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Monday, March 5, 2007
Penthouse, Littauer Building, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts

B E F O R E:

JEANNE SHAHEEN
Director, Institute of Politics
Kennedy School of Government

ALEX JONES
Director, Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy
Kennedy School of Government

MARK HALPERIN
Fellow, Institute of Politics & Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy
ABC News Political Director

KAREN TUMULTY National Political Correspondent
Time Magazine


P A R T I C I P A N T S:

For Mayor Giuliani:
Mark Campbell Mike DuHaime Ed Goeas Chris Hennick

For Senator McCain:
Rick Davis Bill McInturff Brett O’Donnell Stuart Stevens

For Governor Romney:
Alex Castellanos Alex Gage Ben Ginsberg


P R O C E E D I N G S

(2:03 p.m.)

MS. SHAHEEN: Good afternoon, everyone, welcome.  I suspect there may be a few more people who filter in, but we will go ahead and begin so we can try and keep things on time.  I’m Jeanne Shaheen, I am the Director of the Institute of Politics. I want to welcome all of the presenters who are here and welcome members of the audience, members of the media and of course the students who are here.

Before I was the Director of the Institute of Politics, I was the Governor of New Hampshire, so I’ve had the opportunity, personally, to participate in a lot of presidential primary campaigns and so I especially appreciate those of you who are here presenting today because I know what your time is like from now until the election.

This is a very exciting event for all of us who are political junkies, especially in 2008 because this is the first presidential campaign in about 50 years that we have not had an heir apparent on either side, either as the Democratic or the Republican side, and so for those of us who care about politics, it makes it a particularly exciting race.

This event we think is unique, it’s the first of its kind that we are aware of.  Many of you know about the event that the Institute of Politics has been doing since 1972 where the campaign managers look back at the presidential race, well this is an opportunity for us to look forward at the presidential race and see what we think may happen over the next two years until the election, almost two years.

We are particularly pleased to have students here with us today for this event because we think the young people are going to be critical in 2008, and I will be shameless in advertising and just point out to all of you that, in your folder, you should have a press release and a schedule talking about an event called Campaign 2008: Targeting Young Voters, which is a conference that the Institute of Politics will be doing this Friday, talking about what works in targeting youth voters.  The fact is that, in 2004, we had more young people, 18 to 29, turn out to vote than we did age 65 and older, we saw that trend continue in 2006.

And one message that we at the Institute of Politics, who care about getting young people involved in elections and in the political process, want all of you who are here representing campaigns to take back with you is the fact that young people are getting more engaged, we think they are going to vote in 2008 and we hope you will make a special effort to target them.  To all of you students in the room, we hope you will also carry that message to all of your friends and encourage them to get involved in the political process.

Now I would like to introduce the co-host of today’s event, Alex Jones, who is the Director of the Shorenstein Center. 

Alex?

MR. JONES: Thank you, Jeanne.

The Shorenstein Center’s shameless bit of marketing is these handsome hats that are on your table.

(Laughter)

MR. JONES: I am very pleased to welcome you as well, I’m going to speak just very briefly to introduce the two people who are actually going to be conducting this conversation with you. This is, as Jeanne said, something that we have thought had potential to be really, really interesting, we are hoping that you will find it interesting and we hope that something will come out of this of genuine value.  The people who will be conducting the conversation this afternoon with you and later on tonight are two, as I’m sure you know, of the top political reporters in the United States.

Karen Tumulty, the National Political Correspondent for Time Magazine, began as a business reporter in San Antonio and broke out of Texas, as she told me, by getting and MBA at Harvard and she has not looked back. A good bit of time at the Los Angeles Times she has been doing political reporting and all different kinds of other reporting for quite a long time, and I think that she is certainly recognized as one of the genuinely shrewd and wise political voices and we are very glad to have you here, Karen.

Mark Halperin has also got Harvard lineage, he is a graduate of Harvard, he is, this semester, a joint fellow of the IOP and the Shorenstein Center, along with Mark McKinnon who is also very much a part of this program, we are very glad to have both these Marks. Mark Halperin is the ABC News—what’s your title, the Political Director of ABC News. What I think that means is that everything that has to do with politics has to go through Mark at some point, he is the editor and founder of The Note, the on-line site that I suspect many of you don’t pass many days without visiting.

I thought that it was, I don’t know how many of you saw the PBS series, “The News Wars”, as it was called, a Frontline series that was aired just this past several weeks, but they didn’t give Mark and The Note due credit, in my opinion, for one thing, the coverage of the Strom Thurmond birthday party that led to such a sort of moment for the blogosphere, they did not give credit to any mainstream news organization. Mark Halperin spans that, Mark Halperin is one of the people who really does sort of live in both the on-line world and the mainstream world, and it was ABC News briefly and overnight, and The Note that, among the mainstream media, at least initially, were the ones who took note that something important had happened.

I’m going to now turn it over to Karen and to Mark and, as I say one more time, we are very, very glad you are all here.

Thanks.

MR. HALPERIN: Thank you, Alex.

As Lamar Alexander says, thank you for that nice introduction, you read it just the way I wrote it.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: I always win over the crowd by starting with a Lamar Alexander joke.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Thank you all for coming.  As Governor Shaheen said, we know how busy you all are. When we conceived of this program, the idea was let’s do something early in the spring, late in the winter, before the campaign really gets intense and heated, before there is daily engagement between the candidates, and there will be time for a long civil conversation.  We miscalculated it in at least one respect, so we know that you all are busier at this phase than you thought you would be and we want to hear from you.

