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Tad Devine

Tad Devine, a Democrat, is a strategist with D&D Media. He worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry and was campaign manager of Bob Kerrey’s 1992 campaign. Internationally, Devine has helped elect national candidates in Bolivia, Colombia, Ireland, Israel, and Peru.

Jules Witcover interviewed Devine on June 11, 2007.

What if you just start to talk about the state of the campaign-finance reform law and whether there is any future to it?

Well, despite the best efforts [of those] who went into this with the best intentions of trying to get a lot of money out of politics, and particularly the big money that was exerting enormous influence, I think that campaign-finance reform has not worked on a lot of different levels. First of all, just look at the amount of money that’s coming into politics now versus the amount of money before we had the so-called reform. It’s just an avalanche of money that is coming in. And per se, that’s not necessarily a problem, because a lot of this money has come in through the Internet and things like that, and really given people an opportunity to participate in politics by contributing small amounts of money, which I think overall is good.

I’ll go back to someone who worked for the last presidential campaign and kind of that perspective. The problem is that I think the campaign-finance reform very much encourages third-party groups to go out and to enter campaigns with little or no accountability as to their actions. They go out. They fundraise. Some of them have disclosure requirements, which really have no impact in terms of an election cycle. People really can’t find or follow the money because of the disclosure requirements.

So you are talking about the 527s and the independent-expenditure groups.

Yeah, both of them. And just to give you an example from the presidential campaign perspective, then we can talk about the Senate races or House races or anything you want.

Well, we’re basically interested in the presidential.

OK, let’s talk about the last presidential campaign, where I worked for John Kerry and spent a lot of time being involved in this. When a presidential campaign is able to conduct its own campaign and broadcast television ads and bring a message to people, they do that on the basis of the resources they have and on the message that they want to communicate. But when other third parties are involved in this process, those third parties are able to come to the table and to put forth whatever message they want. Now that message may be, in the minds of the third party, very beneficial to the candidate they support. But it could also, in my view, hurt that candidate and particularly hurt the candidate at a strategic level.

I want to give you an example of what I mean. This really made an impression on me, personally, when I was involved on behalf of the Kerry campaign. I think it was in the early summer of 2004. I spent a lot of time appearing on television on behalf of the campaign. That was one of my responsibilities. And CNN had organized a forum where the Bush campaign and the Kerry campaign would have a representative go to a town meeting and they televised it live, almost like we were kind of candidates. But we were going to answer people’s questions. And I was in Ohio. And as the evening went on, someone asked me a question about all of the negative ads. And I made a statement, which was factually incorrect, but which people were absolutely incredulous when they heard. I said, “The Kerry campaign has never run a negative ad in Ohio.” This was in June of 2004, and everyone in the place started laughing at me.

Now, being on national television at the time, I didn’t want to be laughed at in public. It was kind of a large public at the time. And I realized, but it just hadn’t occurred to me the way it does when something like that happens, that these people who live there in Ohio, for months now, had been seeing negative ad after ad against George Bush. And those ads, while people would say, “Gee, that was good for your campaign — isn’t it great that someone’s out attacking Bush and his draft record and all of these other things?” . . .

Which wasn’t your ad.

No. These were independent-expenditure ads. And I want to tell you something. In my view, as somebody who is at the heart of that campaign strategically and the message that we were trying to deliver, particularly in the paid media, that advertising, despite the good intentions — and I in no way take anything away from the good intentions that people had to try to help us — but effectively, our efforts were undermined. Our efforts at that time, when we were trying to introduce John Kerry to the voting public in the spring of 2004 — he had won the nomination — we were sitting there in a very difficult situation. The president had $100 million cash on hand and we had $2 million at the beginning of March 2004. The president was in the position to define us. And we had to scramble. And we actually found a way of funding that campaign, principally through the Internet, but also through large fundraising that went on with the campaign that gave us the ability to go out and to broadcast our own advertising. We engaged in a massive paid media campaign. But that campaign was founded on a premise, which was if we could get people comfortable with John Kerry and use our resources to make people comfortable with him, later on we could win the back-and-forth.

The problem was, as we were attempting to introduce him with a positive campaign that was issue-oriented, at the same time there was this very negative campaign going on that we had nothing to do with, even though it was on our side. Even though these were people who wanted to help us and believed in the same things we believed in, in effect, they were running a really negative campaign. So our ability to posture this race as: “Listen, George Bush is really negative, all he does is engage in personal attacks. We have a substantive candidate and a real plan for this country, and we are not going to engage in that kind of politics. We are going to talk about the issues that we thought the swing voters really wanted to hear about.” And they wanted that kind of presentation. And if we could have made it without the negative going on at the same time, I think we could have begun to win the argument about the campaign itself — the tone, the tenor of the campaign. And that could have helped us. You see that in places like Iowa and New Hampshire about the campaign can actually be a winning effort. I think that could have helped us in a lot of places. But instead, we couldn’t even make that argument. Because what people saw from these independent groups was our campaign. They thought that was us talking even though it wasn’t.

So what message were they conveying?

Well, it was a panoply of things. Some people talked about Bush’s record in the National Guard and the draft. Some people talked about issues like prescription drug coverage or the lack thereof or the failure of the plan on the Republican side. Other people talked about other things. And it was a cacophony. Instead, what we needed was a solo. We needed our song to be sung to people and for people to get a sense of who Kerry was to start to move the thing to issues, ultimately to move it to a comprehensive plan to move the country ahead. And then maybe at the end there would be some pushing back and forth. But that was the campaign we wanted.

