Countdown

Home > Interviews > Rick Davis

Rick Davis

Rick Davis, a Republican strategist, is the chief executive officer of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. He is the managing partner of Davis Manafort, a political consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia. Previously, Davis was national campaign manager of McCain’s 2000 bid and also worked on the presidential campaigns of Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan.

Jules Witcover interviewed Davis on June 25, 2007.

The presidential matching fund system, tell me if you think it’s dead. And if not, how can it still function? And what can the alternative be?

Yeah, I think as far as federal presidential funding for the purposes certainly of this election cycle, it’s dead. I mean, this will be the first presidential campaign that doesn’t take general-election federal contributions. And I cannot envision a scenario where the leading Democrat candidate won’t have more than what the government’s going to give them left in their primary account by the time of their convention. And that means the Republican candidate will be forced into the same kind of a routine. Roles are a little bit reversed this cycle than historical precedent — that is, I think the Democrats will raise significantly more funds than Republicans will for a whole host of reasons. But it’s clear, even in the first quarter of this primary cycle, Democrats accumulated about $70 million in their accounts, and the Republicans did about $50 [million]. My suspicion is that gap will even get wider this quarter.

What do you attribute that to?

Well, I think that the general low esteem that most voters hold of Republicans, it’s harder to get money out of their pocket. Sort of off the topic, but I think that Republicans have not woken up to the fact that our party’s in serious trouble. And if there was any clear indication of that, it was the 2006 elections, not just federal, but state and local. I mean, we lost at every level. Every level, Republicans were thrown out of office in historical levels.

So the party never came to grips with that. The party never said, “Wow, we have to change what we’re doing, find new leadership, take a new direction, embrace some other issues.” And so I think we are on track to have another whipping at the polls in 2008, if we are not careful. Obviously, my little side piece of that is I think [John] McCain’s the biggest change agent in the party. And if we don’t embrace him, it will be seen as just business as usual. And business as usual defaults against us. So I think that definitely had some impetus going over to the Democrat side.

Two, I do think the issues, at least for purposes of fundraising, side with the Democrats. I think there is a national attitude against the war in Iraq, especially among the wealthier communities: businessmen, Hollywood, things like that where a lot of this money is generated. And so that has helped fill their bank accounts.

And I think there is a sense that the whole Hillary [Clinton]-[Barack] Obama thing is kind of exciting. There is not much excitement on the Republican side. But the Hillary-Obama thing has some excitement to it. And that helps raise money. So if you believe what you read in the early speculations for next quarter, between Obama and Hillary, they will raise $50 million just together.

Amazing.

And I think Republicans will struggle to be where they were last quarter. I think there is even more deterioration on the Republican side where it gets harder and harder every quarter to raise money.

Did you happen to see that piece in The [Washington] Post, I think it was yesterday, about [Michael] Bloomberg?

Yeah.

I think it was in that piece, the author suggested that the candidates would be restricted in the general. He didn’t factor in what you just said.

I think that’s naive. Yes. I think that was an assumption they made when they were writing it, that Bloomberg would have this huge financial advantage. And the others would take the $75 million from the federal government.

But the others won’t be.

They are not going to take [the $75 million]. I cannot imagine a scenario, especially considering how compact the primary schedule is. When you are done by February 5, you really do have, what, eight months to raise money in the primary. So can Hillary raise $100 million in eight months? Of course she can. If [John] Kerry could, she certainly could. And so she’ll be faced with a decision, that I have $100 million in my bank account that I can transfer, or take a check for $75 million. Well, that’s a no-brainer. And pretty much it was a no-brainer for Kerry, but he blinked. Otherwise, I think he would have had a little bit more of a financial advantage. I mean, who is going to give it to the party, which is what they have historically done. Any leftover money in the primary account goes to the party. And then you take the check from the government.

I think fundraising will go all of the way down to the November election. We’ll have, for the first time, an aggressive presidential fundraising activity while everyone’s running. Certainly, my experience with McCain is that you spend overwhelming amounts of time raising money. I think this campaign will be seen as the most finance-driven campaign in history. In other words, if you look at the days you spend fundraising versus the days you spend campaigning, a day on the bus in New Hampshire versus a day in New York going in and out of investment banks with your tin cup, I think you are going to see three-to-one the days you spend fundraising versus the days you spend campaigning. And I think it used to be the reverse. I have never done an analysis on that. But if you ever looked at it, I’ll bet you, you used to spend three days campaigning and one day fundraising. Now I think it’s exactly the opposite.

How do you think that’s going to affect McCain?

