Countdown

Home > Interviews > Walter R. Mears

Walter R. Mears

Walter R. Mears was a reporter for The Associated Press for more than four decades, covering presidential campaigns. He received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1977 for his coverage of the 1976 presidential campaign. Mears is the author of Deadlines Past: Forty Years of Presidential Campaigning: A Reporter’s Story.

John W. Mashek interviewed Mears on August 1, 2007.

Walter, you won the Pulitzer [for your coverage of the campaign in] ’76, of course, the first year that the public financing of a presidential campaign took effect because of all the problems with the [Richard] Nixon-[George] McGovern race four years earlier. It looks now like public financing, though, could be dead, with the candidates taking money in bucketfuls, particularly the six who are considered the top tier. Do you think that public financing is dead or at least comatose?

Fairly comatose. I think it began to die when George [W.] Bush turned down the money in his first campaign. He had so much coming in that to have accepted public financing would have restrained him rather than helped him. So I think, essentially, that system is out of business. The question is whether the post-convention part of it will ever function again. And it certainly isn’t going to function unless the numbers are raised tremendously.

It wasn’t that surprising, with inflation and with the whole drive for more expensive ways of campaigning and more effective ways to finance it, [it] outdated the primaries system, which carried a very intricate network of state-by-state limits. You remember Ronald Reagan staying in a motel across the state line in Massachusetts, so that his money wouldn’t count against his New Hampshire spending limit. But even after that part became obsolete, candidates, until last time, took the federal money that they are entitled to after their nominations.

Well Walter, it’s interesting that Senator [John] McCain, who, as the frontrunner, was collecting gobs and bucketfuls of money, is now in such dire straights that they are talking about actually waiting until the first of the year, so he can qualify for public financing to at least get him through the first couple of primaries. But he apparently is the only one, other than the second tier of candidates like Senator [Chris] Dodd, Senator [Joe] Biden, and others on the Republican side, who will need that money.

Yeah, it’s kind of a roll of the dice. Basically what candidates in that circumstance, it seems to me, are saying is: “Well, if I could just stay alive until the New Hampshire, Iowa, now Nevada, maybe lightning will strike. I’ll win. I’ll become a major player all of a sudden. And then I can collect the money.” But I am not sure that he can selectively do that. I think he has to say yes or no to the whole season. And if he does that, what is he going to do with the rather insane system that we have now where everything has to happen in the first three weeks, basically.

Well, our colleague, Jules Witcover, and others will argue — and there is some basis for this — that money isn’t everything. Just ask John Connally and Phil Gramm. But as we both know, getting back to Jess Unruh and the mother’s milk analogy, you have to have it in gobs now. With the primary system, again, going to the February 5 super, super, super, I don’t know what, they are going to have a new nomenclature.

I guess both.

Twenty-two states are voting.

It’s a national primary, effectively. I mean everybody after that date is superfluous.

Right. Well, when Connally spent $11 million . . .

He got one delegate.

Then the delegate wound up voting for his archenemy, George Herbert Walker Bush. He admitted that was the coup de grace of his presidential campaign. But things have changed now with this primary.

But one of the things I wanted to ask you is, of course, a great deal of this money is going to be spent on television commercials. And once we know the nominee, and we will almost assuredly know on February 5, there is going to be a hiatus of several months until the two conventions in Denver and Minneapolis. And those of us — and I am sure you’ve followed politics a long time — realize that is what Karl Rove calls “defining the opponent,” which means an absolute avalanche of negative ads. We all say it turns people off, but they still keep grinding in the mud.

It works, yeah. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it. It isn’t that surprising that we are going to have very early nominees. Just it’s been moved up six weeks. But we knew from the middle of March, in Bill Clinton’s first campaign, that he was going to be the nominee. And obviously, you knew that President [George W.] Bush was going to be the Republican nominee, so you had a somewhat similar situation. Jimmy Carter basically won the 1976 nomination in Pennsylvania, which I think was in April that year. He then went on to lose more primaries than he won for the rest of the season.

In the far West, yeah.

Also some in the East. But it told you, basically, that he was essentially a weak candidate. But it was too late to do anything about it. He was losing to Jerry Brown and Frank Church. The lesson that we never learned, the political structure never learned is that you really need, somehow — and I don’t know whether it’s retrievable, I suspect not — to have a glide path, to have a buildup, to have a circumstance in which people get to know the candidate, know everything about him that they got to know and make their decision on an informed basis and not on the basis of, now, an avalanche of money.

