had come before me. And I just studied those in the commercial arena and applied it to the nonprofit ideological political arena. And for whatever reason, not a lot of people followed me for at least 15 years. So I had a big head start there.

But in the Internet area, everybody has to play Lewis and Clark. McCain had some success in 2000, of course. But it was a transmission belt. He was on Larry King. He was on Time magazine and all of that. And people would go to the Internet to send money. But if he hadn’t been with, what I call, the above-the-radar media, he wouldn’t have received many contributions through the Internet.

In 2004, [Howard] Dean and [John] Kerry had a lot of success. Between direct mail and the Internet, they raised like three-quarters of their money, both of them did. But Republicans didn’t do that well in ’04. The Internet, right now, we are still trying to figure it out. But right now it works where there’s intensity, where there is passion. And conservatives are beginning to have the issues that will allow us to use that successfully. In ’04, there was no energy, no passion for Republicans. And there was a lot against Bush in ’04.

But going forward now, we are going to have the issues — and I am going to help develop them and market them — that will allow us to do work on the Internet in a way that it hasn’t worked for us before. But it will, going forward, be a big factor. It’s had a small impact up to date, but very little, quite frankly, compared still to direct mail.

I wrote a book about three or four years ago called America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Use New and Alternative Media To Take Power. And without the new alternative media, that wouldn’t have been a concerted movement. Reagan wouldn’t have been elected president. [George H.W.] Bush wouldn’t have been a president. There would have been no Republican Congress in ’94 without direct mail, talk radio, cable television, and the Internet. That just changed everything for conservatives.

And in going forward, it’s going to play an even bigger role. In my opinion, about 50 percent of the American people right now get their primary views about public policy issues from the new alternative media. And we all know how network television is losing audience. Newspapers are losing audience. And everything is changing out there. And the new alternative media has literally leveled the playing field. Conservatives would not exist in any meaningful way without the new alternative media. We forced ourselves into the political debate by going around the monopoly that CBS, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, et cetera, had on the microphones of the country. Through direct mail we went around that blockage right into people’s homes.

I remember David Broder [of The Washington Post] coming into my office in the late ’70s and saying: “Richard, Democrats have the White House, Jimmy Carter. They have almost a two-thirds majority in the House and the Senate. Hardly any of their legislation is moving forward. Carter wants the election-law changes and can’t get that. He wanted a consumer protection Cabinet position, can’t get that. Can’t get this, this, and this. Been to [Walter] Mondale’s office, I have been to this and there. And nobody can tell me what’s happening.”

And I said, “Well, David, I don’t know if I can shed any light on it, but let me tell you some of the things that I am doing here, and some of the things that others in the conservative movement are doing.” In those days, I was mailing 110 million letters a year narrowly focused on bringing conservatives to power, organizing the movement. And it was all under the radar. Nobody was aware of what was happening. And so to the extent that the political community is not focused on what’s happening in the new and alternative media, they are going to miss an awful lot of what’s happening out there. And they are not going to be able to understand the political scene as well as somebody who does do that.

I remember on Monday, after the November election [of] 1980 when Reagan was elected, I was a guest at Godfrey Sperling [of The Christian Science Monitor], one of his [press] breakfasts. He had me there just a week afterward. And he said: “Mr. Viguerie, last Tuesday a conservative was elected as the president in a landslide. Republicans got control of the Senate, first time in years, and big pickups in the House, governors’ elections, et cetera. Nobody saw this coming. What happened?”

I said: “Excuse me, Mr. Sperling. You didn’t see it coming. Others here, 23, 24 of the top print journalists in the country, I can’t tell you how many times we called a press conference and you guys didn’t show up, how many press releases we put out, you never covered them.” I said, “Just out of curiosity,” this is November 1980, “how many of you have ever heard of the Reverend Pat Robertson?” Two or three hands went up, out of the top 20, 30 print journalists in the country there. They just didn’t know what was happening out there.

I am sure I wasn’t there that day.

No. No. No. But anyway, I’m just saying all of that to kind of make the point that the new alternative media is a big, big factor in American politics today, far more so than when you and I started in this business a few years ago.