Well, it’s not his strength. His strength is town halls, sitting on that bus with reporters, talking to voters, doing shows. So every hour that you cut into that, you are making it harder for him to be the nominee. Because part of the formula with McCain that was successful in 2000 that we are missing right now is that direct retail public exposure. There is a reason we are doing well in the early primary states compared to nationally. And that’s because he is there; even if it’s only one out of four days, he is there. So those people see him. They touch him. They feel him. They go to the town halls. They get their answers. And they come out, every one of them, with, wow, that guy ought to be president of the United States.

That’s how we did it in New Hampshire last time. We did 100 town halls. We had good TV and all, but everybody had good TV. What made the difference with McCain is when people got exposed to him, when people could see, touch, and feel him. They realized that this was the real deal. Our strategy in 2000 was based on the fact that we had to strike quickly in those early states. So expose him a lot in New Hampshire, expose him a lot in Michigan, expose him a lot in South Carolina, and don’t go to other places, because you don’t have the time to spare. This time, we have probably been in California more than we’ve been in New Hampshire.

Well, with your particular candidate, how do you cope with this challenge?

It’s tough, because the media has set a standard. We realize we don’t get to set the standards. I mean, you play by the rules that get set. And the governing authority is the national media.

You mean the standard of money.

Yeah. You have to have money. I mean, we had a very good first quarter politically, and it was judged a failure because we didn’t raise as much money as everybody else did. So then in order to establish confidence in our campaign, we made a decision: OK, the media gets to make that decision. Because the other option is to tell the media, we don’t really care what your standards are. And we are not going to adhere to them.

Now that’s what we did last time, and it worked pretty well for us. Clearly, we are running a different kind of campaign this time. And we want the media to embrace the fact that McCain can compete in a different fashion. So we refocused the attention and actually devoted more time to fundraising in this quarter than we did last quarter. And if we don’t live up to the standards of the media in this quarter, we’ll be judged a failure again. And that, by the way, is a moving target. Nobody says $13 [million], $15 [million], $20 [million]. It’s just whatever everybody else makes; it’s in relation to them.

So the speculation is that you are going to lag behind the other candidates again?

I am confident of that.

So is there some strategic or tactical way you can get around that?

I think successful campaigns find a strategy they think they can win in, figure how much money they need to execute that strategy, and do their job. And if that doesn’t meet the expectations of the press, then I think you have to ignore the expectations of the press. You have to run the campaign you think you can run and win.

The reality is that we have, because of the media, I think, seduced ourselves into believing that real success is fundraising. And it’s not. As long as you have enough money to do what you want to do in the campaign to get votes, votes are the only judge of success. That’s why upset victories occur all the time in politics. Somebody wins Iowa who wasn’t supposed to win Iowa. Someone wins New Hampshire who wasn’t supposed to win New Hampshire. And what happens is, as long as they have enough money to keep the lights on, i.e. Reagan in 1980 — they can survive the process, regardless of the media’s expectations. But that’s not what we’re doing this time. I hope that we get back to doing that, because I think that’s a solid campaign philosophy.

But what about some other tactic that would draw the attention of the media? I am not saying that we should do this, but one sort of thing that might do that would be to go after the other candidates to make McCain the point man on going after the other candidates on issues. That’s one way you can grab media attention.

You get a lot of media attention that way.

You see Obama doing this now.

Yeah. The downside is that’s just not John McCain.

You see [John] Edwards doing it.

Edwards is the one who has ratcheted it up. And Rudy [Giuliani], to some degree, is doing it as it relates to Hillary. I think in his construct, he can be more relevant if he engages Hillary directly. And I do think there is some value in that. And I think that John would like to have a public debate with Hillary. I think that’s the matchup that everybody wants to see. And I do think that there is some value to that with Republican donors.

Why would she be interested in doing that?

Because I think there is something sort of unique about the relationship with her and John. They actually like each other, so that’s a unique facet. Two, I think Hillary spent a couple of years running up to this election wanting to make sure there was no daylight between her and John, at least on national-security issues, but probably on a lot of issues. Because I think in her mind, and I can’t read minds, but certainly her behavior would indicate that I think she has always assumed that the contest would come down to her and John. And she didn’t want a lot of clear, bright lines between them. Triangulation: that’s always the way the Clintons have operated. I have no reason to believe that she didn’t think that to begin with.

So it’s hard for her to not engage him if he starts to peel away, because the demographic that she worries about are independent votes. He has a lot of credibility with independent votes, and she has none. And so if he starts to frame her, as it relates to independents, he can, regardless of whether he’s the nominee or not, box her in. And so I think from my perspective, she can’t avoid that. She knows she has to do battle with John. The minute that battle is established, whether it’s now or six months from now, she knows that she cannot let it hang out there. And that’s the classic Kerry situation. I mean, even the [George W.] Bush folks, in the middle of his primary, were positioning Kerry. And she looked at that and said, “Boy, never let that happen.”

So wouldn’t that be a good strategy to try to egg her in?