I had elaborate jokes planned about paraphrasing President Kennedy about this is more Republican talent in one room, except when Ken Mehlman dines alone.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: And because Barbara Comstock has had to cancel, Beth Myers had to cancel, it’s a more diverse group of Republicans in one room than except when Joe Allbaugh dines alone. But I’m not going to do any of that because we want to hear from you, so let me just talk briefly about what the idea here is.  There is a narrative to be told, and we want you all to look forward not so much talking about what’s going on just today in the campaign, although obviously that informs what will happen, but going forward we want to hear from you.

And this is a chance we think for you all to speak frankly about each other, about the process, the state party, the national party, the media, not to attack or engage in anything untoward, but to lay down markers, as I say, to talk about what you expect, to try to make this campaign as interesting, as high minded and as valuable to the country, as good a process as it can be.

So feel free, we’ll call on you. Karen and I will call on direct questions to some of you but if you have something you want to say and you are not called on, get yourself recognized. You have in front of you buttons on your microphones, you need to press those to be active. Four of us can speak at one time, although my button apparently overrides all the others.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: So if you want to speak, make sure you toggle your mike on, you’ll see the light go on and, when you are done speaking, toggle yourself off,

please. And when we are done, about an hour and a half from now, we’ll take a break, we’ll come back promptly and get started. 

Karen and I, as I said, have a lot we want to get through.  As always, if you can think about this in terms of the nomination fight but also, where applicable, the general election and, with that, I will turn it over to Karen to start our questions.

MS. TUMULTY: Thanks a lot, Mark.

One of the things that it seems like, you know, a burden that all of you start with is the fact that very rarely in our history has the country, after eight years of having one power, one party in power, decided that it wants to give that party another four to eight years. And all of you are also running under the additional burden of the issue that seems to be overwhelming all others, which is the Iraq War.  So I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about the war issue and specifically, you know, how it is driving the primary dynamic.  And so, just calling on somebody randomly, Rick Davis?

MR. DAVIS:  I would say just the one thing I would say about, Karen, your comments, I mean parties don’t give up the power every four to eight years, it’s taken from our grasp kicking and screaming the entire way.  I mean I think the goal of every party is to retain power as long as humanly possible, without concern for cycles, sometimes we run afoul of cycles.  This is actually a pretty good year to talk about running afoul of cycles because it’s kind of hard, at least historically, to retain power past an eight year cycle. So, that being said, setting that aside, Iraq I think plays into that cyclical change, cyclical dynamic.

There is no question we just saw an election cycle that had a lot to do with Iraq, I mean the 2006 cycle was framed a lot of different ways.  I think everyone would have their separate take on what caused the Republican Party to take a historical loss in 2006 but clearly I think a lot of us look at it from the perspective of Iraq is a filter through which a lot of the public look. It’s not the only issue but it’s a filter with which they have to look to see all the other issues and to see the candidates.

And I think, within our own party, it’s not as much of a filter as it will be in the general election, but I think it’s safe to say everybody around the table has generally the same position, in addition to the administration, on the war in Iraq.  We all have permutations and combinations of it and I don’t think anybody is more vocal about it than our candidate, but it is still seen, by and large, regardless of how the Hill dynamic plays it out, as a pretty homogeneous Republican issue.  I mean all the parties, all the candidates are for the surge, all the candidates hope the surge works well, all the candidates have supported Bush in his efforts to do that.

I think all our candidates have taken time to talk about the leadership of Petraeus and for a new strategy, so I think that, by and large, you know, sort of applying the 80/20 rule, we are all in pretty much the same boat on it.

MR. HALPERIN: Mike DuHaime, it’s said regularly that president, that Senator McCain is the face of the surge. So, even though, as Rick said, all the candidates

have roughly the same position, but Senator McCain is paying a bigger price now than Rudy Giuliani and Governor Romney.  Do you share that view that, for whatever reason, because he is the so-called face of the surge, that Senator McCain is suffering now more with Republican voters?

MR. DUHAIME: It depends on how you look at it.  In large part, just like the major candidates are all in similar positions in terms of the war in Iraq, so are many Republican voters. So, you know, you could, well Republican voters are, for the most part, supportive and therefore you could look at all of us getting varying levels of support based on how we are identified. I think I would just echo what Rick said and agree completely that this is not a dividing issue, at least seemingly so at this point, for the Republican candidates.

MR. GOEAS: I would just add two things, and I think Bill McInturff’s firm would have similar data too on the premise of the question, one is a lot has been said about the 2006 election, what happened and what didn’t happen.  I think we forget that only 50 percent of voters voted, only 36 percent of adults 18 and over voted in this last election. So I think to read too much into it and understand what happened and what didn’t happen has a lot to do with where we are going in terms of the issue.

In terms of the war, I’ve seen a lot of the public data out there, I think a lot of the public data misportrays where the American public really is and I think that’s where you see a comfort level, I think, with some of the Republicans, in that once you get past the kind of shouting over the issue, and the real issue with the people is the transition in the last couple of years from Katrina, to the port issue, to incompetency on running the war I think somewhat clouds where the American public really is in terms of understanding the depth of the war, how important it is, how important it is to the War on Terrorism and I think sorting through that is very helpful.

Our polling and, again, it matches very close to what POS had, of 57 percent saying that the war in Iraq is connected to the War on Terror, 72 percent of them saying that it is a major part of the war, I think rather than just a general look at where people are on that surface feeling about the war and understanding really where the depth of the American public opinion is on the war.  No one likes what they see happening but they also at the same time understand how important it is and I think as long as our candidates are portraying that and in that secondary part of the issue, I think it’s going to be much different than what people are assuming on the surface.