But a reaction to one state or two states, I think we had a better system when you still had to go all the way to California in June to submit your nomination, because then the electorate knew who they were dealing with in a way that I don’t think they do now. I don’t know the answer. I don’t think there is one. There is another effort to have regional primaries. That’s going to go nowhere.

Yeah, it makes too much sense.

That’s been proposed over and over and over again for years.

And it always gets shot down.

And it just never takes off.

Walter, when you started covering, the campaign money was raised either by the candidate himself, getting on the phone, or by direct mail, which we know costs gobs of money. And, of course, now that’s been turned on its head. Well, candidates do get on the phone. It is the Internet which raises the most cash? Notably this year, Barack Obama keeps continuing to get headlines for a number of contributors. Is direct mail just too expensive? Or can you still raise it for a cause, like Richard Viguerie’s right-wing causes, which apparently they are still sending direct mail out despite the cost?

Well, if you go all the way back to our first experience together in 1964, Barry Goldwater built up an unprecedented list of donors. I mean his direct mail effort created the structure that the Vigueries and others built on over the years. So, yeah, direct mail is expensive. But there is something more to it than the amount of money raised, and that is the commitment that you get when direct mail leads somebody to buy into your campaign. The big difference in those years — and particularly four years later when Richard Nixon needed money, he went out to Chicago and had lunch with [W.] Clement Stone, who wrote him a check — is that now the absolute ceiling is, what, $2,600?

$2,300 for each cycle. So you, your wife, your kids, can all give $2,300 during the primary season. And then you can give again in the general.

And if you think back to particularly 1968, when Nixon reinvented political finance, that’s when the money went off the charts. I remember there was no reporting, also.

No.

There was no system for making it public. And I remember covering Nixon in ’68. I went through every record I could find in every published report I could find. And I put together a story early that fall saying that Richard Nixon had raised and would spend $28 million on his campaign. And I remember our friend Bill Safire, who was working for Nixon at the time — The New York Times printed this story — we were in New York at the time and Sapphire, when we got on the bus that next morning, scoffed at the $28 million figure. I thought he was saying that I had overestimated it.

In fact, the real number was closer to $43 million, I think. And the $28 million was absolutely unheard of. It was double what anybody had ever come up with before, and it was all raised from some of the same sources that eventually became embroiled in Watergate. But it was big, big money. To most people, $2,300 is not inconsequential. But we are talking $50,000, $100,000. The only limit was supposed to be that corporations couldn’t give money directly. And so it came from them indirectly.

But then came bundling and all sorts of ways to beat that.

Sure. Well, the bundling dates from the time that limits were finally imposed, and it seemed to me it was a thousand dollars at first. And that meant you couldn’t go to one fat cat and say, “Write me a check and I’ll get back to you.” You have to go to the fat cat and say, “Call 50 of your friends and get them to write me a check.”

According to Frank Mankiewicz, and I think is this probably accurate, McGovern raised about $28 million. And he believed that Nixon got about $250 million. Much of it was spent, of course, to define McGovern in a very unflattering way. And, of course, we go back to 1960 when, if you were running for reelection in the House, and you were in good favor with Speaker [Sam] Rayburn, the Board of Education meetings, “Speaker Sam” had some money in his desk for you.

Sure. Well, the more efforts there are at reform, it seems to me, the more unintended byproducts appear. I remember I spoke to a group of House Republicans one time, one of those breakfasts that [former House Republican Leader] Bob Michel used to run. And they got into campaign finance. And I said, “The only way you are ever going to reform campaign finance is if you make it totally transparent and say, ‘Take what you want, but report it instantly in a manner that everybody will know where your money is coming from.’” Because every other effort to do it has led to a Rube Goldberg-system, part of which has just been knocked down by the Supreme Court.

And, of course, there is no Court, even if it should change and tilt more to the liberal side, that is going to change a candidate being able to contribute to himself.

Yeah, that’s the other part of it. I mean the ruling that took effect, in ’72?

It was [1976].

That said that you could control contributions, but you couldn’t limit spending, stood everything on its head. Because the only way you can control what goes into a campaign is if you tell the candidate, if you spend over “X” amount of money, you are violating the law. And you are going to get punished for it. But the Supreme Court — that was not a conservative Supreme Court — ruled that the limit of spending was a limit on free speech. A limit on contributions was not.

