Q: You’ve covered, I’m sure, some of these precinct [00:32:00] caucuses in Iowa, personally.
BALZ: Very few.
Q: OK.
BALZ: I mean, I’ll tell you why, because every election night, I’m sitting writing the story, and so I never get out to actually go see a caucus. (laughter)
Q: OK. Well, you mentioned Gephardt, you know, both he and Joe Lieberman were candidates who sought the president — or been on a national campaign before. And neither one of them really got very far in ’04. Any explanation for that?
BALZ: I mentioned…
Q: Lieberman, I know, didn’t enter Iowa, but…
BALZ: I mentioned that I had done, kind of, an informal focus group in early 2003 of activists. These were not average voters, they were activists, in the Cedar Rapids area. And my takeaway from that focus group, and I wrote it at the time, was that Gephardt had problems in Iowa when people thought [00:33:00] he was the frontrunner. And the reason for that was, when you talked to people about what they were looking for, they were looking for something fresh, and they did not think that Dick Gephardt was the fresh candidate. I mean, he had deep ties to the state, he had deep ties to constituencies in the Democratic Party, particularly organized labor, but when you talked to activists, their view was, you know, we’re looking for something different. And so, I think that he always struggled against that kind of perception that if the party was going to move forward, they had to find a fresh face, they had to try something different. So, I think that was the problem. I think with Lieberman, I think Senator Lieberman’s problem was that he was just ideologically out of sync with the Democratic Party. He might well have been a strong general election candidate, but he was not an effective candidate inside the Democratic Party, particularly a party dominated by the Left. And the campaign reflected that, [00:34:00] it was a campaign that was just kind of out of sorts and out of sync.
Q: I have heard and read Kerry people saying that after they won Iowa, essentially, Kerry was unbeatable. Do you agree with that?
BALZ: I do agree with that. I mean, I think that Howard Dean had a moment to try to put it back together in New Hampshire, and they had spent an enormous amount of time building what had been a pretty good organization there. They had a person there in charge named Karen Hicks, and Karen was a first-rate organizer. And they had done just some very serious work. But once the air comes out of a presidential candidate’s candidacy, it’s hard to pump it back up quickly. And I think that, you know, there’s not a lot of time between the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary, it’s usually an eight-day stretch, and sometimes less. And, you know, he came back a little bit, but he could not come back all the way. And I think that once that happened, there was nowhere else for him to go. [00:35:00] And Kerry had the financial resources that nobody else, other than Dean, had. He had had establishment support. I mean, there were people who were behind him early on who kind of got nervous as he struggled through the summer and fall of 2003, but once he began to win, you know, winning begets winning. And, you know, he was able to almost run the table after Iowa and New Hampshire. I mean, John Edwards, as I recall, won South Carolina, I think General Clark won Oklahoma after that. But if you look at the great sweep of things, Kerry was on a roll after Iowa, and was pretty unstoppable.
Q: And was Edwards from that point on, do you think, running for vice president?
BALZ: Well, Edwards was a man of enormous ambition, and so I would say yes. You know, I don’t know that for a fact, but you would have to believe that once it was clear to him that he was not going to be the nominee, that he very much wanted to be [00:36:00] the number two person on the ticket, yes.
Q: I was thinking of Bush versus Reagan in ’80, the campaign you covered. Sort of, not going too far once he realized he was going to lose.
BALZ: Well, that 1980 campaign, though, was interesting, because it was Jim Baker who really pulled the plug on George H. W. Bush, not the candidate himself. I mean, it was Baker’s decision. And I think done to preserve the possibility that he could be on the ticket, to not carry that fight any farther than they did. I mean, there’s a point beyond which you don’t want to go as a challenger if you want to, you know, maintain good relations with the nominee. And so, Jim Baker basically said, you know, we’re out, before the candidate, probably, was ready to say I’m done.
Q: Edwards, do you have any insight into why Kerry chose him, and whether he was the best choice? [00:37:00]
BALZ: I think Kerry felt that he was a strong campaigner. I think he thought that they would complement one another. I think that he thought that the growth that John Edwards had shown as a candidate, I mean, after all, he was a still relatively new senator, that the growth he had shown on the national stage would continue. I think, after the campaign was over, I think he had some regrets about having picked Edwards. That relationship deteriorated pretty quickly after the ’04 campaign. But I think at the time, he felt that he would put them in the strongest position to be able to win the general election.
Q: How did he think Edwards would complement him, complement with an E, not an I. (laughter)
BALZ: Right. (laughter) That’s right! Southerner, younger, you know, sort of that [00:38:00] populist message on the economy that would complement Kerry’s experience. So, I think that, you know, you can overthink this aspect of picking a vice president. You know, so much more used to go into balancing a ticket, I think that that notion, it’s not that it doesn’t play a role, but it plays a lesser role. I think over time, what we’ve seen is that the vice presidential pick is as much a governing pick as a political decision. I mean, obviously, there’s politics that goes into it, but a lot of it is who do I want at my side if I become president, and whose advice do I want to be listening to for four or eight years, and that affects the decision. So, there’s always some of that, and I think that the Gore decision with Joe Lieberman, probably, was, in many ways, a governing decision as much or more as been a political decision. My guess, and I’ve never asked Kerry or any of his people [00:39:00] about this, my guess is that the decision on John Edwards was as much political as it was governing.
Q: And you said afterward, there was — after the campaign, there was a kind of regret? Was that because of how Edwards comported himself during the campaign?
BALZ: Well, a little bit during, and somewhat after. I think that there was a feeling on the part of some of the Kerry people that Edwards appeared to be in it more for himself than for the ticket. And, you know, long before it was clear whether Kerry might try again in ’08, John Edwards was already out there, you know, running. I mean, if you remember, Joe Lieberman, he hung back in ’04, kind of waiting to see if Al Gore was going to decide to run again. He was clearly interested in running, but he didn’t take too many overt steps to launch his own candidacy until Al Gore said “I’m not going to run in ’04.” John Edwards, [00:40:00] as I recall, was in New Hampshire by February of 2005, starting to work the circuit already. And one person told me, who knew Kerry pretty well, that Kerry had said to him afterwards that in some ways, he wished he would’ve picked somebody different, maybe somebody like Dick Gephardt.
Q: And would that have been a better choice? Or were there better choices available?
BALZ: Well, you know, the Gephardt choice could have been an interesting choice. You know, again, Gephardt’s presidential campaign turned out not to be particularly effective, so you have to question about whether he would add much to the ticket in a general election. The argument that people made about him was that he would be able — he would have been more helpful than Edwards in some of the Midwestern battleground states, maybe could’ve helped win Ohio. But, you know, that’s speculation, there’s no way to really prove that. [00:41:00]