So I would say, for starters, these independent groups I believe have been bred by campaign-finance reform, because previously, if you go back four years earlier, the money was going through the parties. And the campaign, essentially, controlled the broadcast advertising that was funneled through the party fundraising. There was real accountability. Everybody knew these were our ads. And indeed, in 2000 when I worked for Al Gore, the same group of people who were making the Al Gore ads were making the Democratic National Committee ads. Not only could we coordinate, we were the same people. And now we have a situation where — you mentioned talking to David Axelrod. Well, David Axelrod worked for the Democratic National Committee. If I had a conversation with him about the ads, I was breaking the law. So I couldn’t even have those conversations.

So my first complaint is that campaign-finance reform has bred all of these independent players. And these independent players can undermine a campaign strategically. And they also bring into politics a lot of money with a lot less accountability than we used to have when the money was going to the parties. And people transparently could see where the money was coming from. That’s complaint number one. Complaint number two is, some of this advertising, and again, this is sort of on the receiving side, I think of Swift Boats as the best example of this.

I was going to ask you about that. That’s the flip side of this argument there.

It really is. Where somebody can go out and do what they did and launch a series of attacks against John Kerry — I mean, listen, obviously mistakes were made on that one. And I’ll be the first to admit to that. The Swift Boat campaign, in my view, was a fundamentally unfair attack against John Kerry. I mean, in other words, the charges they made, and I think there is great support in the press for this, were unfounded — basically, that the medals that he had won in Vietnam he didn’t deserve. I think that’s the heart of what they were saying. Every sort of eyewitness to this, on our side, testified to the exact opposite. 

Now, when Swift Boats happened, which was in the wake of the convention, this gets us, really, back into this sort of public funding and money argument again. The Kerry campaign made, in my view, a very serious mistake in the summer of 2004. And it was something that I tried to the best of my ability to steer the campaign in another direction. But I was unsuccessful. I felt if we accepted public funding in the general election, our ability to compete with the president would be completely undermined by the fact that the president of the United States and his campaign were going to receive the same amount of money as John Kerry and his campaign.

But we had a 13-week period to spend that money. And they had an eight-week period to spend that money. So when you give two campaigns the same amount of money for 13 weeks and for 8 weeks, one campaign gets an inordinate advantage. Because of that, when the Swift Boats happened in the wake of the convention, we were left with the most difficult choice you can make in politics, which is, Do we spend money now to deal with this paid media attack in the paid media? Well, we had a very effective response. But if we do so, are we risking the paid media that we’ll need at the end of October, early November. At the end of campaign, when voters really decide, particularly swing voters tend to decide, there was a tradeoff there. If we were going to spend money in August, we were not going to have that money to spend in October. It’s just as simple as that.

Well, when exactly did the Swift Boat ad stuff start?

It started days after the convention. And it put us in a tough strait, I think, because of the decision, and in my view the mistake, that we made of accepting public funding. And by the way, since this is kind of an inside thing I am going to crawl a little bit further inside this. Another thing that happened, that not a lot of people have paid attention to, but I think has also had a huge impact, which was that the two campaigns were given the same amount of money to spend. It was about $76 million. Now in addition to that there was another pool of funding — they call it 441a(d), the provision of the code that says you can coordinate expenditures through the national party. But the campaign can control those expenditures. They can be coordinated through the national party. You got about another $15 million in advertising spending than a national party can do on behalf of presidential nominee of that party.

So, total, we are talking $91 million — $76 million to the campaign, another $15 million from the party you can coordinate. Now when the Bush campaign got their money —again, we have gone for five weeks now spending that same pot of money, and we are subject to the same limits — they began to spend on their advertising campaign. But instead of spending those dollars, the $76 million plus the $15 million, and allocating it 100 percent to the pot of money that you have been given to spend, they began allocating a smaller percentage of their spending to the campaign itself and argued that because they had designed what they called a hybrid version of advertising — advertising which called for the election not only of George Bush, but of a Republican Congress — that they only had to allocate half of that spending to the presidential campaign. The other half of the spending on this media they could allocate elsewhere, which meant that they could expand their spending on presidential campaign significantly. 

So did the Federal Election Commission ever step in on that?

No. This is something that really, I mean, it’s so inside. You know what I mean?

I am going to tell you in the practical world how that hurt us. We are sitting there, and we begin to observe this. It’s like first we see, “Well, why aren’t they just saying, ‘I am George Bush and I approve this message.’ And why are they having narrators advocate the election of Republican Congress?” It would be a nice thing to do. But they weren’t getting a lot of political impact on it. And then we began to see, once the filings occurred, and the lawyers kind of crawled into it, that the allocation formula they were using was 50 percent as opposed to 100 percent, which was what we were using.

So we were then forced to make a very difficult decision. Do we want to change our advertising so that we would engage in this hybrid advertising, advocating an election of a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president? But more importantly for us, taking John Kerry out of the ads and putting a narrator into the ads so that we could fit this formula of hybrid advertising, which had certain strictures.

So the candidate couldn’t appear in a hybrid?

Well, there was no effective way to use them the way we were using him in the kind of ads that we want to do. So instead of us strategically following the course that we wanted to follow — which was, “Gee, we have to get people comfortable with Kerry, this really is all about John Kerry, and even though we are being attacked we’d still like to stay positive with John Kerry so that when people see and hear him they are more comfortable with him — we had to sort of backtrack out of that, go into this more narrator-driven kind of advertising, which, for our purposes, wasn’t nearly as strong as having Kerry come to the camera and speak to people. Because if we didn’t do that, we could only run, say, 60 percent of the ads that our opponents were running with the same amount of money. And this is after we have gone through this 13-week, eight-week thing with them. They already have the huge advantage; now they have multiplied their advantage. For a while, we actually went to a lot of the narrator-driven advertising.