Well, how do you think Karl Rove is going to adjust to his situation now? What do you think he’s going to do?

Well, I suspect he’s going to make money. I am sure he wants to do that. And there comes a time when you just can’t do anymore. I think that he realized that the ’06 election results had a lot less to do with him and a lot more to do with others that he didn’t have control over: the corruptions, sex scandals in Congress, but number one the Iraq War. So if he stays here through the ’08 election and Republicans get their head handed to them, he is going to get blamed for that.

I am no big fan of Rove. I put out a tough press release on him yesterday saying, in essence, it’s good for conservatives that he’s gone. But he has two legacies, I think, I was just telling a magazine. One is political, and he is the best. He is just the boy genius. And nobody is in his league, even, in terms of politics. In policy, I think he was a disaster. And those are the two legacies there.

I think he recognized that there was very little that he could do with Republicans in the minority in Congress, in policy. In politics, the Iraq war is just going to overwhelm everything else. That’s going to be the elephant in the room. And nothing that he says is going to impact things to the extent that that war has there. So he goes back down there. And he begins to burnish his legacy in the presence and probably put together the library and begin making some serious money.

What about his dream to make the Republican Party the majority party? Did he give up on that?

I suspect so. I suspect so. I think he made a big mistake. And I think he came in where there was a brand. The Republican Party is a brand. We are all brands. And he tried to change the brand and had his head handed to him. The Republican brand is small government, lower taxes, fiscal responsibility, balanced budget, et cetera. And he took the party in the opposite direction and just took the heart and soul out of the Republican Party.

Today the Democrats have higher numbers in terms of fiscal responsibility, morality in government, lower taxes. And he just screwed the brand up. I think that the Republican Party could govern along the lines of what he wanted for decades to come. But he doesn’t know how to do it. He is not a principled conservative. He doesn’t understand. Well, he does understand.

He came to town, and it seemed like he almost got everybody together in the House and the Senate and the White House and said: “We are going to govern with a one-word strategy. And that one-word strategy is ‘bribery.’ You, the voters, have votes. We have money. Let’s talk.” No Child Left Behind, largest foreign subsidy bill ever, prescription-drug benefit, steel tariffs, we are going to go out there and divide everybody into interest groups and try to bribe them. And it’s just exactly the opposite of the conservative philosophy.

So I take it that you come down, basically, on the idea that there is too much money in politics?

No. No. No. I don’t believe there is too much money in politics.

How do you bribe everybody if money is not involved?

Well, he bribed them with prescription-drug benefits: $7 billion. But the seniors weren’t out there screaming and yelling for prescription-drug benefits. He just said: “I’ll take that senior issue off the table. We get beat by the head and shoulders every election. We are going to throw grandpa out in the snow and cut grandma’s machine off.” And so we are going to bribe them that way. But that’s how they have bribed them with the voters’ own money.

But no, I don’t believe that there is too much money in politics. I think that money is speech. And the more we have a discussion about the issues, I think it’s healthy for the republic. So I am a George Will disciple in that area.

How do you feel about the self-financed candidates? They are an injection of huge amounts of money into the process. I am talking about Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, and . . .

Michael Bloomberg. Yeah.

Does it bother you at all?

Yeah. It does. And we, the conservatives, have come down on the short end of that stick, of course. Because the vast majority — 90 percent, it seems like — of those who self-finance have been liberals, or conservatives, very few who have self-financed that are on our side. But I still wouldn’t legislate simply because we are on the short end of that stick. I don’t like that. I don’t like [New Jersey Governor] Jon Corzine’s buying elections or Bloomberg-types. But that’s the American way. And it’s flawed.

But as I said about Churchill, it’s still better than all of the other systems. And it’s certainly better than public financing. Here is one of the hurdles you have to get over if you are promoting more campaign-finance reform: I can’t think of any campaign-finance reform legislation that’s not had the opposite effect. Every time they tried to legislate it, they have made it worse. It just has not worked at any time.

Give me an example of that.

