Q: We’ve talked some about the conventions, but I wonder, could you compare the two conventions in terms of which was more effective in [01:02:00] advancing the campaign.
BALZ: Yeah, you know, I think we always slightly exaggerate this after the fact. So, take that as a starting point on what I say. But the Bush campaign — the Bush convention was a more successful convention, because they knew what the message was. Again, you know, they were there at 9/11, they wanted to draw that focus, rather than purely Iraq. They used, on opening night, they used Mayor Giuliani, and I think the opening night, also, was John McCain, who had obviously been a rival of President Bush, and that relationship was uneasy, and yet both Giuliani and McCain vouched for President Bush as a leader, and as somebody who could keep the country safe. They kept the focus on that, as other people raised questions about John Kerry. [01:03:00] Kerry was trying to use Vietnam as a shield against attacks that he wouldn’t keep the country safe. He was trying to use, you know, quite credible service in Vietnam as a way to say I’ve been there, you know, I’ve seen war, I know what war does. You can trust me; I’m not going to go to war irrationally. I will make decisions that are in the best interest of the country. But I don’t think, in the end, they were able to successfully get that message framed as well as they wanted to, and then, of course, immediately after that came the Swift Boat attacks which really went after Kerry very, very hard. And which he did not respond quickly enough or effectively enough to kind of put that off. So, it set up the convention for President Bush to have a pretty good convention.
Q: Let’s talk about the Swift Boat ads, [01:04:00] and when you first saw those, did you think they were going to be effective, or that they were just beyond the pale…
BALZ: I think I probably underestimated them at the moment. You know, in part because, you know, you’re in between conventions. Again, you think this is a period when, you know, it’s kind of a down moment in the campaign, people aren’t paying attention, people are on vacation, it’s summer, the convention is a big moment, you know, the Democrats have just had it, the Olympics are somewhere in the middle of all of that, you don’t know how big a media buy this is going to be by an outside group. So, your first inclination is probably, boy, that’s a tough ad, may not hold up to scrutiny, you know, it may not — it can be rebutted. So, I’d say I think initially, my sense was this might not be that effective, but it turned out to be quite effective. And in part because the Kerry campaign was very slow off the mark [01:05:00] to deal with it. And that, to me, has always been a puzzle, because you know, in a sense, we’ve seen this before. I mean, the attacks on Michael Dukakis that came, you know, in 1988, that he didn’t respond to in the August period, whether it was pledge of allegiance, or, you know, things like that. You know, another Massachusetts politician, it’s a rerun of that, and yet, they — I think that they felt that the ads were either unfair or not true, and so — thought that the general public would come to the same conclusion. But, you know, in campaigns, you can never take that for granted, you have to be willing to respond, and they paid a price for that.
Q: Now, the Swift Boat ads were one of many that year that were put on the air by this new thing called 527s, or at least newly-prominent thing called 527s. What’s all that about, and does it have something to do with [01:06:00] what was meant to be a reform of campaign finance, the McCain-Feingold Act from 2002?
BALZ: Yes, I mean, you know, with every action, you know, there’s a reaction, or there are unintended consequences of all reforms. And one of the consequences of the McCain-Feingold Act, and the decline of so-called soft money, unlimited contributions to the parties was that there was a way for outside groups to collect this kind of money in very, very big contributions. And so, it created outside organizations with tremendous resources that the candidates didn’t have any particular control over, and that could put up messages, could air television campaigns, and they’re most effective at doing that, they’re not particularly good at get out the vote operations. I mean, to the extent that these outside groups are influential, it’s because they can put television commercials on the air, and do it effectively. [01:07:00] So, you know, that was the first that we really saw the effectiveness of what these 527s could do. Now, you know, we’ve iterated beyond that to the so-called Super PACs, and Super PACs that, in fact, are closely tied to a candidate, in the way that the 527s were not. They may have worked on behalf of a candidate, but they didn’t — you know, they weren’t explicitly in Mitt Romney’s camp the way that — or the Priorities USA was for President Obama in 2012. So, you know, the degree to which campaign finance reform has sort of neutered the party’s ability to raise and spend money, it has empowered these outside groups, and they’re a force to be reckoned with. You could argue about, ultimately, their influence, particularly in 2012, whether it was significant or not, but certainly, the Swift Boat ads were one where they were effective.
Q: So, McCain-Feingold [01:08:00] tells people who want to write big checks, you can’t write big checks to parties anymore, so they start writing them to these new independent — so-called independent — legally independent…
BALZ: Quasi-independent groups. (laughter) Yeah.
Q: Do campaigns — I mean, you described the Bush campaign, and you’d probably say the same about the Kerry campaign is, you know, wanting to craft a message, execute a strategy, and then there are these 527s, who are doing their own thing, or are they? People always suspect that, you know, there’s some collusion somehow. But my question is, were the 527s always helping the campaigns that they were trying to help?
BALZ: Well, the campaigns will always say no. The campaign’s view is that even if this is a group that believes it’s helping us, it’s not necessarily helping us because we want to craft our message, we want to decide when to put forward what message. And the degree to which there’s kind of, you know, interference [01:09:00] with that from some outside group, even if they’re promoting your candidacy, the candidates will all say it’s unhelpful. We’d rather have all that money and do it ourselves. And in fact, in 2008, the Obama campaign was very clear they did not want Super PACs doing their bidding. They wanted everything in-house. They wanted to keep control of all of the money. That’s one of the reasons that they opted out of public financing in the general election when they had clearly indicated that if McCain stayed in, they were likely to stay in. They made a different decision. And I think part of it was they knew they could raise a lot of money, and that if they had tons of money, they could, in a sense, starve the Super PACs by getting all of the money directed at them, and they would have control over their message. Now, by 2012, what we’ve seen [01:10:00] is, you know, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama both raised, you know, in the neighborhood of $1 billion, and you still had Super PACs who collectively were raising similar amounts of money. So, you know, the system is completely broken down now in terms of the money. So, that’s always one of the considerations. But nonetheless, these outside groups, whether they were the 527s or the Super PACs, as they’re not constituted, you know, if you have a lot of money, you know, you can get in the game, and that’s what they did.