Then we kind of backed off and we said: “You know what? Even though we can’t run nearly as many ads as they do, because we are not going to engage in this hybrid advertising, we have to get Kerry to the camera. We got to get people comfortable with him. Let’s go and let’s put him there.” So in our view, because of all of this campaign finance, public funding, and at the presidential [level] with a fundamentally unfair mechanism of public funding, [this was] giving one candidate a much longer time to spend the same amount of money and the manipulation of it by the other side. And by the way, I don’t sit here and criticize their manipulation of that. They did what they felt they had to do to get the maximum impact out of their side.

Did they ever go in advance to get a ruling [from the FEC], or just went ahead and did it?

Not to my knowledge. This is something I think you should talk to the lawyers about. I mean, I didn’t get into it at that level. I was at the sort of strategic and ad-making level, and the reality of having to deal with this day to day. But for my view, and from the perspective of the last presidential campaign and to an extent the one before, both of which I participated in, the whole system of public financing of elections, and particular campaign-finance reform — and I’ll give you my last critique. I have named two thus far; I am going to give you the third one.

And this is just somebody who is an ad-maker, not just in a presidential campaign — it’s been a lot of federal races. This sort of disclaimer requirement: “I am John Kerry and I approve this message.” In my mind it was difficult enough to take complicated ideas, particularly as they relate to some complicated issues, and to bring them down into a 30-second format and deliver them in a way where people can understand what it is you are talking about. It’s not an easy task. There are a lot of great 35-second script writers out there. So they are making it work in 30 seconds. Now a huge chunk of that, almost 20 percent of that time, has been taken away from us and given to this disclaimer requirement.

And I would argue that if you look at the way people handle disclaimers, the Bush campaign is a perfect example of this — look at their disclaimers from the presidential campaign. They would start with a scene. It would typically be George Bush, or mostly George and Laura Bush together, because she was more popular than he was. And he would say, “I am George Bush, and I approve this message.” They would dip to black then. They would go to several frames of black screen, enough to physically separate the disclaimer from the body. And then they would attack Kerry. It would be a negative ad. But that sort of black veil that they drew down in the ad, I would argue, kind of separated the disclaimer from the ad itself. And I think the disclaimer, in many ways, is just meaningless.

You mean to say that break, in people’s minds, conveyed the idea that [he] wasn’t responsible for this?

I think it provided some separation between the intent of the disclaimer, which was to associate whatever was said in that ad with the guy saying it. I think there was a circuit breaker there that they used effectively. And my big complaint is, and I guess maybe I am whining a little bit here, but taking that time to sort of figure out how you are going to put that disclaimer in front of people takes a lot away — I think about 20 percent of the time. It takes about four seconds to do these things. I think it’s a pretty significant amount of time. It takes away a lot from our ability to try to communicate the message that we want to communicate, particularly when we are dealing with issues. And that’s the problem.

I think in a small way, and I am not saying it does this totally, but I think it does drive you a little bit away from the kind of more substantive debate that would be better, in my view, for voters. And in a lot of campaigns, if we had some more time to talk about why candidate ‘A’ had this position on that issue, it’s better to have that kind of discussion, I think.

Well, did all of this you have been talking about factor into the criticism that the Kerry campaign didn’t answer the Swift Boat ads?

Well, I think that our decision on public funding absolutely drove that whole decision-making on our part. And I think, without a doubt, if we had decided to reject public funding in the general election, as soon as the first Swift Boat ad had hit, I think we would have dealt with it in the paid media where we wanted it. And I think there is a very good chance it would have been confined to the paid media, because think of the way that story evolved. The Swift Boat ad was out there in the paid media. There was no answer in the paid media from our side. There were people like me going on TV saying our candidate didn’t engage it until it was about 10 days in.

If we had had a full flight of paid media then, what we would have done absolutely, without a doubt, was as soon as the convention ended we would have started an advertising campaign that said, “This is the Kerry-Edwards plan for America: X, Y and Z.” Then Swift Boats would have come, in only a few places; it didn’t come nationally. That thing grew, remember? It started small and became big. It would have started in a few of these markets. And what we would have done is what we wound up doing later, but in a lot of other places. We would have answered, in the paid [media], probably at the same point level as the attack, only in the places where the attack was made.

And I think when that mushroomed out onto the national stage, instead of them just seeing the Swift Boat ad, they would have seen the Swift Boat ad from the other side. And they would have seen our answer. They [would] have seen Pete Peterson, former POW, first United States ambassador to Vietnam after the war, who offered testimony to John Kerry. We would have seen the wife of a man who served with John Kerry in Vietnam and who was killed there offer testimony to John Kerry. We had some really powerful paid media. And frankly, the two of those ads going at each other, I think it would have been a wash for us, totally. So it would have been a lot better.

But in that decision, was that driven by your decision to stay positive on John Kerry and explain him? Or was there another reason for not doing the [response]?

The biggest reason for not engaging in the paid media with the Swift Boats was the decision to accept public funding and the fact that we had a much longer period to spend money than the Bush campaign did. That was absolutely the driving point. Because we were confined to a free media response on our side, once we had made that strategic call that we don’t want to spend the money in August, we want to spend it in October, then we had to deal with it as a free media story. And as you know, when you are dealing with the free media, you have to make an initial assessment of whether or not you engage. Because once you engage, suddenly it becomes a much bigger story.