MS. TUMULTY: Alex, so we have had two people say basically that, as far as the Republican primary electorate is concerned, I think the word you used, Rick, was homogeneous which would suggest that Republican voters are not seeing a dime’s worth of difference among the candidates on this issue.  I mean is that how you see it?  And also, is that going to continue to be the case or is there a window here at which these three candidates in particular, are going to have to differentiate themselves from each other?

MR. CASTELLANOS: I admire Senator McCain’s leadership on this issue.

(Laughter)

MR. CASTELLANOS: I think to some degree on this issue and others, everyone is looking at the next election as going to represent change, whether it’s either you will be changed or you will get changed.  And so, yes, considering that we seem to be stuck there, hopefully we represent something better, whether that’s a success of the surge or some beneficial solution to the mess, yeah.

MR. HALPERIN: Let me go to Karen’s, the first issue Karen raised, the notion of replacing someone who has been in the White House for eight years with a candidate of your own party, that does not happen very often.  You work for President Bush, so far the candidates seem to be relatively reluctant to make any criticisms of the White House.  What do you project forward, over time, is likely to happen in terms of both what the Republican candidates do in the nomination process and then maybe even the general election in terms of being critical?  And what do you think the White House reaction will be when that begins?

MR. STEVENS: Well I remember, was it last week, Senator McCain calling Donald Rumsfeld the worst Secretary of Defense ever and he was appointed by the President.  I think it’s—

MR. HALPERIN: And then Vice President Cheney did not react particularly well to that, so is that an indication of what will happen?

MR. STEVENS: I think Senator McCain will carry Wyoming.

(Laughter)

MR. STEVENS: When the day is done. 

I think that it’s, the party, like a lot of the, more of the nation, as Ed points out, than the numbers at face value would reveal, deeply respects President Bush, admires him, those qualities that they’ve always liked about him I think are there.  I think that every campaign here is going to have to come up with its own way to be new and improved and different.

Senator McCain has the advantage of a lifelong dedication of building an image as a maverick, something he has earned.  I think that there is something unique about the needs of a wartime president and it wouldn’t be unusual to imagine turning to someone with his skill set to lead the country through war.  But I think, come January of next year, you are going to have, every candidate represented here is going to be spelling out ways that they are going to lead the country differently and I think it’s going to be everything from the war, to taxes, to what their priorities are going to be.

MR. HALPERIN: Chris Hennick, which of the three candidates represented in the room do you think is the most likely to, in the nomination process, meaningfully distance themselves from the White House and what do you think the White House reaction will be when candidates start to do that?

MR. HENNICK: Well I’m not about to analyze any assumptions of what the other two campaigns might distance, or if they will at all.  I do know that among rank and file Republicans, the job approval is very much high still for the president.  And I think as you’ve seen Mayor Giuliani campaign on behalf of 49 states and over 60 candidates since he left office, I think that proves right there where at least we look at things strategically, but I think it still remains to be seen what else would occur, but I feel pretty confident among this team where we feel the advantages are in holding those lines like that.

MR. HALPERIN: Alex Gage, let me ask you, if you the war stays the way it is in terms of public opinion and if the President’s popularity stays the way it is, how big a problem is that in the general election for the Republican nominee? And are there things that you can do about it now or should do about it now before the determination of the nominee?

MR. GAGE: Good question. I would take a little different view, I guess, just speaking as sort of a student of public opinion on the whole where are the Republican voters on this. I think you do see them sort of standing tall, and standing behind the president and supporting the surge.  But I think when you start to scratch at it, you start to learn even they, they meaning Republican voters, are somewhat uncertain, apprehensive and so forth.  I mean Iraq is going to be the big gorilla in this room and it’s probably going to stay in this and dominate for the next, what do we have left, 22 months or whatever it is?

Who is it that puts the blog out every day, 661 days to something?

So that, so I think it is going to be a big, it is going to be a factor, you can’t deny that. I mean people, if you are talking about fixing things and turning things, you know, around and putting the country “back on the right track”, I mean it’s going to be a big part of it. And I’m trying to harken back here and think through 1968, it’s not quite analogous obviously but where you had a war president, very unpopular and so forth and a vice president seeking to replace him and so forth.  I can’t quite remember the entire dynamic of it but I think when we get into it, this whole issue of where you are either as a Republican nominee vis-à-vis this administration and so forth is going to be a very delicate thing to work out, but it’s going to be critical, I think, to convincing voters that there is a choice and that they should vote Republican one more time, as you say, and give this thing, give the party itself another four years to right the ship.

The other just general comment and really I think it’s one that you made in The Note once, is we are all trying to sprint a marathon, the question is can you actually sprint a marathon?  I think that is a very interesting thing I would like to hear the rest of us talk about because you surely do feel like we’re just already starting to jump over these hurdles a lot, they are coming at you a lot faster than we thought.

MR. HALPERIN: Bill McInturff, do you accept Ed Goeas’s characterization of where things are?  And what I want to ask is there is obviously almost always a tension between running for the nomination and positioning yourself for the general, is it possible that you all, on the war in particular, Senator McCain’s criticism of certain aspects of the way the war has been handled notwithstanding, that you are clinging too tight to the president now?  And while that may win you the nomination—

MR. MCINTURFF: I’m sorry?