I think so. And we have walked him out, recently, on some stuff dealing with the various sorts of pork that she put into the armed-services bill and stuff like that. I think we could accelerate that. Part of the problem we have right now is media consumption. John gave a press conference in California attacking Hillary on the stuff in the armed-services bill. But all they talked about was immigration. I mean, when you are blowing into the wind, as you know, on like a dominant issue, and three or six months ago it was Iraq, now it’s immigration, it blocks out a lot of the other things that you do.

And so we are, I think, in the classic Lee Atwater view of political cycles. We are just in that cycle where we have to survive the cycle. There is not much we can do for ourselves; but the key is not to damage yourself. And then, when you get in more of an up cycle, where people are looking at you in a different light and they see an opening, that’s when you have to press the advantage.

So the challenge now is really just to survive.

I mean, look, Rudy had his day in the sun in the first quarter and is slowly making his way back down in the pack. Fred [Thompson]’s going to have his day in the sun this quarter and it will slowly, maybe more rapidly, make his way back down in the pack. That’s the physics of politics.

But at least there’s enough time for that to happen.

I think there is enough time for that to happen. And I think by the time you get into Labor Day, the primary will occur. Someone told me the other day, and they were exactly right, “Look, we’ve still got 80 percent of this primary left to go.” Everyone assumes just because it’s been very intense early . . .

The stage right now is maybe what you would be in maybe December.

Or January or February. Absolutely. Candidates into their game, starting to position the various people and ideologically, where do they fall in the scheme of things. Raise some money. Build an organization. That’s still going on. It’s still going on.

But what about the so-called second- and third-tier candidates? Do you think they will take the federal money? And is there any possibility, do you think, that they can survive?

If they were smart, they would take matching funds. The only thing that kept us alive in the 2000 campaign were matching funds. It’s a good deal. You don’t get that money anywhere else. And if you are [Mike] Huckabee, what did he raise, less than $1 million in the first quarter? Take the matching funds.

Just get yourself into the first tests. So if lightning struck, they’d be in the ball game for another couple of weeks.

Yeah. If John McCain had become the nominee after South Carolina and winning there, and let’s say it all worked out, we’d have capped out by the end of March. We’d have gone to 50. And they would have said, “OK, you can’t raise or spend any more money.” And then we could have done exactly what [Bob] Dole did. We’d transfer everything over to the RNC [Republican National Committee] and run it out of there. It’s not like you don’t have options. They are not great options. They are pretty crappy options under current law. But you do have options. And party committees would take up activity and things like that. So there is a way to thread it together. It’s inefficient; the current law is not set up for efficiency. But if you are one of those guys, I think it’s malpractice not to take that federal money.

Just looking ahead, after this campaign, what do you think is going to happen to campaign finance? Do you think it will lead to public financing? Or do you think it will just be out the window?

No. I think one of two things is going to happen. If McCain is president, you will get reform. He believes some kind of system is necessary. And you look at what the Campaign Finance Institute and others have done on this, there is something to do there. I mean, I have my own views. I sat on that board of the Campaign Finance Institute when we did the restructuring, and they didn’t like one idea I had, which was let a national lottery pay for the campaign-finance system. Don’t make it a tax check. Sell lottery tickets. Everybody in this country likes to play the lottery. They make billions. So once every four years, you have a presidential lottery. You stick a bunch of money in it and you sell tickets. I mean, campaigns are gambling anyway, so why not?

What kind of reaction did you get?

They hated the idea.

Why? Dirty money?

I think it’s like, “Well, that’s sort of a gimmick.” I said it’s all a gimmick. I mean, what are you talking about?

Not as much of a gimmick as that guy, I think in Arizona, who wanted to pay people for voting.

Right. Well, he got in a lot of trouble for that.  But plus, you have to start making politics fun again. This has become drudgery. And part of what you have to figure out is, what can bring in more people into the process? And I think some of the recommendations were very good. I was a very big advocate for lifting the cap. I think that successful campaigns that can raise a lot of money need to be allowed to raise a lot of money without undermining the system. In other words, you have to have that option in there. And maybe you create a situation where, if you go over a certain threshold, $100 million in a primary, it kicks in a bigger match. There are all kinds of good sliding scales.

But I think that if McCain is elected president, you will see reform. He is not a big fan of congressional campaign-finance reform. It becomes really expensive. But some kind of system that can level the financial playing field, and hopefully get this pendulum moving back over to spend more time in campaigns than in finance, is a healthy thing for the process.

If he doesn’t get elected, meaning either another Republican is president or Hillary, then I think it’s dead. I think people are learning in this campaign process that you do not get any benefit for trying to do the right thing. The measure of the McCain campaign, to me, has a very negative impact on trying to accomplish good for the country. Because that’s basically the campaign he’s running. And he’s not getting any credit for it. And if he goes down, it will be seen as repudiation and playing politics and doing the expedient thing to further your career, and your party’s grip on the country is going to be seen as the norm. And that will mean things like campaign-finance reform will go by the wayside.