So our initial foray into this was, OK, let’s try to keep it confined, confined, confined. Certainly don’t engage at the candidate level. Keep the confined engagement at the local level. We’ll have people within those markets talking about it, but let’s not get us out there engaged in this thing and make it bigger. Now, as it turned out, it became very big. And finally, we had to make a decision as a campaign to engage it in the free media. For us, that was the worst possible situation. The best possible situation was paid to paid, our paid attack response versus their paid attack, which every time we tested our paid responses — we did so in a lot of focus groups and everything — we completely won the case. We had really strong answers in the paid media. But when this thing went out and became a free media sensation, it hurt us.

Was there a big argument within the campaign about which way to go on that?

There certainly was. There was an ongoing debate about what we should do, when we should do it. I think as the time goes by, there are different recollections of who said what, when, honestly, about this. But sure, there was a debate. And I will say this, though, and I can say this from firsthand knowledge that the guy, I think, who wanted to engage this most of all and most quickly was John Kerry, without a doubt. And I am happy to state that for the record. I mean, I had conversations with him about that. He was very anxious for us to answer this.

But the basic axiom that a charge un-responded [to] is believed, or whatever the heck the axiom is, I was surprised that argument didn’t carry. But the money factor was also a factor in there, right?

It was a huge strategic decision, because, frankly, if they had gotten us to open the coffers in August, that was a win on their part. You know what I mean? It meant that potentially we’d go into October looking at them spending twice as much money as our campaign on television. And for us, the tradeoff was too big. And it was just that simple.

Did Kerry go first in deciding not to take the matching or was that Dean?

In the primary? First it was Dean. Well, first the president was out.

Of course, the president was already out.

The president was out from the beginning, as he had done in 2000. First Dean did it. And then Dean did it by having an Internet poll. Remember, he had people, and then once they were all polled — although I would argue that they were pushing their people to opt out.

Like [Richard] Nixon in ’52 saying, “Should I get off the ticket?”

Yeah. I mean, you knew who was going to win this one, so of course they won. Now once that happened, I think Kerry made the decision — which was not an easy decision for him — to get out of public funding. It wasn’t easy on a couple of us. Number one, John Kerry had had a career in the Senate supporting reform in terms of public financing of campaigns and other issues like that. He had a strong record.

Number two, raising this money, it was a big black hole that we were about to jump into. We were turning our back on a substantial amount of matching funds. And in exchange, we were hoping that he would succeed. And the reality of it was that he was going to have to go into his own resources. And while I think people see John Kerry as a really rich guy, the fact of the matter is that his wealth, or at least the wealth that he would have access to for purposes of converting it to collateral for a campaign, was essentially limited to the equity that he owned in his house in Boston. Now that was enough to provide about $6.5 million in cash.

What about his wife’s money?

It was beyond reach, absolutely beyond reach. And this was something that was really lawyered to death, I think it’s fair to say. But there was no way for him to be able to access $25 million, $50 million, $100 million, or anything like that.

I think that was largely misunderstood, though.

Totally.

He didn’t have a handle on his wife’s money.

No. Honestly, that’s a two-sided coin. If people think you’ve got a lot of money, and they are potential opponents in a primary or something, that’s not a bad thing. Even if you don’t necessarily have it, the thought that you have that at your disposal could help you.

Look how Bush drove those candidates out in 2000 before they even got to the primaries.

Yeah, he did a good job of it.

So anyway, this whole matching system now, some of the second-, third-tier candidates this time around are talking about they are going to have to use it. Can they survive on that?

I honestly don’t see how a candidate who accepts public funding will be able to effectively compete with a candidate who is out the system of public funding, assuming the candidate outside the system has great capacity to raise money. For example, I told John Kerry in November of 2003 that, in my view, he should get out of the cap or get out of the race. You know what I mean? Because I didn’t see how he could compete. And the reason I felt that way was not just that Dean [did it]; this is before Dean did it. But I could see where Dean was going. Dean was spending so much money on television in New Hampshire that there was no way that he could stay within the state spending limit. If you analyze his spending, as I did at the end of 2003, you would see there is absolutely no way to stay within the limit. Therefore, in my mind, he was going to get out.

I also had lived through the experience in 2000 with Al Gore, where I worked for the incumbent vice president, who accepted funding, against his opponent, who was outside the system of public funding. And I will tell you that from the time we effectively won the nomination in early March, with Super Tuesday, when Gore dominated and beat [Bill] Bradley everywhere, until the time we got the funding for the general election, we went though a terrible period in our campaign. And the polls reflected that. Bush was spending. He was advertising. He was moving around. He was running a campaign. We were trying to figure out how to survive.

It was the same problem Bob Dole had in ’96.

Yeah. Absolute disaster for us. Now we did have the benefit in June or so of the television advertising from the DNC. But trying to run a presidential campaign where you are moving the candidate around, where you are trying to do the research that you need to do on a national basis to contest 20 or more individual states, to have the organizational presence that you want to develop a real campaign at the grass roots in some of these key battlegrounds and sections within battlegrounds — it’s impossible to do without enormous resources.

Having gone through that with Gore, I mean, we used to sit around in the spring of 2000, [and] a lot of the meetings were just about how are we going to get to next week? Or how are going to get through the month without breaking the law? And how are we going to get him from point A to point B? And it meant that we couldn’t do a lot of the things that we wanted to do in terms of travel, certainly in terms of communication. The Gore campaign didn’t run any advertising after Super Tuesday. Gore campaign advertising was done. Forget it. We had no money to do it. And I’ll tell you, I would argue that if we could have run 10,000 points in the spring of 2000 in Florida, [he] might have got another 500 votes.