And that strange distinction, which has been there ever since and nobody pays much attention to it, seems to me is the one that makes it impossible to really regulate campaign finance. I mean the only way to do it, really, is with mandatory public financing that says, not one more dollar than this can go into your campaign. And if it does, you get disqualified. But that ain’t going to happen.

As you mentioned, many proposals have been made to try to even this thing out. And when public financing is mentioned for Senate and House races, the incumbents, of course, hiding behind all sorts of excuses, never want that playing field to be even.

No.

If the “incumbent protection act” has literally [been] raised almost every day in Capitol Hill, that’s why there is so little turnover.

Yeah, and the great hypocrisy of it is that some of those same people argue that if you do this, no outsider will ever be able to build a bankroll and be a challenger. Well, that’s not what they are up to. They are up to exactly what you said. It’s a system that perpetuates power.

Walter, I want to get into a subject of debates a little bit with you. To kick it off, I would like to ask, in the 1976 vice presidential debate, you asked Bob Dole the question, in which he at least mentioned two or three times “Democrat wars,” even before [Walter] Mondale mentioned that he was proving he was the hatchet man on the Republican side. I know there is pressure sitting there as a debate panelist; I have been there, too. Did you sense right away that Dole had made a huge mistake?

Yeah. I mean where he made the huge mistake was in trying to change the subject. I didn’t ask him about wars.

That’s right. That’s right. He just introduced this.

I asked him why it was not fair for Mondale to make an issue of Gerald Ford’s partner, Richard Nixon, for Watergate when he, Dole, had made that same point an issue in his most difficult Senate campaign two years earlier, by saying that the pardon was prematurely issued, and he hadn’t agreed with it. And he was stuck. I mean it was not a hostile question.

No, it wasn’t.

It was a difficult one. But he was stuck. And the only way he could think to get around it was to change the subject, which he tried to do, and all of the wars of the 20th century are Democrat wars. And he never lived it down. I mean we talk about it years later, and he was kind of ruefully . . .

I know years later, when I retired, you could talk to politicians. I had told “Fritz” Mondale that I had actually looked several times at the tape of that. And his eyes almost lit up when he saw Dole mention Democrat wars. He could hardly wait. And of course, he made his own boo-boo later when he talked about Reagan’s age and led to Reagan talking about age not being a factor.

But this year, given the fact that there is no sitting vice president running or no absolute [candidate], despite these early, rather meaningless polls, the bloviators are saying that the debates this year could be more important than any in the past. You agree, disagree?

Certainly not in their present format. I mean, as you recall, we didn’t call them debates when they did this years ago. We called them cattle shows.

Which these are?

Yeah. I mean you line up eight or 10 people, put them all on the stage, and they give their little speechlets, and that’s it. That’s why we spend a week reading about the great war between Hillary [Clinton] and Barack over whether it was a sign of inexperience that he said he’d talk to some dictators. If you think that’s tough politics, you haven’t watched politics for very long. But when you are dealing with the thin gruel that comes out of these overlong, overpopulated forums, that’s as good as you can do.

Well, and very few people are watching right now. It’s mainly the junkies.

I am a junkie, and I can’t sit through the whole thing.

No.

I mean it just drives you crazy.

But when we get down to two Republicans and two Democrats and then have the debates — we have interviewed Frank Fahrenkopf and Paul Kirk, and [this is likely] going to be their last go-around. And they of course say that they are sure that the candidates are going to agree [to debate]. And there is probably good reason to think there will be two or three presidential and one vice presidential [debate], because there is a lot at stake, but with one moderator like Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill, or something, and not eight people on the stage.

And I guess that was the basis that I was going to ask. Rather than the huge number up there on the platform all giving their little speeches, when it gets down to just two in the fall, could this be a make or break thing?

I agree that there certainly will be debates. I think it’s institutionalized now in that there is no way for a candidate to avoid them, even if he or she wanted to. There is really no way to answer that question. You don’t know what’s really going to happen. I mean it’s like Bob Dole stepping on his tongue with the Democrat wars, or Dan Quayle, who was actually doing quite well in the vice presidential debate until he made the John Kennedy comment.

And I can add a post script there, because I do know from my Texas experience, knowing Lloyd Bentsen. And I didn’t know at the time, but he and Jack Kennedy were never good friends.

Oh, no.

I mean they knew each other in the House, but that was about it.

I don’t think they liked each other.

No. I think Bentsen was just waiting for Quayle to say something about that.

Well, Quayle had used that line before on the campaign. And his people had told him, “Don’t say this in the debate.”

But he did anyway.

Dan did anyway.