Your idea of the national lottery, that’s really public financing.

Of course it is.

That’s all it is?

That’s all it is, with a smile on their face. Nobody buys a lottery ticket without thinking they are going to win.

Just a little carrot. You shouldn’t give up on that.

Oh, I never give up on anything. I just have to turn my attention to something else. Believe me, if McCain is president, you are going to see that lottery. I have more influence with him than the folks at CFI. Because with all campaign finance, the nexus is always, how do you get the money? The system of spending it is pretty well established. I mean, they’ll change things like the state limits and things like that, and even congressional and state limits. They have figured out how to administer the program. They just can’t figure out how to raise the money in a politically neutral way. What I mean by that is, not with a tax. So if you can actually generate an income-producing stream for campaign finance, the rest of it’s in pretty good shape.

What about the self-starting candidates like you are seeing now, the possibility of Bloomberg, but you also had Ross Perot and Steve Forbes. Do you think that’s healthy? And if not, do you see any way to do anything about it? Or do you think it is an element to bring in?

Is it healthy? I don’t know if it’s healthy or not. I actually haven’t thought about whether it’s healthy or not. I just see it as a reality. I mean, there are a lot of really rich people out there who think politics is good. And I think that’s good. I mean, by virtue of the fact that they have done well, you don’t see a lot of inherited wealth, since [Nelson] Rockefeller, trying to become president. But these guys are entrepreneurs. And you have to think they have something going on that’s good. I mean, they figured it out, at least in a financial context.

I think Michael Bloomberg’s one of the smartest guys I have ever met. It’s a good thing that he’s in politics. It’s helped New York. It’s good for the political debate there. I just want smart people involved. If they’re rich, that’s great. If they are not rich, I don’t want it to be a reason not to be involved.

Polls have been taken about how people feel about that, and the attitude in the polls is, “Hey, maybe he can be more honest; he’s spending his own money.”

Yeah, because they don’t have to be trapped by all of these special interests. That was certainly the tactic going into the first mayor’s race, if you recall. His message was: “I won’t be held accountable to all of these special interests at city hall. I’ll do what I think is right for the city.” I think that’s what people care about. And I think that’s what fuels a lot of McCain’s popularity, is that nobody thinks he’s this kind of guy who sits in his Senate office with all of these lobbyists trouping through there saying, “You raise me $100,000 and I’ll put this in my bill.”

What do you think impact would be of a Bloomberg independent candidacy?

I know Bloomberg pretty well. I helped him in his first campaign. He’s a good friend of John’s. He was like the only billionaire who was for us last time we ran. First of all, I think the original premise of Bloomberg’s candidacy is based on the fact that you have to have two polarizing candidates get their party’s nomination. So I think if John wins the nomination, there is much less relevance to a Bloomberg formula. And I think Bloomberg feels that way. In other words, John’s not a polarizing candidate. John is a unifying candidate. John will move into the center and occupy space that he otherwise would want to himself. So I think he won’t run if John gets the nomination.

But if it’s not John, and it’s a Mitt Romney, and Hillary wins, who by virtue of the competition she’s got from the left — and Obama has had to move left; we see it now every day — I think in that scenario, Bloomberg looks and says, “Wow, if they run the same campaigns they ran in 2004, which is just turning out their bases, there is this huge opportunity in the center of America in politics.” I think he’s right. I think somebody could have done well last time, because you had the sort of [Karl] Rove strategy of “drive up your base.” In other words, don’t try to get votes in the center, get an extra 2 million, 4 million votes off your base. We know who they are. We can identify them. They already like us. We don’t have to do anything different.

And that’s sort of a new version of the strategy. I think Kerry bought into the same thing. He didn’t move to the center. He sort of thought, well, I have to do the Rove strategy. Why? I don’t know. I thought it was a flawed strategy all along. But Kerry did the same thing. He just tacked left and stayed left. And there were a lot people in the center who didn’t have much of a choice. They didn’t like their choices. So I think that’s the scenario Bloomberg would like to see.

Do you think he would wait until the nominees were clear on the other parties?

He is clear about that. He is waiting until February. I mean, you’ll know on February 6 who the nominees are going to be. So it’s not like you have long to wait, and that gives him plenty of time to establish ballot positions. Plus, I have got to say, if he’s at 20 percent, 25 percent in the polls, I dare any secretary of state to deny him a ballot. I think that’s worth contesting.

I don’t remember whether Perot had to go through the contortions.

He did. He went through a lot of contortions.

But I remember George Wallace got on the ballot in most states.