MR. HALPERIN: You are clinging too tightly to the President for now but that may put you in a bad position once you win the nomination with the general electorate.

MR. MCINTURFF: Once of my life experiences in Republican primaries is it’s better to win them.

(Laughter)

MR. MCINTURFF: So you tend to say what would be required to win the primary first?  I’ve been in primaries where they have looked ahead to the general election, they tended not to be very successful. 

I do believe that the attitudes about Iraq are somewhat more complex than public polling, I think there is an enormous frustration but it’s a frustration because people, because there is about a third of the electorate that would pull out now, but I think the majority sentiment is this enormous frustration because they do feel stuck, they want a resolution other than pull out and other than American defeat.

And third, I believe that what I’ve said to Republican candidates, and let me just go back to what I said to Republican candidates in 2006, I think that’s cleaner than talking about Senator McCain. In 2006, what I said to my candidates was, one, you don’t get to pick the issues people care about, so this attempt by Republicans to “ignore Iraq”, that’s what everybody wanted to talk about, you have to talk about it. 

Number two.  I think you can be critical of the president and the administration for the conduct of the war, that even the Republican Party and even the Republican electorate is dissatisfied with the conduct of the war, even if they agree with the policy.

And three, that people want change, that whatever you are for, you’d better be for change because this notion that we should “stay the course”, as far as people have decided, they’ve decided the course has failed and they are willing to do something different, like the surge, if that’s what it would take, what they are not willing to do is to stay the course.

And four and then finally, you have to respect the President, meaning in this regard. People, in our party, admire his consistency, his leadership and his personal dimensions, and you had better be very, very careful how you talk about the President around those things and you’d better say I admire and respect him but I differ with his views and I differ with the conduct, I think a change needs to be made.

And when you drift to something that looks like a personal assault on the President, it does two things, one, it irritates their own base, and two, it engenders the White House reaction.  I think the White House is a very sophisticated and mature political operation and I believe they understand that our next nominee is going to be very different than this administration, he or she, he in our party, he will have different views and they’ll tolerate those views, what they won’t tolerate is something that looks like some personal assault on the President and I can not imagine a nominee of this party being someone who would do that because our primary electorate won’t tolerate it.

MS. TUMULTY: It sounds like, at least judging from Senator McCain’s comments over the last few weeks, that this sort of, this shield of invincibility does not apply to other members of the administration.  I mean how much will Republican voters, for instance, tolerate, you know, attacking the Vice President?

MR. MCINTURFF: Again, I think you have to, I think you have to be very distinct between the comments about, in this case, someone’s job performance versus what they perceive to be a personal assault.  And I would say, in general, that, you know, that there is a broad tolerance for talking about someone’s performance in their job.

MS. TUMULTY: But if we could, the other big reality of this primary season is the calendar and, as Alex said, sprinting a marathon.  Mark, could you talk a little bit about this calendar and how comfortable is your campaign with everything being moved so far forward?  And it would be great too if you could sort of pull the curtain back a little bit for us and tell us, you know, how much of this is a function of the candidates wanting this and getting it done and how much of this is the result of forces that are beyond their control?

MR. CAMPBELL: Yeah, absolutely. I think the primary calendar moving up has been more a lot of the political parties in the various states wanting to have more say. The 2000 and 2004 campaigns, prior to that, it was New Hampshire, Iowa Caucuses first and then you sort of moved rather slowly through the primary season.  Speaking for the Giuliani campaign, we are thrilled to death that February 5th could pretty much mark the end of the primary season for Republican candidates and that Mayor Giuliani will be the Republican nominee come that date.

MR. HALPERIN: Ben, having the calendar switch involves the national party, state parties, a whole bunch of entities, legislatures, obviously, what’s your sense of how much the campaigns, your and the others, have been involved? You read occasionally about pressure from the candidates but you don’t see very much in the campaigns, you don’t see very much explicit about it.  How much of this is happening at the behest of the other campaigns or your campaign?

MR. CASTELLANOS: Can he consult his attorney before—

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: He can consult his inner attorney.

MR. GINSBERG: I may consult my clients.

I think, by and large, it has been a reaction and reflection of the different states wanting to move up and try and get more influence.  I think that there are instances perhaps where campaigns have talked to their supporters in a state and said it’s either good or bad that they move up.  By and large, my experience is that the denizens of state legislatures and state houses really kind of care more about themselves and their institutional prerogatives and positions than they would necessarily hearing from a campaign.

MR. HALPERIN: Does anyone at the table want to name a name though and name an instance in which a campaign has urged a particular state to move up? Your own or another’s? Anybody?  Either Alex, is there any doubt in your mind that the giga Tuesday, the consolidation of big states on February 3rd, benefits the Giuliani campaign?  Is that something you would concede?

MR. CAMPBELL: No.

MR. HALPERIN:  No?

MR. GAGE: No, but what strategically is going to be put on the table and what we are all trying to figure out is is there truly a national campaign that goes on where people collectively, through all the media and so forth, that goes on?

Well, two things, one is how much of a natural sort of dialogue and debate discussion does a country have, given the information that flows into the information environment mainly from the media prior to any paid advertising and so forth?  And are we really going to get a dynamic going where this is enough sort of news media coverage that a national campaign starts to emerge?

And then there is this constant question about the individual states.  I go back to 2000 and ‘99, and if you look at the national polls, I think President Bush, then Governor Bush, I don’t think he ever fell below 55 percent or something in a national poll, even after losing two of the four, what was it?  New Hampshire and then Michigan, going up to Michigan. And then McCain had to cease and desist but I don’t think McCain even got up to 25 percent in the national polls through this, you know, but is it different now?  I mean just how much of all the new media and so forth is this? 