And Bentsen was no dumbbell. And he leaped on it. And, of course, you would think in the next few days that somebody in the Republican hierarchy would have blistered Bentsen for saying [that he was friends with Kennedy.] Let’s talk about what this friendship was all about, because Bentsen was a conservative Democrat and Kennedy liberal, and they weren’t friends at all.

Yeah, but there was no way that that was retrievable. That’s the thing about debates.

Too many people have seen it.

Once there is a bumper sticker line like that, that’s something that can’t be eradicated or even eased, I think. So that’s why it’s impossible to say whether the autumn debates are going to be a big deal or not, because you don’t know what’s going to be said. I think that it would be useful.

John Edwards was absolutely right in this comment that got Mike Gravel, the great senator from Alaska, so exercised, by saying, “We really need to sit down with people who are invested in this process and serious about it.” And how you do that, I don’t know. If you go back to the League of Women Voters rules, they say there is a point at which your national standing in the polls is so low, we are not going to include you. That might be a way to get some meaningful dialogue between people who have a practical plausibility [of winning].

Well, it may be cynical to suggest this, Walter. But there is a feeling that some of these candidates who, let’s face it, really haven’t got a prayer to be nominated — I am thinking primarily of Ron Paul on the Republican side and maybe Gravel [on the Democratic side] — but because they are seen on television, can fatten up their speaking request fees.

Well, Ron Paul fattened up his campaign treasury. I mean the libertarian viewpoint, which if you go all the way back to Barry Goldwater, whom I mentioned earlier, Goldwater wasn’t a conservative in the sense of the people who are calling themselves conservatives now. He was a libertarian. And had a very popular viewpoint in this society, but it’s blurred into neo-cons and all of that stuff.

Yeah. Paul even got a, I would almost call it a favorable, piece in The New York Times Sunday magazine. And those pages are probably worth weight in gold to a libertarian.

Sure.

And he may seek their presidential nomination and may get it, whether he wants it or not once this is over.

Well Walter, a couple of other questions. Your reputation as a journalist and your unwillingness, when asked, to talk about who you were for and all of that, was a symbol for a lot of journalists from our era. And it seems like it’s becoming more difficult all of the time. I am not casting aspersions on anybody here, but for people to be labeled as liberal or conservative, I am talking about people, journalists, to be drawn into a discussion about who you are for.

Why is that? Is it just the pressure of journalists getting out and making a speech and being asked about, well, who did you vote for? It would seem to me it’s an easy answer for a journalist: “I am interested in who you are voting for, but I am not going to tell you in any way, shape, or form who I voted for.”

Or anybody else. I think it’s television. I mean we have been talking about politicians and money; look at quasi-journalists and money. The speech fees flow from the television. The television wants a viewpoint. They don’t want a dispassionate questioner. You remember Larry Spivak on Meet the Press, he always opened it by saying the questioners on this panel are impartial and don’t read anything into their questions. They are just trying to get a story for you.

We are a long way from that now. I used to do, my first years in covering politics in Washington, a good many of those panelist shows. And the role of the panelist was to ask dispassionate questions. Now it has become a matter of commentary. And as soon as you get into that, you get into taking sides.

Yeah. There was a survey that was done — I think AEI [the American Enterprise Institute] published it. And I remember getting the questionnaire — you probably did too — asking me who I voted for in the Nixon-McGovern race. I remember there were a lot of questions. And I sent it back. I said: “I have no interest in answering this questionnaire. And any self-respecting journalist would feel the same way.”

Well, of course, some did answer it. And it was something like 90 percent for McGovern. And that was published. And conservatives have been using that as a whipping boy ever since.

Yes.

But I would guess that 90 percent of journalists were a very small number who didn’t think about what they were doing when they [filled it out].

Yeah, with the size of the sample. I got it and considered it junk mail and threw it away.

Tossed it away. That’s right.

But I think the rise of so many television outlets and of cable and all of that stuff has put a premium on commentary. And that leads to people either taking sides or appearing to take sides. I mean it’s possible to write commentary without taking a position on individuals, candidates, or whatever. It’s very hard to talk it. It’s very hard to do that on the spur of the moment with a camera in your face.

And some of our better-financed colleagues have made an awful lot of money making speeches, which flow from appearances on television. And in both instances, you don’t get those forums and those honorariums if you are a down-the-middle, dispassionate, straight-faced [journalist]. I guess that’s kind of dull. But that’s what we are supposed to be. We are supposed to be a transmission belt, not a product.