Transcription – Dan Balz Interview

Q: Well, let’s pivot to the Bush side of this election. Basically, the same team in ‘04, all the way through from 2000, right? I mean, [00:52:00] Rove is in the White House, Ken Mehlman is now RNC chair, but Matthew — I mean, Nicole Devenish, that whole team remains intact.

BALZ: Karen Hughes, the whole group. Yeah, it’s one of the remarkable things about the Bush operation. And I think it’s a hallmark of successful campaigns that you have a group of people around a candidate who have loyalty to that candidate, who have long and deep ties to that candidate, and who are prepared to, you know, go through thick and thin. You know, we all remember when McCain won that New Hampshire Primary in 2000 convincingly over George W. Bush, there was all this talk about, will Bush shake up the staff, which is not unheard of. I mean, Ronald Reagan shook up his staff in 1980, just as he was winning the New Hampshire Primary, having lost the Iowa Caucuses. So, it’s not unheard of. [00:53:00] But there was really no thought of this, as I understand it, with George W. Bush in 2000. It was all right, you know, we got our backside kicked in this, but we’ve got to figure out a way to come back, and I’m not going to heave people overboard. This is my team, I’ve got confidence in you, you know, we all let down in this, and we’ve got to come back. So, when you get to 2004, you’ve got a team that’s very experienced, and they know how to work together. This is not a team that was not without rivalries and disagreements. I mean, all successful or losing campaigns have, you know, intra-staff conflict. But this was a very effective campaign. I’ll just begin as a side note, when Haynes Johnson and I did our book about the 2008 campaign, and we were going around talking about the book, we would often get asked, was the Obama ’08 campaign the best — [00:54:00] you know, the best-run campaign you’ve ever seen? And there was a lot to say yes about. I mean, they had obviously — you know, they had defeated the mighty Clinton machine in the 2008 nomination process, and so — and they were groundbreakers on social media, and things like that. But I said, you know, you could make the argument that the Obama ’08 campaign was the best, but I said, you could make an argument that the Bush ’04 campaign was the best. Because, you know, Obama did not face, what I would say, was a serious general election challenge. He obviously faced a big primary season campaign, whereas, Bush was in a very difficult struggle, and that you could argue that they won a campaign that they had no right to win in 2004, and that it was in part because of the success of, you know, both the candidate, particularly in that final stretch, but also the team around him who put together, I thought, a very effective campaign.

Q: Well, apart from their experience, and their experience working together, what made the Bush team so good?

BALZ: Well, I mean, they had both a strategic vision, which all good campaigns have to have. They had…

Q: And that vision was…

BALZ: Well, that vision was that 2004 is not 2000; we cannot rerun the campaign that we ran in 2000. Mark McKinnon always had a funny line, which was the challenge they had in 2000 was, you know, the country was in pretty good shape, and yet they were saying, you know, we need something new. That, you know, in essence the bumper sticker was, things are great, time for a change. Yet, in ’04 it was just the opposite; you know, people are unhappy, stay the course. And they had to figure out a way to make that campaign about things that would put the president in a stronger light, and they were able to do that. I mean, they built on the idea that you may not agree with President Bush on a lot of things, particularly Iraq, [00:56:00] but you know where he stands, and he’s a leader. And he is somebody who will have a vision about where he is going, and he’ll be very direct about what he’s going to do. So, that was, I think, part of it was to have a strategic understanding of what was possible and how you would sort of maximize whatever advantages you could find. I think the second was they understood that this was going to be a battle for every vote, and that they had to find a way to maximize the turnout. And I think that they did two things. One was they knew that, in large part, that this was going to be a campaign of who got their base out. That, you know, they had to increase the percentage of the Republicans who participated in the election vis-à-vis the Democrats. They had to bring that closer to parity than it had been in past elections, and they were successful in doing that. So, they put a lot of effort [00:57:00] into finding ways to keep the base motivated. But the second thing they did, and I think this is partly Karl Rove, and it’s partly Matthew Dowd, and it’s partly Ken Mehlman; their view was, one of the things we have to do is pick off parts of the Democratic constituencies. We have to do a little bit better with Hispanic voters than we did the last time. We have to do a little bit better with female voters, suburban females. We have to do a little bit better with these kinds of groups in order to get to 50.1%. And so, it wasn’t an either/or; it wasn’t a base versus swing voters. It wasn’t, say, well, if we get the independent vote, we’ll be fine. It was, the base is crucial, it’s absolutely crucial. But at the same time, it’s not necessarily sufficient, and we’ve got to find some ways to peel off part of the Democratic vote.

Q: With that first point you made about the [00:58:00] presenting President Bush as somebody who, even if you don’t agree with him, you know where he stands, they really used Senator Kerry as a foil in that way, didn’t they?

BALZ: Right, the I voted — “I actually voted for it before I voted against it,” line about the money for the war. You know, that was a gift that John Kerry gave to George W. Bush and his campaign. And they understood that was a gift the instant that they heard it. You know, this happened out in West Virginia, when Kerry was campaigning out there, and uttered those words. You know, the Bush campaign always wanted to run against Kerry as somebody who was a flip-flopper, somebody who had no core convictions. And, you know, as we talked earlier, if you’re a senator, you’re probably on different sides of issues over the years, and there’s things [00:59:00] that are often manufactured in campaigns, as we’ve seen, that are not necessarily — you know, that are often a distortion of where a person stands, but you can manufacture somebody’s record into that. They felt that there was enough in the record legitimately, but this was kind of a perfect illustration of it. It seemed a kind of crass decision on Kerry’s part to flip-flop on that particular vote. And so, you know, they just seized on that, and hit it very, very hard.

Q: And then he goes windsurfing a few months later.

BALZ: (laughter) Well, you know, Kerry’s problem, to the extent it was a real problem, was that some people thought he was an elitist. And I think all candidates suffer from stereotypes and caricatures. Some are fair, and some are unfair. You know, Mitt Romney suffered from that in the 2012 campaign, but when John Kerry went windsurfing, you know, most people don’t windsurf off Nantucket. [01:00:00] And so, it was something, again, that the Bush campaign seized upon to drive home a message. Now, you know, the Kerry campaign had things about George W. Bush that, you know, they could go after him on. But the Bush campaign, you know, was very driven. I mean, this wasn’t the most positive of campaigns that we’ve ever seen, and modern campaigns aren’t, by any stretch of the imagination. But part of their strategy was to make people uneasy with John Kerry, because people were already uneasy with George W. Bush.

Q: It seemed like a big issue in the campaign, in terms of each candidate trying to frame the election differently, was, was the war in Iraq part of the war on terror, or was it a departure from the war on terror. Who won that argument?

BALZ: Well, you know, you would have to say that ultimately George W. Bush lost the argument on Iraq. [01:01:00] And that was happening during the campaign. You could see public opinion moving against the Iraq war, starting in the spring of ’04, and continuing through the election, and then after the election, continuing on. But I think where Bush was able to be successful was to, in some ways, kind of divorce issues purely about public feelings about Iraq to go to the broader question of he’s kept you safe. We’ve not had another terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11, and he has been singularly focused on that. And, you know, that was persuasive enough to help him get through that election.