And is there still this thing called the sort of national momentum? Do the snowballs start rolling down the hill after you’ve come out of New Hampshire or is that still operative?  Or do you just have a new information communication department where that may not be the case?

MR. HALPERIN: Even though we are going for extended, thoughtful, scholarly academic discourse, let me do what I’m going to do occasionally which is a rapid round of yes/no from a representative from each campaign. 

Obviously there is a lot of question about Iowa and New Hampshire, Senator McCain skipped Iowa last time.  Alex Gage, yes or no, is your candidate, as we say this cycle, in it to win it in both Iowa and New Hampshire?

MR. GAGE: Yes.

MR. HALPERIN: Rick, is your candidate aiming to win both Iowa and New Hampshire or might you skip it?

MR. DAVIS: Yes.

MR. HALPERIN: Mike DuHaime, is your candidate in it to win it in both Iowa and New Hampshire?

MR. DUHAIME: I’m not going to comment on our strategy in the early states at this point.

MR. HALPERIN: Well let me follow up on that then.

(Laughter)

MR. DUHAIME: Also can I comment on the last question as well?

MR. HALPERIN: Sure.

MR. DUHAIME: I just wanted—

MR. HALPERIN: I’m still going to follow up on that.

(Laughter)

MR. DUHAIME: Sure. I was also going to, in terms of the February 5th primary and the notion that it is, you know, extraordinarily beneficial to Mayor Giuliani, I would agree with that, but I also would not say solely Mayor Giuliani, I believe it’s also beneficial to Senator McCain. I think a large function of the earlier primaries tends to deal with the ability to campaign in all those states and the ability to raise the resources to campaign in all those states.  And one of the benefits that I think Senator McCain and Mayor Giuliani bring to the race are essentially universal name ID and I think that’s something, so I don’t think it would be exclusive necessarily to this campaign.

And I would also say that Senator McCain’s campaign has done a very good job in terms of building a national organization and he has certainly been at the forefront of the party for a long time.

MR. HALPERIN: Until Senator McCain skipped Iowa, it had been, for several cycles, the conventional wisdom and pretty much true, that a major candidate could not win the nomination if those chose to skip Iowa and New Hampshire, unless there was a favorite son running, Senator McCain did that.

I’ll try to slide you into an answer not commenting on your own strategy, but what allowed Senator McCain to skip Iowa and then compete rigorously for the

nomination in 2000?  And do the same factors exist this cycle for another candidate who chose to do that?

MR. DUHAIME: I would probably defer to anyone who was more actively engaged in the 2000 race than I was on why he did it, but I do think the compression of the calendar, I think everyone would agree, makes it different.  To have so many states so much closer together, even Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina now are closer together than they were in 2000, and so many states falling on the heels of that, I don’t know that it’s, I don’t know that people can look at this campaign, whether it’s this question or a broader range of questions, I don’t think you can, I think it would be a mistake to look at this campaign and say this was the model in the past, therefore that’s got to be the model for this time around.

It’s just that you enter some of these big states that we’ve talked about, these are extraordinarily expensive states with extraordinarily expensive media markets with much larger populations and therefore it’s more difficult to just kind of go, go kind of house party to house party and meet enough people to make that extraordinary difference. You still can in those early states but you have to, obviously all the campaigns have to weigh how does that factor in on what would come in the next, in the weeks to follow.

MR. HALPERIN: Chris Hennick, let me just follow up, if I could.  Is Iowa skippable for any candidate?  Can you skip Iowa effectively and still win the nomination?  Can one skip Iowa and win the nomination?

MR. HENNICK: How many skips did you say?

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Can one skip Iowa. Can a candidate skip Iowa, not compete in Iowa, and still win the nomination?

MR. HENNICK: It still is, that’s an assumption that we, you can make or not make at this point in the campaign, but I think what’s interesting is this whole movement forward, as Mike is describing, I mean you’ve got a number, you’ve got up to 17, 18 states that would follow those two, along with three, with South Carolina. So, to some extent, you had mentioned South Carolina but it was always described as a firewall in past primaries and now pretty much it could very much be an accelerator, particularly where Senator McCain won last time, didn’t win last time but won six counties, a proven vote getter there, as well as 41 percent in South Carolina.

So I think all these states, they do, it’s not a question of skipping, it’s just a new, different strategy and how they relate perhaps to February 5, because you’ve got up to 700 delegates, perhaps, in a one month period that will be decided after the two to three, the two you mentioned, certainly the three with South Carolina.

MS. TUMULTY: So, Rick Davis, where is the firewall this time?

MR. DAVIS: Let me just go back on one of the issues that everyone is talking about and I would make a bold, blatant statement that there is probably nobody on this campus who will influence the change in the calendar, you’ve got to sort of take whatever it gives you. I mean we thought it was a great thing that South Carolina moved up in 2000, we thought, oh, it’s the secret to our success.  Well, that didn’t really work out as well as we thought it was going to.

So I mean I think that there is too much focus on, we are all going to play with the calendar that we are given, your calendar isn’t different from our calendar which isn’t going to be different from your calendar.  So this notion that somehow there is this like secret primary going on, array the states in a way that will be better for you, I think is just fantasy.

I don’t think there are such things as firewalls, I just think there are good campaigns and when you run a good campaign in a state, you win.  When you run a bad campaign, someone calls it a firewall and so I think that it’s sort of a misnomer to think that there are states that line up as firewalls.

