Q:                    And it’s interesting because if you look at the list of battleground states in the presidential election, there’s not a whole lot of overlap with the open seat —

TIMMONS:      Yeah.  (laughter)

Q:                    — Senate elections that year.

TIMMONS:      Right.

Q:                    So, I’m thinking, every minute that Bush spent in Florida or —

TIMMONS:      Right.

Q:                    Bad example.

TIMMONS:      Florida is actually a bad example.

Q:                    Bad example, but you know what I’m talking about.

TIMMONS:      And he did spend a lot of time down there with our candidate in Florida. (laughter) There was some overlap.

Q:                    Bad example on my part, but South Carolina, North Carolina.

TIMMONS:      Right, right.

Q:                    Was time away from —

TIMMONS:      Oklahoma.

Q:                    Oklahoma, was time away from the most efficient use of his —

TIMMONS:      The battleground states [00:16:00] for the presidential, right.

Q:                    So, I guess my question is, not only did you think of the Bush campaign as interested in winning a Republican majority in ’04, but building an enduring Republican majority, kind of equivalent to the — what had been the New Deal Democratic majority.  Did you get the sense that you were doing — you were laying a foundation for a hoped-for…

TIMMONS:      Yeah, there was no question —

Q:                    Future?

TIMMONS:      — about that.  There was absolutely the hope that this would be — this would translate into a generational majority.  Ronald Reagan did it; as you noted, FDR did it; maybe to some degree [John F.] Kennedy did it.  I would argue that Bill Clinton was somewhat successful in doing that as well.  So this was, I think, the hope by a lot of folks.  Maybe we didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a hope that we were building something that was sustainable.  It wasn’t, but we had hoped that it would.

Q:                    Yeah.  Well, if you don’t mind, could we talk [00:17:00] about some of these individual —

TIMMONS:      Sure.

Q:                    — races, and we could start out, roughly, alphabetical, but…

TIMMONS:      Now, you’re really testing my memory here. (laughter)

Q:                    (laughter) Well, we will go as far as we can, again starting with the As, and Alaska, here you had…

TIMMONS:      Lisa Murkowski, who was appointed by her father to take a Senate seat.  The charges of nepotism were rampant in the state, and I think, you know, it was 10 years later, and I think Lisa Murkowski has proven that those charges were very unfounded because she is — she is an extraordinary senator and I think most people knew that if they had seen her in action.  She had been a leader in the general assembly in Alaska, so obviously, she was not new to politics, but she had to prove to the voters that she could stand on her own.  So she had a really rough primary.

I had [00:18:00] two trips to Alaska, myself.  One of them was in 2003 to talk to prospective primary candidates, one of whom lived in Wasilla, Alaska, and got to have a Diet Coke, at the local Woolworth’s with Sarah Palin and chat with her about her ambitions and came back and said, “Wow, if she runs, we’re going to have our hands full.  This is going to be a problem.”  We were fortunate that she did not run at that point, obviously.  But there were other candidates that were looking at the race and decided against it.  Ultimately, she had one primary opponent, and it was a pretty difficult primary.  Her ground game was not as strong as it needed to be.

When I went up in 2004, we brought some reinforcements from the NRSC who stayed on the ground to help ensure that all of those people who were out there who really liked what they saw in Lisa Murkowski were helping to spread the word to their friends and their neighbors. [00:19:00] And ultimately, she obviously prevailed in the nomination.

Q:                    And she had — I’m sorry, she had a tough opponent in the general, too.

TIMMONS:     And then in the general election, a former governor, Tony Knowles, extraordinarily popular guy, but it was — you know, there was a little bit of luck in that Alaska is — at that point tended to be a fairly reliably — reliable Republican state, if you didn’t have other issues to contend with.  Obviously, the issue was the appointment by her father.  That certainly helped propel her for her first victory.  I also think, though, that in the end, she had a stronger ground game.  She was very active and strong with the native population and she was extraordinarily well known in the Anchorage area as well, so I think that helped her out tremendously.

Q:                    And that was one — if you were a Democrat planning how you were going to get to a majority, that was a big one to lose.

TIMMONS:      You had to have Alaska, yeah. [00:20:00]