I mean, these are impactful decisions, really important things that you can’t do, because there is a system set up saying: “No, you can’t do it, and even though the other guy is doing it — George Bush is spending as much as he wanted, he raised $100 million — you can’t spend a dime. I am sorry. You accepted public funding. You are out.” And for me, there is a fundamental unfairness in this. There was a fundamental unfairness in 2000, being within the system for Gore and being outside of it with Bush. It was a fundamental unfairness in 2004 when John Kerry had the same amount in 13 weeks as Bush had in eight weeks. I just think it’s fundamentally unfair, period.

Let me ask you a related question, but still on the question of the second- and third-tier candidates. In ’76 Jimmy Carter had five weeks, I think, between Iowa and New Hampshire.

Yes. It was actually 51 days between the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

And so he got a good bump out of it, raised a lot of money, and he was able to do it. It can’t happen now.

That’s right. That’s another important and very good point: that the frontloading of the calendar, the compression of it, doesn’t allow candidates to employ strategy they used to, which is sort of get yourself established and then raise money off of it. You can raise a huge amount of money, as John Kerry demonstrated. We go back to $100 million for Bush at the beginning of March to $1 million for Kerry. And yet what happened the rest of the spring? We wound up outspending Bush in the month of March. We raised $35 million. We outspent them in April. We outspent them in May. We outspent them in June. Even though they had $100 million. When you look at the FEC records, we outspent them in July. The first month that we stopped outspending George Bush, Kerry versus Bush in the primary season, was August. What happened in August? It wasn’t good. I mean, there is an intense correlation between the spending and success with voters. And when you set up a system where one guy has an inordinate advantage over the other, you are giving them a tremendous likelihood of success in terms of the outcome.

So the theory that a second- or third-tier candidate, by winning Iowa, can keep and move on — that’s questionable, isn’t it now?

It’s totally suspect given the changes in the calendar, the intense frontloading of all of these states. You go from, again, two and a half months to a week or two weeks. That’s a whole different formula. So I think for people to say, “Gee, it used to work that way — it can work again,” it’s just not true in the modern nominating process.

Do you see any possibility, again involving the frontloading, that there could be a split decision out of the primaries and caucuses?

I do. The Republican side is kind of beyond me, [though] I could speculate about that. But on the Democratic side I spent a lot of time, particularly doing delegates, and then strategically in campaigns. I think the system that we put in place — and I was involved in this in 1998 on behalf of Governor [Michael] Dukakis when we made fundamental changes in the rules and we moved the Democratic Party from the system which it used to have, with winner-take-all primaries, loophole primaries we used to call them, winner-take-more primaries. We had bonus primaries where if you won a congressional district you got the first delegate, and then they split them up. We moved, in 1988, to a pure system of proportional representation. That is the exclusive method of allocating delegates in the Democratic Party.

And I believe that the following factors [are the realities]: number one, proportional representation, which rewards anyone who gets more than 15 percent of the vote. If you have a congressional district with five delegates in it or three candidates get more than 15 percent of the vote, which I believe is likely to happen with [Hillary] Clinton, [Barack] Obama, [John] Edwards, and perhaps other candidates will be that third candidate in different states. But you will have a lot of congressional districts early on, like we had in ’88 where three candidates break the threshold of 15 percent and you see proportional representation.

I mean, it’s a five-delegate district. They are not going to get 60 percent of the vote. They may win with 35 percent of the vote; they will get two [delegates]. The next candidate may get 28 percent of the vote; they’ll get two [delegates]. The third candidate will get 18 percent of the vote, and they will get one [delegate]. So trying to roll up delegate totals in that kind of system is almost impossible.

The second reality is the amount of money that people are going to have at their disposal. In ’92 the system was employed the first time for proportional representation. But no one had any meaningful amount of resources. You had Bill Clinton in 1991 as the fundraising leader. He raised $4 million in 1991. Bob Kerrey was second; he raised $2 million. Tom Harkin raised $2 million. So when people have as much money in a year as they are now raising in a week. I was Bob Kerrey’s campaign manager in 1992, and the reason that he dropped out was not that he didn’t believe in fundamental change anymore; he dropped out because we didn’t have any money, period. That was why he dropped out.

But if you have people who go into a heavily frontloaded process where anybody who gets more than 15 percent can win almost as many delegates as somebody who gets even 20 points more. I mean, if you have a four-delegate district, and one candidate gets 60 percent and the other candidate gets 40 percent, the delegates split 2:2. Yeah, I won by 20 points. That’s a landslide in politics. But in delegate math, that’s split.

So with proportional representation, with a heavily frontloaded system, and with an amount of resources that is unprecedented on the part of three or more candidates as they go into this thing, even the down-tier candidates, a Chris Dodd or a Joe Biden, they may raise $15 million to $20 million — four or five times what [Bill] Clinton raised in 1992. Those people are going to be able to make decisions about where they want to participate.

So they target districts instead of states.

That’s right. Exactly. And they go in and start to roll up delegates. And then suddenly, because you have so many delegates gone so quickly because of the frontloading of these megastates, we wake up in early March or so and say: “Well, wait a second. This candidate is ahead but there are only 15 percent of the delegates left. And he or she only has 35 percent of the delegates. They are not going to win 100 percent. How is this going to get done?” So I think there is a real possibility that, given proportional representation, intense frontloading, and unprecedented resources, that we will see on the Democratic side a split in delegates that can only be bridged by either the joining of forces between two candidates or unilateral surrender. I don’t think unilateral surrender is going to happen. 

What about superdelegates? Do they still exist?

They do.

They are critical?

Very critical, because they are about 20 percent of the total number of delegates. And that’s 40 percent of what you need to be a nominee. So I think what’s going to happen with the superdelegates, although some of them are moving early toward one candidate or another, I think most of them will kind of hang back. We will see sort of who is moving. And I think, in the end, this may be the first time that you actually get a superdelegate who makes an early commitment for a candidate but then leaves and goes to another candidate.