Yeah. Just by virtue of raising hell.

So I thought maybe that might have broken the ice. But Perot had to go through the whole thing.

Oh, no. It’s an insider’s game. We did an analysis of it after the 2000 election. Because we were seriously looking at, well, if there is another opportunity someday for McCain, maybe it’s as an independent. And it’s a rigged deal. Every state is different. You start with needing a battery of lawyers, and that’s a ton of cash, just to figure out the systems. Then, in many cases, it not only it costs a lot of money, but also a ton of effort to get 100,000 signatures, some of them notarized, or the signature gatherers have to be notaries. It’s just crazy. But money cures a lot of that; you just hire people to do it.

That’s what I was going to say. Why do you think Bloomberg would have a better shot than the others who have tried?

Well, Perot got on almost all of the ballots. And it was money. I mean, there are literally cottage industries in these states that do nothing but get people on ballots. And a lot of the more complicated states are referendum states. So you literally have businesses that do nothing but gather signatures and get them qualified.

California, especially.

Yeah, so you just go hire them. It’s $2 a signature; it’s a marketplace.

But I mean aside from the money question, isn’t there kind of a mindset in the country that we are a two-party system? And that although loyalty to the parties is not as strong as it was in the past, there is sense that the parties have such a hold on people that electing an independent would be kind of out of the question?

See, I think it’s the opposite. I think that parties used to be very responsive to voters. Parties, by nature, are supposed to be dynamic. In other words, they fill vacuums. And historically, parties that have been more dynamic have succeeded. You can look back in history where parties that have consumed movements that were outside the normal two-party structure would govern during long periods of time with those movements as principal elements.

There is clearly — and I think Ross Perot identified it, but it might have been going on even long before that — I call it a reform movement in America, outside of the Republican or Democratic Party. And I am not sure people would self-identify them as reformers or reformists. But they clearly don’t like what’s been going on.

So normally a party would wake up and say: “Hey. This guy got 19 percent of the vote in ’92. There are a lot of people out there. We could govern for 25 years if those people would vote for our party.” So normally, you would gravitate or say, “Republicans — we are the reform party. We believe the same stuff you do. Congress is dominated by Democrats. What’s the downside?”

No. What do we do? We go to our base. And we leave them out there. So that leaves it open to the Democrats. Democrats easily could have said: “We are for reform. We want to change the way Washington does work. We want to be for the people.” Which is right down their alley. They ignore these people. They don’t go after them. So they are still hanging around out there. It’s what fueled our campaign.

So if the parties aren’t going to do that, then they are going to consign somebody to the task of giving those people political voice. And I think this is what Bloomberg has figured out. Now again, if McCain is the nominee, there is no question that he will move the Republican Party into that space. He will say, “We are the reform party, because I am the reform president.” And as Teddy Roosevelt did in the turn of the century, he will do, which is to identify a whole mass of people. I don’t know whether that’s 15 percent, 20 percent, 25 percent of the electorate.

I mean, there are people who have actually done nothing but track what they call the reform, the Perot voter over time. And I think someone wrote a book about it a couple of years ago. It was pretty interesting. And I agree with it. I think that’s a class of voters who have a lot of similar interests who aren’t getting talked to. I think that’s why you see in states like Arizona that independent registration is up, [and] Republican and Democratic registration is down, because there is nothing on the offering plate for them.

Didn’t Bush attempt to do that after New Hampshire, when he called himself a “reformer with results”? Remember?

No. All he was trying to do was crowd us. In other words, I don’t think they actually had a demographic strategy. It was just a way of capping our growth. It was what I call a political bear hug. And this is the same thing they did to Gore.

There’s nothing reform in their platform?

None. Zero. That’s my point. These are voters that actually expect you to talk about this stuff, not just put it on a TV spot. And by the way, we have opportunities when we elect people to do that. And so when Bush didn’t do it, I think they make their own judgments.

I think there is a process that the Democrats could have gone through in the Senate and the House this last year where they could have consumed that. I mean, you get a new speaker and a new majority leader, and there is no reason why they couldn’t have presented a reform agenda. But look what happened. They couldn’t reform ethics. They haven’t reformed campaign finance. They haven’t done anything. For all practical purposes, it’s business as usual. And they wonder why legislative approval ratings are down below [George W.] Bush’s. I mean, it’s pretty low. And by the way, that’s not just Republicans.

So is Bloomberg the guy? I mean, a short, single, New York Jew, as he calls himself, may not be the perfect package for this. But he’s got resources. And he’s incredibly smart. And if he runs, you will find out how big a bloc that is. Can he move a state? I don’t know. Can you get a lot of the popular votes? Yes, no question. How many states can you win? I don’t know.

Who does he cut into, do you think?