MR. STEVENS: But let me, as one of the architects of the Bush victory in New Hampshire, I can speak to this.

(Laughter)

MR. STEVENS: I can remember vividly sitting in Austin in ‘99 and 2000 and asserting unequivocally that there are rules to this game and you had to obey these rules, and they were silly rules but they were rules, and I was wrong every time.  We said you had to compete in Iowa to win New Hampshire.  Senator McCain ran an absolutely brilliant campaign, I think that we at one point were 60 points ahead and we lost by 19, which I think is probably the single most humiliating defeat in modern political history. Why?  Because he ran a better campaign and he ran like governor in New Hampshire, he ran as if he was running for governor.  People fell in love with him and, you know, we got our butts kicked.

We all thought whoever won South Carolina would win Michigan, which is an interesting little moment there to look when you start talking about snowballs and momentum and all of this.  So, you know, we were wrong then, we all thought Bush would lose California. So I mean whatever we think is going to happen, it’s not going to happen. And I really agree with Rick that the idea that, at the end of the day, the calendar is going to be that important, you know, it’s kind of like the famous bike racer, Eddie Merck was asked what he felt the weather was going to be for the race and he said I think it will be the same for all of us.  And that’s I think going to be the operating factor here.

MR. GOEAS: Probably another way to say it, look, we all know the game is going to be different, the rules are going to be written as the game is played this time, as opposed to going into it.  The only thing history matters here is understanding what’s happened in the past in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan becomes kind of how you develop your worst case scenario.  It doesn’t mean that’s what’s going to happen, we don’t know that Iowa is going to have the same impact, or New Hampshire is going to have the same impact, or South Carolina or Michigan is going to have the same impact, we just have to look at what the impact has been in the past to set where the worst case scenario is.

But the rest of it is going to be developed as we play this game and the rules are going to be rewritten, I think we all know that and we can’t predict what those rules are going to be before the game is played.

MR. O’DONNELL: I think one of the other x-factors in this is the compression of the schedule will probably encourage the field to stay larger heading into that February 5th mega primary because, you know, the natural progression is for Iowa to weed out some candidates and to whittle down the field by the time you get to a Super Tuesday, but that’s unlikely to happen this time.  I think it’s very likely that most of the candidates will feel like they have their chance on that Tuesday and so the picture may not be that much clearer than it would normally be at that time in the election.

MR. MCINTURFF: We have three major campaigns here, we have this, this is a very unpredictable year and very unstable times, and an unpredictable year and unstable times are all saying unexpected things are going to happen, one of those unexpected things is I’m not sure we’ve seen the last of the major candidates.  I still believe Speaker Gingrich is going to be a candidate in this race and I think he is going to have consequence as a candidate, I think he’ll run and I think he’ll run his own campaign, his own style of campaign, it’s going to be typically Newt, it will be a little different.

But I think the point is well taken here about the number of candidates on February 5th because I still believe sooner or later races tend to devolve to two people races, and sooner or later you have to beat somebody in a two person race to be the nominee.  And like the southern primaries that were set up to have somebody below 50 need to get a majority, sooner or later, even despite this early calendar, the press focuses on a two person race, it clears out people, it will clear out people and I think it’s, I think having all those early candidates and adding Newt means it’s going to be a hard nomination to win without some period of time with a two person battle.

MR. HALPERIN: Ben?

MR. GINSBERG: I would offer the observation that there will be more states at play at February 5th than there were target states in either 2000 or 2004 which, in a general election campaign, you have time to build your state organizations, you know what your budget is going to be to a pretty much moral certitude because everyone has taken public money in the past. 

I would also note that after you have a disastrous election year like Republicans had in 2006, that drastically reduces the number of at-large delegates that are available under the way the Republican Party casts or selects its delegates, chooses its delegates, and that roughly 60 percent of the delegates will be chosen by February 6th and that roughly half of those are congressional district delegates as opposed to at large delegates.

MS. TUMULTY: So it sounds like a lot of you are arguing that while the race itself is going to be over with quicker, it’s going to be in flux a lot longer, with not really any state being a knockout blow, is that fair?

MR. STEVENS: I think that’s probably true that there is not going to be one state. But I think one of the interesting things is that, like Ben was saying, this is going to be more I think in the intensity on the campaigns and on the candidates, it’s going to be more like a general election than a primary and there is not going to be a lot of sort of grapefruit league warm up to this.  And you know, as I’ve always just been struck in these presidentials is how incredibly grueling and humiliating the process is, it’s designed to break you, designed to break campaigns and there is always a moment when a campaign is either going to break or hold together.

And one of the phenomenons is that when you do stupid things like we did in 2000 and lose New Hampshire, the pressure it puts on a campaign is extraordinary because it’s not just that you know that you blew it, but every time you turn on the news, every time you go to the gym, there is somebody talking about what an idiot you are on television—

(Laughter)

MR. STEVENS: --and how you’ve now without a doubt lost a chance to be president. And that’s a unique experience and it doesn’t happen in governor’s races and it doesn’t happen in senate races.  The closest would be a state like Massachusetts where you still get that press coverage on an intense level, but it’s that period and you don’t know how campaigns are going to react to that, you don’t know how candidates are going to react to that.  I mean it’s a lot of sleep deprivation, a lot of intensity and a lot of pressure, and it’s just putting you in the centrifuge and whipping it around.