Well, the McCain-Feingold, of course. It was supposed to take the big money out of politics. We saw that, right, in ’06. I mean, what has McCain-Feingold done but probably massively brought more money into the political process, 527s, et cetera. People can’t give to the party, so they go out there with the 527s. In [’74] the Democrats said: “Aha, Republicans are financed by millionaires. We’ll put a ceiling on it.” And it had the opposite effect. It brought a lot more money in the process.

But now they were $10, $25, $50 donations. One of the myths out there is that this Democrat class of ’74 was supposed to be such a morally upright class. And they came in with all of these new bright ideas and one thing or another. And in my opinion, they were one of the most corrupt classes of all, because they recognized that they had been elected in Republican districts. And they were not going to be returned in two years unless they changed the laws. So they began to try to change the laws to give themselves an advantage. And many of them are still in office to this day, because they tried to change the laws to keep themselves in office there.

So campaign finance, it’s inconceivable that it would work. Because the practicality is that people who are writing the laws have a self-interest. And the idea that they are going to write laws that are going to open up the process and bring competition to it here, and put their own seats at risk and danger, it’s just not a serious idea. How do you get over that hurdle that the people who are writing the laws have a vested interest? It’s just not conceivable that they are going to write fair laws that are going to open up the process and level the playing field.

Well, how do you explain that McCain-Feingold did pass?

Well, but they love it. It doesn’t hurt the incumbents. It protects the incumbents. McCain-Feingold protects the incumbents. You can’t go and criticize these people; 501(c)(4)s can’t criticize these people 60 days before a general election, 30 days before a primary, which just coincides with the time people are paying attention. It’s the incumbent protection act. So they are not going to pass something that’s serious campaign-finance reform.

Do any of the candidates who have declared now, or including Fred Thompson, look good to you?

No, not really. I urge conservatives every chance I get — which is fairly often speaking, writing, whatever — that we should withhold our support from all, certainly the top-tier candidates. None of them deserve our support. None of them has been there for us in the last dozen years when we desperately need it.

But what does that mean? Run your own candidate?

Nope. We should be busy relaunching the conservative movement and let these people come to us. I have gotten several calls today regarding one particular top-tier candidate: “Richard, would you be happy if he did this? Would you be happy if he did that?” So let the bidding continue. Don’t stop the bidding now. [Rudy] Giuliani, yesterday or today I guess, I was reading that he had moved in our direction some more on illegal immigration. So whoever is the nominee has to select a vice president. If we are out there supporting his opponent, or even him, he doesn’t owe us anything. He doesn’t have to pay attention to us. We have less influence. Right now we have a lot of influence with these people.

Well, if you had to nominate somebody now who is or is not in the field, is there anybody who looks good to you?

No. No. No. Nobody. Nobody.

How about [Newt] Gingrich?

Gingrich would probably be better than any of the other top-tier candidates. Yeah. Those who have any kind of a chance of being the nominee, Gingrich is no more conservative than, say, Fred Thompson is. Gingrich can play it any way you want. He really can. But he probably would be more accommodating to conservatives than others. But I think, right now, it appears to be [Mitt] Romney. I think Romney is the man to bet on right now.

Do you think Gingrich is going to get in?

Gingrich? He certainly wants to. And, of course, we all know that he is waiting to see how Thompson’s going to do. I don’t think Thompson’s going to take off. I thought he might 90 days ago. But he’s diddle-daddled so long that I think he has missed the crest there. As Shakespeare says, events taken at the flood lead on to success. You miss that opportunity, it’s gone forever. And I think Thompson has waited too long.

Have you talked to Gingrich recently?

Nope. I was very tempted. I could have done that a lot the next two weeks. Many of my friends are going to be on a cruise with him in the Mediterranean. And they leave this weekend. Up until a week or two ago I was thinking about going. Ollie North and NRA cruise [Freedom Cruise] , and all my NRA buddies and Dave Keene and this one and that one. They are all going to be there. I think Gingrich is on the cruise.

You better hope that ship doesn’t sink.

That’s for sure.