That might be a bonus then, the superdelegates at the end.

I think that superdelegates are the only hope the party has of achieving a consensus nominee. I don’t think the frontloaded system, with proportional representation and with so many people with so much money, it is not likely to produce a nominee, in my view. I think we have structured a system that will produce multiple winners in different places. And we will not have a repeat of what we had in 2000 and 2004. And by the way, in 2000 and 2004, the nominating process was very, very different each time. In 2000 you had Iowa and New Hampshire, five weeks of nothing, just voting. In 2004, you had Iowa and New Hampshire — boom — two weeks later, massive voting. It’s a very different playing field. Now we have Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada voting, voting, voting. I mean, it’s very different.

So the conventional wisdom is that it’s all going to be over on February 5.

I think, like most conventional wisdom, it’s wrong. I think we will have a more complicated nominating process than that. And I don’t think someone is going to come up and utterly dominate the nominating process in the only coin of the realm that means something, which is delegates. We were able to do it the last two times because effectively, if somebody wins Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, they are going to win. I stipulate to that. That will happen. I just don’t think that’s likely.

I really see something else happening. I see bifurcation at the front end. I see different people doing well. Maybe one person will do better. Maybe they’ll accumulate more. But then suddenly the reality of the voting sets in, and the reality of this mechanism that I have talked about, the proportional representation, and then also the abundant resources. Those are the two things that never happened at once before. And I think that means people hang around longer, that they win more delegates just by showing up. If you are an antiwar candidate in the Democratic primary, and you are credible, you are viable like a John Edwards or something — trust me, 15 percent of the vote, you are going to get it. That’s a powerful platform to run on.

Do you think possibly [Dennis] Kucinich could win 15 percent?

I think it’s a lot less likely. I’ll tell you why. Because I think the Democratic primary voters are very tactical.

They think he wouldn’t be electable?

That’s right. I went through this with Bob Kerrey in ’92. I saw people in focus groups who said, “I like Bob Kerrey.” Well, who are you going to vote for? “I am voting for [Bill] Clinton.” Well, why are you voting for Clinton and not Kerrey? You say you like Kerrey more. “Well, I am not voting for Kerrey because I don’t think he can win.” I mean, it’s catch-22 from the campaigns. And I think that’s Kucinich’s problem.

Now listen, if Hillary Clinton and Kucinich are the only candidates left in the race, yes, he will break 15 percent. Absolutely. If everybody else drops out, and he stays in, and he runs strongly against the war, against poverty, against war itself, not just the war but all war, he will get more than 15 percent. But in a multicandidate field where you have an Edwards, Obama, Clinton, maybe a [Bill] Richardson over here or a Dodd over there, no, I don’t see him breaking 15 percent in that field.

Well, what about if that sort of scenario plays out? Nobody has enough after February 5. This whole Internet phenomenon, both in terms of fundraising and free media through other voices of the sort that you were talking about before — but not 527s, just anybody, a blogger or anybody else who wants to get on, that’s a big community. And it’s growing all the time.

Yeah. I remember in the old days— when I talk about the old days, I talk about 1988, 20 years ago, and even before that, 1984, when I worked on the delegate operations for Mondale and then for Dukakis. When we would go after these delegates — I mean literally, in 1988, I had a guy who worked for me when I was in charge of the delegates for Dukakis, who used to go door to door. He got in a car and he would drive around. And he would visit Gore delegates and have a meeting with them, literally, sometimes on the front porch, and talk to them and say how much we wanted their support. And waiting for Senator Gore [to] say it would be OK. But if it was, call him and he could be the liaison and things like that.

And we were sophisticated, because we had some computers. We had people’s names on computers. Now there is going to be an ability to communicate with each of these people who are delegates, on kind of a universal basis, which is somebody could go to a site. And you could have that kind of conversation, through e-mail or the telephone. But you are going to have the ability for all kinds of contact that is going to go on in real time right now that used to be very hard to do in the past. Once we know who these people are — and remember, as frontloaded as the delegate-allocation calendar is, typically the living delegate calendar, these people who actually become delegates at the national convention, that calendar tends to be backloaded.

So, for example, if I go to the Iowa caucuses, and I caucus for a candidate, and I elect somebody at a precinct caucus, those precinct caucus people are going to assemble a couple of months later at a county convention. Those county-convention people are going to reassemble. And somebody may do better or worse depending on the politics of the day. And then ultimately, in June, they will go to the state convention. And they will caucus by congressional district and elect district-level delegates. And they will caucus as a state convention, all of them, and elect at-large delegates, pledge party-leader-elected official delegates. So those real delegates from Iowa who got selected in January, those human beings who are delegates, except the superdelegates, those pledged delegates, we don’t really know who they are until June. So actually talking to them is going to have to wait.

So in all that you are talking basically about the campaign talking to these would-be or actual delegates.

Yes.

What about other voices injected into the campaign?

Sure.

And not the groups you were talking about before. But just individual people, bloggers, YouTube, all of this stuff that I don’t understand.

Sure. I think there is all kinds of potential. Say we have this situation, this scenario, that no one has a clear majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention by the middle of March in 2008, which I think is a very plausible. It’s something that could happen. What do you have then? Well, you have a universe of people, a little over 4,000 people. Not all of them have come online yet, because those Iowa people, we don’t know who they are until June. But a lot of them, maybe 3,000 of them, we actually have established their identities. Communicating with those people, affecting their decisions, and ultimately, perhaps, affecting their choice of candidate preference, I think, is going to become big business for a lot of people, not just campaigns.