MS. TUMULTY: One of the reasons that this is so hard to predict at this point too is the fact that the Republican base doesn’t seem to have settled down.  Could you, Alex Gage, talk a little bit about the component parts that are out there, and you know, why it has been so hard, particularly for these three candidates to lock down the base?

MR. GAGE: Well, like I said, the base is still obviously reeling a little, reeling from the loss in 2006.  People have talked about its brand being damaged and so forth and the base sort of disheartened and confused about what’s going on with their party and so forth.  I think they are starting to get over that, it will take some time.  I don’t think, even though we are so heavily focused on it, I think there is research after research that does show 60, large numbers of people just really, Republicans and Democrats for that matter just are not quite ready to engage in this process of choosing a nominee for 2008.

MS. TUMULTY: So you are not thinking it’s the problems and the flaws in the candidates themselves that are making it harder?

MR. GAGE: Not yet. I mean even the candidates that enjoy this universal name recognition that I think, as Mike said, I mean Senator McCain and the Mayor Giuliani obviously go into this with a huge advantage in terms of name recognition and so forth but if you also then probe that and ask people, well, how much do you really know about Senator McCain and his record or how much, then you still, I think a lot of Pew research will, people still don’t, even for these universally known candidates do they really feel comfortable and understand where they are and where they are coming from, no, they don’t, it’s a process and it takes a long while.

And obviously, from Governor Romney’s standpoint, that’s twofold, one is to get the name ID and then you have to give some definition to it, so it is going to require more resources for that, but I just don’t think people are ready.  It may come soon but, right now, I think a lot of the base voters are disengaged, both in the Republican and Democrat, but it may change soon.

MR. GOEAS: I guess I would disagree a little bit that they are disengaged, but it’s very, very early in the process and they—

MR. GAGE: Well that’s right, I mean are disengaged, they are just, they are getting ready to—

MR. GOEAS: --make up enough time.  I mean it’s ironic that on one hand we talk about how this process is starting so early and that’s how we start the—

MR. GAGE: No, but we are starting it early, the voters aren’t necessarily, we are not sure it’s in alignment with what they want and when they want it.

MR. GOEAS: I guess I’m seeing a lot to show they are watching very closely and I think there is a lot of public data that shows it very closely.

One of the things I would disagree with, again, some of the public polls, is something we know as pollsters, you don’t ask the question how much do you know about a candidate, you just don’t because when you ask that to a person on the other end of the phone, they are afraid that the next question is, okay, show me how smart you are, tell me what you know.  It is not the way to get into how deeply they understand it, you have to go to some other methods in terms of open ended questions and other things like that. So I think there has been a little bit of a distortion on the whole issue on how closely they are watching, how much they know and what they are picking up.

I do think it’s a bigger thing, I mean that it’s truly going back and the actual number is 80 years since we’ve had either a vice president or a president either running for reelection or stepping up, with the expectation of I think, under Truman, one of them ran but didn’t make it through the convention process.  But in terms of the general election, we are facing 80 years of that and there is a certain sense of that. It’s the first election since 9/11 that is an open seat, it is the first election in 80 years, both sides understand that, and I think part of it is, if there is any one thing I have seen kind of locking down our voters universally, it is two words, Hillary Clinton.

And so they are looking at it from a perspective not only of where our candidates are, they are looking at it from a perspective of the one thing they do know right now, they don’t want Hillary Clinton, and so there is much more of a locking down in terms of attention level of Republican voters than I think they are even being given credit for right now.

MR. STEVENS: And at the end of the day, as Haley Barber always says, name ID is something they sell down at the TV station and I think everybody in this room, the voters to go in to vote the day before the election are going to have 100 percent name ID in every key state that matters, so I don’t, it’s going to be more of a definitional process.

MR. HALPERIN: Let me end that topic with a rapid round and then begin the next one with one. Chris Hennick, will one of the Republican candidates consolidate religious conservatives and other elements of the base of the Republican Party before voters start voting or will it be what it seems to be now which is those voters spread around?  Yes or no, will somebody consolidate?  You don’t need to say who, unless you would like to for bonus points.

(Laughter)

MR. HENNICK: No, I was going to, I don’t know how you would reward bonus points to us, it’s an assumption of would I know that or not.

MR. HALPERIN: Just for being gutsy and saying it.  I mean President Bush, when he was a candidate in 1999 against people some considered more conservative than him, did consolidate religious conservatives and other members of the Republican base pretty well.  Will any of the candidates in the field do that?

MR. HENNICK: I think it’s totally unknown and I think, at this point, that’s not running away from an answer for your question, I think—

MR. HALPERIN: Well can anyone do that? Let me phrase it that way.  Is that possible with this field and this current version of the Republican base?

MR. HENNICK: Possibly not, and it’s not to dismiss issues that are important to religious conservatives, in fact they are very important, and I think that’s the challenge that certainly we have and we are going every instance in every sense of where the mayor is is not to alter the orthodoxy of the party and he is showing that in a lot of cases, even now in his, in reaching out and having meetings and attending, and also getting to know more of the focus of that.  But I think to answer that is there is no unknown and Ed’s point is it’s way too early even to consider consolidating a base. I think the base sense is where candidate are going to campaign for and they are going to focus on that.

MR. HALPERIN: Bill McInturff, is it possible that any of these candidates can do that?

MR. MCINTURFF: I think we all need to recognize George Bush is, I think we need to recognize George Bush is an extraordinary politician and he has had a hold on the Republican Party that I think is under-recognized and under-appreciated.  He was a unique candidate in ‘99 and 2000 because he combined the governors, the money people, the Chamber of Commerce people and the religious conservatives, and is there a candidate like that in this race? No. And that’s why, despite an extraordinary campaign by John McCain, that’s why he can survive. 

