Transcription – Jay Timmons Interview

Q:                    I’m going to skip Colorado because I know that there’s a Kentucky connection there.  Let’s go down to Florida.  Five Democratic incumbents in the South retired that year, one of whom was Bob Graham in Florida.  How did that election play out?

TIMMONS:      So again,  we — this was one where we were recruiting heavily and Mel Martinez, the former Secretary of Housing in the Bush administration, was somebody that we very much wanted to run.  He had a great story.  He was well-known and very popular in the central part of the state, which was very key to a Republican victory, and we knew that he would be able to have a great message with the Hispanic community, particularly those who were of Cuban-American descent.  So when he finally decided to run, it was great news, late in the race.  I don’t remember how late it was, and as I recall, Florida was a pretty [00:21:00] late primary as well, so he entered the race fairly late and ended up winning the nomination — as I recall, handily; I can’t remember what the number was.  But then in the general election, we had a pretty difficult opponent in Betty Castor, who had been around and folks knew who she was.  She had a good profile for the state.  She had a good message for the state, but in the end, I think the connection, again, with the president, I think actually helped pull Mel over the victory line, and he did a lot better in the Miami-Dade area and Broward County than I think any Republican had done before that.  And I can remember sitting there all night long waiting for those numbers to come in, and we knew that that was going to be victory or defeat for Mel Martinez, and of course, it turned out to be a victory.

Q:                    He won by a little over a point. [00:22:00]

TIMMONS:      Right.

Q:                    And Bush…

TIMMONS:      He didn’t trail most of the night, but we knew going into that — the Broward County results, that that would matter.

Q:                    Did President Bush campaign with him a lot when he was down there?

TIMMONS:      As I recall, he did, yeah, because he — again, he was a member of his cabinet, so the connection was clearly there.

Q:                    Yeah.  George — although it turned out him not being a very competitive general, another example of a Democrat incumbent retiring, Zell Miller, who ended up speaking at the Republican convention.  What was that all about?

TIMMONS:      I can’t imagine being a Democrat in Georgia during that time, so you had your governor, your former governor, your former senator who always pledged allegiance to his party suddenly saying hey, let’s elect a Republican as president.  So that had to be a little bit demoralizing, and I think it’s one of the reasons that frankly, we didn’t really play in Georgia much, [00:23:00] other than to provide coordinated dollars to Johnny Isakson.  The state had turned very reliably Republican at that point, and we knew that that seat was going to be in our column.

Q:                    And he ended up winning pretty handily.

TIMMONS:      He did.

Q:                    Another Republican pickup.  Illinois, you know, here’s a Republican incumbent who retires, Peter Fitzgerald, and they’re off and running for a really eventful year.  Can you talk about your —

TIMMONS:      So I don’t think anybody solved the saw the results of either the Republican or the Democratic primary coming.  There were several candidates on the Democratic side.  A little-known state senator ended up emerging victorious, and I think a lot of folks thought that he wasn’t going to be a serious candidate.

Q:                    Whatever happened to — (laughter)

TIMMONS:      He’s now the President of the United States, so I think he was probably the most underestimated state senator in the history of the United States.  Jack Ryan ended up being the candidate that the Republicans nominated. [00:24:00] He was a very, very strong candidate and ended up with a lot of issues that no candidate wants to deal with publically; it had to do with his divorce years ago from a very well-known actress, and in my estimation, the party apparatus in the state was — terribly overreacted, and they didn’t handle the situation well at all.

Q:                    He wasn’t really their candidate anyway.

TIMMONS:      He wasn’t their candidate from the start, so it was a little power play, I think to show them — show the eventual nominee, who was boss, and they drove him out, and he resigned as the nominee.  And then, they nominated somebody from Maryland to run in Illinois, which was a disaster — a huge disaster, and it was a state that we frankly didn’t play in.  After the nomination, I think if Jack Ryan had continued to be the candidate, even though he had issues that he had [00:25:00] to deal with — and he had to deal with those; nobody else could deal with those issues except him in the media’s eyes.  I think it still would have been a very viable race against State Senator Obama, but that just wasn’t to be.  So once he left the race and the Marylander came in, it was pretty obvious that the Democrat was going to win that state.

Q:                    And in hindsight, I mean, one of the significant aspects of that election is that Barack Obama, once again, didn’t have to face a tough campaign, which meant four years later, he’s coming in pretty much unbloodied.

TIMMONS:      So in hindsight, you could say that the Republican Party was responsible for Barack Obama being President of the United States.

Q:                    What would have happened, do you —

TIMMONS:      Which I actually believe.  I really believe that had the Republican Party locally acted differently after the Republican primary and not stomped out of the room because their candidate wasn’t nominated, that there would have been a competitive race in Illinois.  And even if you had a competitive race, it might have been [00:26:00] tougher for the president to compete in 2008 in his primary against Hillary Clinton.

It’s really amazing, when you look back in history and you see what — you know, what steps lead from one thing to another and how history is made, and I think history was made when Jack Ryan stepped out of that race because of the pressure he got from the chairman of the party and others.

Q:                    What are the political wounds that you think Obama would have carried out of that campaign?

TIMMONS:      Oh, I don’t know.  I have no idea.  I’m sure that there was plenty of opposition research on the poor guy, and I’m sure it all came down to the 2008 and other elections.  But having a competitive race I just think would have had the dynamic very different.  I think it would have made it much more difficult for him to quickly establish himself in the Senate and then turn around less than two years later and announce he was running for president.

Q:                    In Kentucky —

TIMMONS:      It wasn’t two years, but about that.

Q:                    — Kentucky, another [00:27:00] sort of vulnerable Republican incumbent running for reelection, Jim Bunning, famously the former star pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, but…

TIMMONS:      Also famously — also famous for saying things that aren’t quite — aren’t good to have to have your press secretary defend, if you catch my drift.