Q: While we’re doing comparisons, could you compare John Kerry to other Democratic candidates you’ve covered?
BALZ: Well — boy, that’s an interesting question. Kerry is a man of great self-confidence. And he believed through that campaign that he was the best person to win the nomination. And he went through a very tough period, particularly in the late summer and fall of 2003, when it looked like he, the nominal frontrunner, was letting the campaign slip away, and Howard Dean was on the rise. But there was a determination about Kerry, he was — you know, he was not at all like Bill Clinton, he was not as natural a campaigner as Bill Clinton, he was stiffer, somewhat more reserved in that respect than Bill Clinton. He’s not Barack Obama either. [00:17:00] I don’t think he was ever able to kind of galvanize in the way Barack Obama did, certainly in 2007 and even in 2006 before he was a candidate, kind of galvanize people with this sense of hope and inspiration. But nonetheless, he brought to that campaign quite enormous amount of experience in the Senate with a lot of different issues, including foreign policy. I mean, you could argue that he was very well prepared on foreign policy when he ran in 2004.
Q: How would you compare him with Bush’s other adversary, Gore, in 2000?
BALZ: Well…
Q: You mentioned Kerry —
BALZ: Yeah.
Q: — you used the word that’s often used with Gore, sort of stiff.
BALZ: Yeah, I mean, there was a similarity between Gore and Kerry in that, you know, Gore, a little bit wooden as a candidate, as was Kerry. You know, I think that both of them had similar instincts on policy, they were probably pretty close to one another. [00:18:00] Al Gore was thought to be, kind of, a new Democrat, but in many ways, he was a populist, you know, a southern populist Democrat, more so than Bill Clinton, who I think was genuinely more of a “New Democrat.” And so, I think that in some ways, Governor Bush, and then President Bush, was helped by the fact that the challengers in both of those races were not seen as, kind of, natural candidates as he was. I mean, Bush had a kind of looseness about him that the other two didn’t. And I think that in an era when people make some of the decisions on kind of how comfortable am I with this person, do I want this person, you know, “in my living room” for the next four years, that he was able to, you know, put himself in a better place than either Gore or Kerry was able to do.
Q: Well, let me ask you this, thinking first about Bush and then about Kerry. What is it that is widely thought to be true about George W. Bush that doesn’t square with what you observed of him as a candidate, and — observed of him personally?
BALZ: Well, you know, this notion that Bush was not particularly smart. You know, George Bush was a smart, smart man, is a smart man. And it’s one of the reasons he was underestimated. And I think, you know, he knew that and he used it, he used it effectively. But he was a shrewd political thinker, and I think, you know, he knew what he didn’t know, which is, I think, an important thing for anybody who’s a chief executive. And so, this notion, you know, that Dick Cheney ran the Bush presidency, I never really subscribed to that, and I think the book that Peter Baker recently published, Days of Fire, explains [00:20:00] quite well why that kind of stereotype was simply not the case.
Q: And same question about John Kerry. What do people assume or think about Kerry that you’ve observed to be different in reality?
BALZ: That’s a harder question to answer. I mean, I think that — I never knew Kerry as well as I had gotten to know Bush, so it’s a harder question for me to answer.
Q: Let’s turn to the Democrats in ’04, and you said the campaign really began after the 2002 midterm. Two thousand three was, you know, the year of John — Howard Dean. How do you account for the Dean phenomenon, that he rose from such obscurity to frontrunner status by the end of that year?
BALZ: Well, I mean, he expressed it, I thought, you know, very succinctly. Which is, he presented himself as the representative of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, which [00:21:00] is to say that there was a great deal of unrest within the Democratic Party over the Iraq war, as we well know. And Howard Dean captured that in a way that no other candidate did. He hit it early, and he built a following based on that. John Kerry, of course, had supported the resolution authorizing the Iraq war. Howard Dean didn’t have a vote on that, but when he got into the campaign, was quite critical of it. And there was a part of the Democratic Party that wanted to hear that message. And Dean was in a better position to deliver that message than anybody else in the race of note. And so, he was able to galvanize that, he was able to raise money off of that. He tapped into small donors and grassroots operation. They kind of were a forerunner of some of the things that Barack Obama’s team did in 2008, in terms of fundraising on the internet. [00:22:00] And, you know, he had a directness as a candidate that I think was something that people were responding to within the Democratic Party.