I think it goes both ways. Because if you think about it, if McCain doesn’t win the Republican nomination, how many of the Republicans who are for McCain are going to want the other guy, versus someone like Bloomberg, whoever the other guy is? So that’s a class of voter that we know to be about 20 percent of the party that he’ll target. And he’ll talk about fiscal responsibility with them, and he’ll have some credibility. With the Democrats, there is a whole moderate wing of the Democratic Party who his social ideology appeals to, because he checks the box on abortion and stem cells and all of the things they care about. But he’s a deliverer.

But he always was a Democrat until he ran for mayor, right?

Yeah. And you look at his social programs that he’s done in the New York area. He has improved things a lot. His advisers are Democrats. And look, like it or not, there has always been a bigger group of Democrats that has been willing to break ranks with their party than the Republicans. The reason the formula never worked before is because Bush had such a lock on the Republican Party.

When we looked at it in 2000, Republicans, you could get like 5 percent. That’s not enough to win a national election. You need 25 percent of the Republican Party, the bulk. And independent voters — there are functionally Republican independent voters and functionally Democratic independents. And then there is a group that flies around. You are going to see where those guys wind up, especially if the partisanship and the polarization continue. 

I never thought after 2004 it could get any worse. I am not sure I have any idea where the end is there. The [Terri] Schiavo stuff and things like that, I mean, normal Republicans look at that and go, “What in the world?” And if that’s what defines our party, we have some problems. And believe me, the Democrats are in the same boat. They pursue some agenda items that are equally polarizing. So I don’t mean to be just self-critical of the Republicans. But I want the Democrats to keep making those mistakes; I would like us to change.

What about the frontloading? Do you see a way of turning that around?

It’s horrible. This is the worst process to nominate someone I have ever witnessed in my life. It is unfair to the candidates and unfair to the voters. And I’ll be honest, I am a Republican for a reason. I like federalism. I like the fact that our states can decide when they can have a primary. That’s different than what the Democrats do where they basically say: “Here is your schedule. You will do it on our schedule.”

But I am losing confidence that this is resulting in a process that has any kind of validity. How can you campaign in 22 states with one week in the biggest states of the country? It’s crazy. Super Tuesday was bad enough. But at least a lot of them were Northeastern states that you literally could say, “I could hit three of these in one day.” But you cannot go to California, Texas, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Ohio; it’s crazy. You need a week in each one of those.

Do you see any possibility that the impact will be such a jolt that serious people will say, “We can’t do this again.”

Yeah, I think so. I think this process is teaching a lot of people it starts too early, costs too much, and lasts too long. Because the reality is you have to start now, at least a year before the process. And we are going to have someone done by the end of January. So one year out is still a long time. Look at our campaign. It started the day after the November elections.

Well, somebody suggested to me that it’s possible, because of the delegates being allocated on a congressional-district basis, [there is] no winner-take-all. Is that true in the Republican Party?

No. In fact, New York just went winner-take-all. So some of them are changing.

On the Republican side only?

On the Republican side, yeah.

So the question I was going to ask you really doesn’t pertain to the Republicans, but on the Democratic side, you could have a split decision, couldn’t you?

I don’t know. I mean, I am a firm believer in momentum.

But you have two or three strong candidates, and they appeal to different constituencies. What’s to prevent Hillary and Obama from taking enough to prolong the process?

Yeah, I think it’s tough. One, because you don’t have money left. I know the process isn’t done shaking out. But basically, what you are going to have is a primary every week in January: Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. I don’t think Florida is going to go ahead of South Carolina. I think everyone’s going to leapfrog them. And that forces it, like first week of January, Iowa; second week, New Hampshire; third week, South Carolina. And look, you have been through more of these than I ever will or want to. Momentum matters.

I mean, how many of these things are really going on after South Carolina? We kept it going mostly just to see what would happen until Super Tuesday, but we weren’t really in the game. We would have had to sweep Super Tuesday to actually win. And we knew weren’t going to do that, because we didn’t have the money. Bush didn’t have the money. By the end of South Carolina, Bush had spent $85 million. He had raised $85 million. He had no money left, and in a campaign that is a lot like this one.

And weren’t you also going to states that didn’t allow crossovers or independents to vote?

Yeah. What happens is, the later you get in the process, you get it down to not-open primaries. And that’s the same thing that’s going to happen here. California, Texas, these are all closed-primary states. So by the time you get out of South Carolina, I think like in virtually every other election I have ever witnessed, you are going to have somebody that the media is going to say, he is the guy, or the person, I should say, because it could very well be Hillary.

If you try to buy February 5 TV, you are going to spend $20 million. Nobody’s going to have $20 million. Even Mitt Romney isn’t going to spend $20 million of his own dollars to try and get back in the race. Would he do it to close it out? Maybe. If he wins South Carolina, and he is the presumptive nominee at that point, he may just do it. But he isn’t going to do it to take a flier.