Campaigns have engaged in this business before. And some of them have been pretty good at it. But you might get other players who come to the table, for whatever reason. They support a candidate, or they oppose a candidate. And they could get into the business of communication. And when that happens, I think it’s really a Wild West situation. Because we have no idea, are they going to run television ads to try to get the governor of a state for VP for somebody or something like that? Who knows?

So what do you think an outfit like MoveOn — how would they play in all of this?

I think if somebody had a sense that they could affect the outcome of the nomination, I think they would play heavily by trying to identify that universe of people and establish a means to communicate with them directly. Because they are very tech-savvy, I think they would focus on that kind of communication first. And then they would try to figure out whether there are other means of communicating with people, talking to them on the phone, sending them mail, ultimately influencing them. I think, for example, the best way to influence people in that situation, these delegates, is to find people who know them and can influence them. So, for example, if I am a lawyer who has been elected from the state of Rhode Island as an at-large delegate, and my biggest client is the laborers’ pension fund, talking to the president of the labor union first is the best way to probably get to that lawyer. You know what I mean?

So are people going to get that sophisticated? Are they going to figure it out at that level? Well, if there is enough at stake they will. You know what I mean? And then what’s going to happen? You are going to have not just campaigns talking to these delegates; you are going to have all kinds of people talking to them. And do I think that’s good? No. I don’t think that’s good at all. I think that’s bad.

Anything that’s not in your control is bad.

Yeah, exactly, whether it’s the floor a convention or accumulating delegates to get there.

Well, what about something that’s not quite that targeted, but just all of the voices out there, the thousands and thousands of voices out there saying whatever they are saying, for or against a candidate. Do you have to monitor all that like you used to monitor?

Well, I think campaigns will establish a line of communication with these individuals. Either the people for them or the people who, potentially, could be for them. Maybe Governor Richardson runs, is not successful, but he has 100 delegates along the way. Well, that’s a very valuable commodity of people that you are going to want to try to figure out how to talk to. And I think a lot of that is going to happen. The irony of all of this, for me, is that I think while the reforms of the ‘70s and the nominating process, and the reality of paid media and advertising, brought us away from old party politics — the guys smoking in the back room making the deal — the changes in the nominating process, I think, have pushed us toward, potentially, that form of politics again. Individuals will decide the outcome of a nominating convention, because that decision could not be made by voters given the system that was put in place by the party, and try to figure out how to influence those delegates. And they do so not on the basis of winning an election with voters but instead by direct communication with them by whatever means.

Do you think it’s possible that that process could go on into the convention so that the decision would not be made until the convention, as in the old days?

I don’t think that’s likely; I think it’s unlikely. I think there is enough time between February and the end of August where everyone has the convention to sort of work this out. But I do think it will get worked out on a very public stage. And I think it’s going to involve some compromise between candidates in order to work it out. I really do.

So like in ancient times, the decisions were decided on the nominee at the convention, first of all, there weren’t that many primaries. So you could drift on without knowing what’s going to happen.

Right.

In this situation, for instance, if what you are talking about evolves, you are also going to have that period of intense negotiation and dealing over whoever manages to stay in the ball game.

Yes. I am seeing this now. I just finished a campaign in Ireland on behalf of Fianna Fail [a political party in Ireland]. And right now they have until June 14 to form a government. They won 78 seats; they need 83. And there are intense negotiations going on amongst their big party and a couple of smaller parties. I think that’s what we are going to see in the Democratic nominating process: the kind of negotiation that goes on in parliamentary systems where you have multiparty government. We are not going to see it in our federal system, because we don’t have a system that allows that. But we will see that, I think, in our party politics, because I think the structure that we have put in place is not one that’s going to overwhelmingly nominate one person or the other.

Have you ever encountered a special interest offering a real quid pro quo to the candidate straight out like that? Has that ever happened?

No. And I have been involved in a lot of campaigns. I don’t think it works that way.

Well, that’s the general impression that . . .

I think this special interest, differing groups whether it be organized labor or some association representing the industry, they want to demonstrate to campaigns that they have enormous power, that they can affect elections. And they come in and make that demonstration, basically saying, “Unless you do this, I am not with you.” I just haven’t seen that. I mean, it’s a much more subtle process than that. They don’t work that way.

What do you say to the idea that the money guarantees negative campaigning? Do you think it does?

I do not, no. I think the negative campaigning —2004 was a great example of that. The Kerry campaign, left to its own devices, without these third parties kind of floating around banging Bush left and right, I think we would have run one of the most positive campaigns the country has ever seen, despite the negativity on the other side. We have done this before.

For example, in 1998 my old firm worked on John Edwards’s Senate race. John Edwards’s Senate campaign in North Carolina was almost a wholly positive campaign. Almost every one of the ads — there were a couple of exceptions where we sort of pushed back [Lauch] Faircloth a little bit — but I would say 95 percent of the advertising was positive, whereas 100 percent of the Faircloth ads were negative. It was a really relentlessly negative campaign.

Edwards running for the Senate and Kerry running for president [had] a lot of similarities. People didn’t know who they were. They needed to be built up. They needed to be connected with voters. The voters have to feel comfortable with them on a values level, not just on a substantive level. And positive advertising was the best way to do it.

So I don’t think the money ensures negative advertising. I think when it’s third-party money, and they are not part of a structure or strategy of the campaign, that almost inevitably it moves to negative advertising. It’s an easier default position to go to the negative ads, and that’s because the advertising is germinated in the research. They go, they do the polling. The poll is a snapshot. The negative arguments in the poll tend to be more powerful and produce more immediate impact.

