Q: There was a big media story in the fall 2004 campaign, and that was when CBS News reported that George W. Bush had shirked his responsibilities in the Air National Guard [01:22:00] as a young man during the Vietnam War. That became a big story, and then it became a different kind of big story. Can you comment on that?
BALZ: Well, I can, yeah. I mean, my memory’s a little hazy. But, you know, it was a very big story. I mean, the question about what Bush had done during Vietnam was an issue in his first campaign. You know, why didn’t he go to Vietnam, had he gotten some kind of preferential treatment, you know, in the same way that the draft issue dogged Bill Clinton in 1992. Anybody who’s of that age, you know, is going to face that. When you are running against somebody who had gone to Vietnam, who had been a decorated Vietnam veteran, and you had not, that issue is likely to come back. And it did, and, you know, when it first surfaced, it was a very tough [01:23:00] story. But, you know, as we know, it turned out not to be correct, it turned out to be based on bad information, for which CBS paid a real price once it became clear what had happened. And, you know, it’s a lesson to everybody in journalism that, you know, you have to not just check and double check, you’ve got to triple check. And particularly when it is a story that has been looked at a number of times, it isn’t as though this was the first time that somebody looked at Bush’s record. And while people still had questions about it, many of those questions had been, you know, answered to the satisfaction of most people. They still may have disagreed with what he did during Vietnam, or the decisions he made about what he did, but this took it to another level, and as I say, CBS paid a real price for it once, you know, everything shook [01:24:00] out.
Q: You know, presidents running for reelection, even when they win by landslides, seldom have anything that we would call coattails. Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, none of them — they all got reelected pretty handily, but their party’s candidates for Congress didn’t do especially well. Bush had been quoted as having told his campaign team, “I don’t want a lonely victory or a lonely landslide. I don’t want 55%, if we can win with 51% and bring in some Republicans into the Senate into the House,” which happened, especially in the Senate election. Did you see that covering that election, that Bush was, more that most reelection-seeking presidents, intentionally doing things to help his party’s down ticket candidates?
BALZ: Well, I had been told about that particular comment that he had made fairly early on [01:25:00] in the election. I can’t remember when I wrote it, but probably wrote it — well, I don’t know when, that I had been told that he had said exactly that. “I don’t want to get here by myself. If there are things we can do to increase my party’s strength in the Congress, I want to do that.” This was part of, I think, you know, the overall Rove strategy of kind of a rolling realignment in American politics. Karl Rove does not believe — did not believe in the Big Bang Theory of realignment, that there are elections in which, boom, everything — you know, the chess board is overthrown, and everything is new, and the balance is completely different. His view is bit by bit, a party can change the balance of power. And they saw 2004, because [01:26:00] you know, you had seen so much happening, kind of underneath, with the realignment of the South in particular, down below the level of the presidency, you know, which really took hold in 1994, Rove and Bush both understood this, because they had been through it in Texas. They had seen Texas go from a one-party dominated Democratic state to a state that, by the time he left office as president, had become a very red Republican-dominated state. They knew that that had taken place over a period of many years, and that it was a succession of victories that built upon previous victories. And so, they saw ’04 as a moment in which they could begin to do that significantly at the national level. And so, that was their goal, their goal was not simply to win reelection, but to put in a foundation that, [01:27:00] over succeeding years, could create what they described as a durable Republican majority, not a realignment, and not something that would last forever, because, you know, nothing lasts forever in American politics. But that for a period of years, the Republicans in Washington, and in the states, would be the majority party.
Q: And what did they do to execute that goal? How was the campaign different because of that?
BALZ: Well, I mean, I think they paid more attention to candidate recruitment that was going on. There was more integration with the Republican National Committee. They worked hand in glove with state parties to coordinate things in a way that probably some campaigns had not done. I mean, presidential campaigns are often very selfish. It’s the nature of the beast. And I think that the Bush campaign was as selfish as it needed to be to win, but it was also thinking about this other side of it that the more we can bring in like-minded people into Congress, the more we’re going to [01:28:00] be able to get done in a second term, and the more we’re able to get done in a second term, the better off we’re going to be as our party goes into the midterms in 2006 and the 2008 presidential election. Now, as we know, it all came apart in 2006. So, you know, the best-laid plans in ’04, you know, conditions changed, and events changed, and their position was seriously eroded. But that was their goal.
Q: Did that have anything to do with why they took federal funding for the general election campaign, to not soak up all of the money that would therefore be free to go to down-ballot candidates?
BALZ: Yeah, I think that that was part of it. You know, I think that they felt that, in the great scheme of things, A, it would be beneficial for others to be able to raise and spend that money, but also that it was — if they jumped out of that system entirely, it would leave them open to criticism both for shredding the [01:29:00] public financing system, but for being all in it themselves.
Q: On election night — or on election day, the exit polls were sort of coming out in various phases of the day, and even as late as, I think, 5:30 or so, really seemed to be pointing to a Kerry victory.
BALZ: They did. The early wave was not good, Ohio was way off; as I recall, there were some other states that weren’t good. I remember that the Bush people looked at some of the internals of those, and thought that the demographics of the internals did not add up to something real. I mean, that there were just some oddities about what they were seeing in the internals. But nonetheless, the individual state numbers were very worrisome to them. They were not so good.
Q: I wonder, because people rely so much on those exit polls and interpreting why the election turned out the way it did. I mean, was this kind of [01:30:00] a warning sign, that exit polls are not reliable.
BALZ: Well, I mean, 2000 should’ve been a warning sign to all of us to be careful of anything until you get all of the vote. (laughter) I mean, we were all on the cusp of calling this election for George W. Bush on election night 2000, and mercifully kind of pulled back from the brink just in time. That was a warning. But, you know, we’re all creatures of these numbers. And as a friend of mine once said, only half-jokingly, bad data is better than no data. And so, you know, we’ve all been schooled by the pollsters in-house here. Just be careful of that first wave. Just remember that that first wave is dirty. But when you see those numbers, [01:31:00] it’s like this message goes through the whole political community. And everybody begins to think that that’s reality. And you could see that happening on election night 2004. I think it’s particularly difficult for people in television who have to talk in real-time, and they get misled by those early numbers, and they sort of begin to shape their commentary, even before they know they’re allowed to say what’s really happening, they begin to interpret everything else in the context of those. And the Kerry people were clearly misled by it. I mean, people were calling Senator Kerry Mr. President in the early evening of election night 2004 until things began to change.