Here is the scenario I believe: Say McCain wins New Hampshire and South Carolina. There is not a reporter in the country who will not write the story the day after South Carolina that the state that kept him from being the nominee last time is making him the nominee this time. That’s done. He’ll be on the front cover of Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and The Economist. And there will be nobody outside the continental United States, or in it, who won’t say McCain has done what he had to do now to be president. He won in South Carolina.

So what about Iowa?

We are actually doing better in Iowa than I ever thought we would. We’re in close second place. If he wins Iowa, I think it’s over. The only guy we have to beat is Mitt. And I am not sure the story is finished being told about Mitt. I am not sure if I were Mitt Romney, and I am the front-runner in Iowa, that can last eight months. First of all, it’s tough to do anyway for anybody. Reagan couldn’t do it. And Mitt, I think, is a flawed candidate. He is trying to do too much different than what he’s done for the last 10 years.

He’s a good contrast to your candidate, then?

Well, that’s because he has said he has come out to be. I mean, it’s clear to me that when he got in this race he said: “I want to be the un-McCain. I want to be everything he is not.” Well, look at what he’s [done]. I mean, is campaign finance really an issue in the Republican primary? Yet he talks about it on every stop. “I am against campaign-finance reform. I am against McCain-Feingold.” And it’s not so much that anybody even knows what that means. But it’s a way he can say, “I am against John McCain.” Because everyone knows that’s a core McCain issue.

McCain is not a good guy to be against. He’s a good guy to be for, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

He’s not a polarizing figure to the point that people say, “I don’t care, as long as it’s not McCain.”

Right. Well, I think there is an effort on Mitt’s part to try and make him into a polarizing issue. And I think immigration has been served up to be that. We can’t wait to not talk about immigration. And these guys want it to stay on the agenda for the rest of the primary.

Talk a little bit about the impact of the Internet and how you think that’s affected both money and other aspects of the campaign.

Well, there is no question that the Internet makes fundraising easier when you are hot. Look at everybody who has ever really been successful at it. We got hot after New Hampshire and raised a ton of money. Kerry got hot after winning the nomination and raised eight times the money we raised. Nobody is hot right now in our party. So no one is raising much money on the Internet. I mean, we’ll raise a million bucks this quarter on the Internet. And I think if we get hot, the system is built to raise a lot more than that. So you have to have the infrastructure in place. But we are not doing it now.

There is no question that used to be the only real good use of the Internet. But now communication is a good use of the Internet, messaging. So I think you will see in almost everybody’s site a really good use of messaging, whether it’s video or audio or live programming. I am not sure that organizationally anybody’s really figured out a way to use the Internet to organize. In other words, it’s still pretty much a man-on-man issue. Everybody’s got this capability to like virtual precinct organizations and stuff. And I am not sure anybody’s really using that.

But is there a downside on the communications side that you get a lot of free voices out that are not on the control of the campaign? Same problem as the 527s.

Yeah. We have done something that I was sort of originally against, and I am kind of glad I did. We don’t have, really, a good live blog on our site. And I think that’s where you lose control. The lesson we learned from the Dean campaign was that he did this thing where he actually tried to use it as a grass-roots organization tool. So if you were blogging and you got 100,000 people to go to your site, you could connect directly on to become part of the campaign. And then all of a sudden he woke up one day and found out they were actually running his campaign.

I mean, we didn’t give that kind of access. We wanted a two-way conversation, but filtered through our activity. You give up a little in edginess and fun and stuff that would bring more people to it. But these aren’t donors, anyway. And if you still have the primary interest in raising money, you are not really giving up much on that. So people are trying to find where that equal space is that can make it even. I don’t know what the future is on bloggers and all that. I think all of that has to go through some kind of cycle and figure out where you go from here. I see reporters actually using the bloggers less now than they did two years ago, which I wasn’t sure I would have thought two years ago. I think there is a consistency, but an inconsistency of many of them.

Well, that’s the problem. There is no editing function in blogging. And if you are an average reader, you don’t know what the . . .

Right. You don’t know where their focal is. Look, there is a guy in New Hampshire who blogs who loves John McCain. And he goes to everything that John McCain does in New Hampshire. Now what’s nice about it is you can literally find out, sometimes while the event’s going on, what’s going on in that event. So if you are a reporter and you are not in New Hampshire that day, and you need a little bit of New Hampshire background, you got it. There is a guy with eyewitness to a scene telling you exactly what he sees.

If you can believe it, and if you know what his angle is.

And you don’t know him, though. Exactly. Because you have to have a filter, too.

And you have somebody out there who is saying things that your campaign doesn’t want said.

And a lot of these guys, you don’t even know who they are.

Same with the 527s, right? Isn’t that the same problem with 527s?