Therefore, the people who are reliant on a source of funding for this stuff, who want to see impact, they move to those negative arguments. If you are running a campaign, and you are not so much focused on what’s going to happen in the next two or four weeks, but what’s going to happen on one day in November, and you can see strategically the course to get there, then there is a very good chance you are going to go to some positive advertising in a lot of places, if not all places.

But what about the Watergate experience, where they had no really tough contest, and still they did all the things that they did because they had money? Not in the amount that they have now, but in those days they had money. And it was almost like they looked around for ways they could spend this money.

Well, I think corruption in politics is something that happens. You just have to be aware of it and have to deal with it. In my view, the best system would be one that is wholly transparent, where everyone sees exactly where the money is coming from. If they wanted to make reforms, I think the better reforms would be to take this issue of bundling, for example, and make it a federal law and requirement. Right now, the disclosure of the bundling that goes on happens because of pressure from the press. You will get The New York Times or The Washington Post or somebody deciding that they are going to editorialize once a week against a campaign until they’ll make that disclosure. Yet those disclosures are made voluntarily, not under the pain and penalty of perjury or any other legal requirement. And so I believe, by some measure, they are a little suspect. At least with the FEC disclosures, if someone is lying there, they are going to face a real penalty. They could go to jail. And so that encourages, I think, honest behavior on the part of campaigns.

Do you think bundling should be a full disclosure?

Absolutely. I think there should be federal disclosure of bundling.

And not prohibited?

In other words, if I have a fundraiser, and I have 50 people over at my house, and they each give $1,000, and I am taking credit for that with the campaign, say that Tad Devine [gave] $50,000, not $1,000. I think we should disclose bundling. I think we should have real-time disclosure of expenditures. I mean, there is only so much you can do in a day. But I would encourage complete transparency. I would say the Federal Election Commission should be allowed to have representatives inside campaigns looking at campaigns and looking at what they are doing. By the same token, everybody should be allowed to raise and spend what they want, as long as it’s done in broad daylight.

But you wouldn’t outlaw bundling?

No, I would not. Absolutely not. You need a lot of money in these campaigns. This is a huge country. We are asked to communicate with tens of millions of people in a very expensive medium. I mean, if we wanted to clean up politics, we should force the television stations to give campaigns time for free. Period. You want to clean it up? OK, let’s start there. Now that’s not going to happen, I think, in the real world.

So if that real reform, where campaigns would not have to spend so much money to broadcast advertising, isn’t going to happen, I think we should let campaigns basically spend what they want to spend to communicate with this huge audience and to say: “Oh, gee, $71 million should be enough. Well, it’s not enough to communicate in an electorate in which 120 million people voted in the last presidential election. And I have $71 million to communicate with them. And some of the most expensive places in the country, some of these media markets, you need more.” I think you need more. And it sounds like a lot, I know.

But in my view, we should try to figure out a way to allow more communication or we should change our system of election. Just having gone through an election in a parliamentary system in Europe, I can tell you it’s much better when we say, “We are calling the election — it will be in four weeks.” If we could do something like that, that would be great. But I don’t see that happening. The Constitution is not going to change.

But do you see any possibility that the availability of free media of all sorts on the Internet will somehow lead campaigns to turn away from television?

I do not. And I just wrote a chapter on this for a book. And my thesis sort of in there is parallel to campaign-finance reform. Campaign-finance reform comes along and people say: “Aha! We have reformed campaign finance. Therefore there will be less money in politics. Therefore it will be better for the system. And special interests will have less influence.” That’s the theory. What’s happened? There is more money in politics. A lot more.

Well, the same is true, I think, with this Internet and these other means of communication. People are going to say: “Aha! Now we can have the Internet. And therefore they won’t have to buy as many television ads to talk to people.” Well, what happened? Well, let’s talk about the last election cycle. One of the most important moments in the last election cycle happened in Virginia when a student [S.R. Sidarth] videotaped George Allen. He said “macaca.” It went on YouTube. But what happened to that videotape? Well, it wound up in a broadcast ad. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — I didn’t do the race, but I am sure they put a million or millions — I saw that thing in Northern Virginia time after time. This was a very expensive media market. Millions of dollars were spent behind an ad broadcasting that image, which originated on the Internet. That’s what’s going to happen. They are symbiotic. There is going to be more, not less, because of those other means of communication.

But it could work in a way that the television stations, which are now bleeding campaigns, could blackmail them in a way. That they would have to recognize that there are places for campaigns to go. They might lower their rates.

Right now, if you had two campaigns and you said: “I’ll give you each $1 million. Run whatever campaign you want, but here is your choice. Either you use the Internet or you use television, but you can’t use both.” And say you were in Rhode Island or something where $1 million would be a good television buy, or Vermont. I just did a Senate race in Vermont. Basically Bernie Sanders spent a little over $1 million on television. His opponent spent about four times that amount. But he spent about $1 million. And that was enough to get his message across.

Until somebody says, “I’ll take the Internet over the TV,” in a race like that, the TV will still be the dominant player. And I can’t believe that anybody would want to have a race where you would have a huge Internet advertising presence versus having a huge television presence. The thing about the television is that there is no sort of act of volition in terms of its receipt beyond the television set being on. On the Internet, I am making choices about the information I want to deal with: how much of it I want, whether I want to go look for it, do I want to download it, what do I want to do with it? I am sitting there with a television ad; it’s on, and I am absorbing it. Now, I may not 100 percent absorb it, but I may absorb just enough of it for it to influence my decision. You know what I mean?

I don’t think the Internet has gotten to a point where it can compete with television, or radio, to that extent: a person driving in their car, hearing a radio ad, and processing it. It may someday. We may all change, because this new generation is consuming information differently. But I don’t see that happening in the next decade, which, hopefully, will be the extent of my political advertising career.