Very much so. It is basically a 527. They get to spend whatever money they want to influence the political process without accountability.

But if you had your choice of having them or not having them?

When are you going to write this book?

It’s a long way off.

I think there are things, like I said, from a real-time experiential thing, I think they are really good about that. In other words, I can’t be in New Hampshire every day. I can’t be in Iowa every day. But I love to read some of that stuff every now and then, because I think it’s color. And this is how you play politics. You have to smell it. And if someone says it was a weak crowd of uninterested people, you are going to do something about that. If they say it’s a huge, enthusiastic crowd who are screaming on their feet all the time, that tells you something. So I think it’s useful to have that kind of thing.

The downside is that you get 25 calls a day from reporters saying, “I read this thing on this blog.” It’s bull. I mean, why do I have to return those calls? And then the reporters get mad at you if you don’t return your phone calls, because they are chasing down some blog rumor.

It’s one thing if a blogger is serving up atmospherics. But you start dishing out positions on there that may not be your position or may be contrary to your position, or may be causing a lot of hell with another candidate . . .

Right. Well, a lot of them link to your website and fundraise for you. But then you are tagged with whatever they have that day. And it’s a slippery slope.

So right now, where do you come down on whether they are good or bad?

I say on balance, it’s probably good. And the question I would ask is, where does it go from here? Does there become a new threshold of responsibility? Do they start to self-police? I mean, what’s enough?

Do you think that all of this influx of money, from whatever sources, necessarily means more negative campaigning?

I have never believed that money equates negative campaigns. In other words, it’s pretty clear that 527 money is basically negative-campaign money. And so if you could ever level the playing field, by virtue of doing that, you are going to take out a whole class of people who are nameless, faceless entities that are much easier to throw mud. And this was the whole idea behind the “stand by your ad” provision of the law. If you have to be a candidate who says, “I stand by my ad,” you are a little less likely to throw the Hail Mary or the sucker punch, in this case. But if it works, you are going to do it. And some campaigns it works, and some it doesn’t.

So the criticism I have had of campaign finance is that in many cases it starts with the premise that campaigns and candidates are bad. They are not. They are a reality. And my view is good campaign finance respects the fact that you have to run a campaign, and it’s not cheap. If you could tell me you are going to hold down the cost of TV advertising and airplane tickets for the next 20 years, then I’d tell you a static system would work. But you can’t. And so the pitch I have made on all of the boards that I have sat on and in groups that I have done is: respect the fact that you have to run a campaign.

I mean, the guy who came up with state limits for presidential primary funding was crazy. It’s not the way it works. If I want to put every dollar I have into Iowa, because I think that’s the right strategy, I ought to be allowed to do it. Likely, I am not going to win. But that’s my choice, not the federal government’s.

This nonsense of candidates who stand across the state line to keep their [spending under the limit per state required for accepting matching funds] — that’s crazy.

I know. It just means we spend more money on lawyers and more inefficient spending on campaigns trying to get around the system. And my point is you have to look at it from a perspective of you want good campaigns. You can’t micromanage those campaigns because you have always got to assume that some campaign manager is smarter than you about how to win. So you want to give them tools to win. And you want to give them an atmosphere. But you don’t want to tell them that they have to do it.

Like one thing I had as a suggestion that didn’t get in is, let’s say we raise the limits in presidential primary funding. And we make it hundreds of millions of dollars. And people get on to it because they think, “Well, I have no downside.” But maybe, instead of like all of these state limits and that kind of thing, we tell people that they have to participate in debates. And that you have to actually be involved in the political process. So if you are going to take government money, you actually have to do certain things that are positive. Now that goes against a little bit of what I was saying before, but I don’t think anybody would disagree that this idea that presidential candidates, especially if you have an incumbent, [saying], “Oh, I am going to do one debate.”

You are talking about the general now?

General election, yeah. And so if you are going to fund those guys, maybe there are things they can do, because right now, other than just getting audited, there aren’t any requirements in the general election. And why not do things like that that actually promote participation and transparency and access rather than being punitive about it. You take the government money, and you have to go to a weekly debate. I think it would be great.

No shortage of debates right now?

No.

Well, you do have that song and dance in every general election where you send the smartest guys, like Jim Baker, who is always the guy who had managed to see that it worked out for his candidate OK.

The negotiations. Exactly. It’s like mergers and acquisitions. You send your smart guys in there. They beat each other’s brains out. And the smart one comes away. But nine times out of 10, the incumbent’s the one with all of the power in those negotiations, because it’s always the challenger that wants the shot. And it’s always the incumbent who says: “I can get on the evening news every night. I don’t have that problem. I’ll give you one debate.” I mean, John McCain would be the only incumbent who says, “Yeah, let’s do weeklies,” because he likes them.