And is there a candidate like that in this race?  No.  That’s why it’s a very different race and, if there were a candid% ‘(+21

that, this would be a different dialogue at this table.

MR. HALPERIN: Alex Castellanos, you are good at the rapid round so are you from the Chris Hennick school or the Bill Mcinturff, in terms of is there a candidate who might be able to do that?

MR. CASTELLANOS: I hope so, yes.

MR. HALPERIN: You hope so.

MR. CASTELLANOS: Perhaps the candidate is not that well known among Republican primary voters at this point but, you know, Stuart is right, the process will fix that. Yes, the Republican primary electorate has been a three-legged stool, social conservatives, defense conservatives and economic conservatives.  Two candidates are somewhat better known than a third of the major candidates, so I think there is opportunity for growth there among all of us, some more than others, perhaps.  And I would like to concur with Stuart about the process being a grueling, grinding process and his endorsement of a younger, more energetic candidate.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Let me move to the next topic, and this one I will insist on—

MR. HENNICK: As opposed to a tougher, more experienced candidate.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: This one I will insist on a yes/no answer, please, to the first question, but then we’ll talk about the topic more broadly.  In my experience, most of these nomination fights in both parties are settled by good opposition research delivered to the old media, to some major newspaper or television network and that destroys the public image of the opponent.  I think Senator McCain was undone largely because somehow newspapers got very good at doing investigative work on who his contributors were to the Commerce Committee, what a+(  he had flown on, all of a sudden reporters got very interested in that.

In South Carolina, they got interested in one of his children, they got interested in all sorts of things, some of which weren’t true about him.  Suddenly some news organizations got a tape of Howard Dean on a Canadian public affairs broadcast talking about how bad the Iowa Caucuses were, I’m amazed at the timing with which that investigative reporting was done. 

So, that having been said, again a yes/no answer, Rick Davis, is the McCain campaign doing and will do, or will do research on the financial and personal background of the other major Republican candidates? Yes or no? And we know what the answer is, so just go ahead and give it and then we can move on.

(Laughter)

MR. DAVIS: We are going to run on John McCain’s record and—

MR. HALPERIN: Just yes or no.

MR. DAVIS: --it’s very positive—

MR. HALPERIN: Yes or no, is the campaign going to do research on the personal background, financial background, voting history of the other candidates?

MR. DAVIS:  We’d always do something on voting history, sure.

MR. HALPERIN: What about financial background, things like that?

MR. DAVIS: Anything that might be relevant to the public’s discussion of this but realistically—

MR. HALPERIN: No, hold on, we’ll get back to you.  Mike, yes or no?  Will you do research on the other candidates’ financial background, voting history, statements?

MR. DUHAIME: I think where you went further than anyone or where they were willing to say yes is where you said the word personal, I think that gets into a gray area that we are not going to—

MR. HALPERIN: By personal, I just mean financial records or real estate transactions, things like that.

MR. DUHAIME: Things that are available for public record that might be part of the public discourse, we obviously have to prepare for.

MR. HALPERIN: All right, yes.

And, Alex, I know the answer for you is yes.

MR. CASTELLANOS: I think you’re right, the McCain campaign certainly will do that.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Please toggle your mics on because these key answers are not getting picked up. All right, Rick, let me—

(Laughter)

MR. DUHAIME: I would say Alex is doing that on purpose, somebody watch his mic.

MR. HALPERIN: Let me come back to you then, Rick, and just talk about how is, your campaign in 2000 had great experience with this, how do you think the process by which campaigns take research, give it to the media at critical times right before people vote, how do you think that will play out in 2008 as compared to in the past?

MR. DAVIS: I think it’s actually a different thing and what you described in our campaign in 2000 I don’t think was as a reaction to the negative campaigning but how we got off of our positive campaigning.  I think that it’s not about the attacks, it’s about how you deal with them as a campaign and, you know, we took the bait, it got us off of our message and I think we lost the campaign in South Carolina because we stopped talking about the things we talked about for the year up to that point in time. 

So I mean I don’t know how much of that campaign was decided by all these other things, I mean, you know, flying around on jets was a one day story.  Did that get us off our message, probably not, but other things did.  And so I think that if you have the discipline to continue running the campaign that you start out running, it usually determines success.

MS. TUMULTY: If I could add a second lightning round because just as important as finding out what there is in your opponent’s background is making sure you have your arms around what’s in your own candidate’s background, and certainly this weekend there were some extraordinary stories in the paper about Rudy Giuliani, I mean it’s, we are now to the point already of reporting about candidates’ kids. So, if we could have a lightning round, are you confident that you now have your arms around whatever skeletons might be in your own candidate’s closet and whether you are fully equipped to deal with them as they come at you on the campaign trail?

MR. DUHAIME: Yes. I think every campaign, smartly, is prepared for that or should be prepared for that and there are good professionals on all sides of these campaigns, so I would say the answer is yes.  I would also say that, at the end of the day, it is less about the process and it’s something that all of us, on all sides of this table, get very involved in the process of this and, at the end of the day, I think what all the campaigns strive for is obviously to show their candidates in the best light and I’m sure all the professionals feel this way.

I mean I feel this way about my candidate, my candidate is the real deal and I think, at the end of the day, people will see that.  And will there be negative stories and will there be a give and take on negative stories on all the candidates, absolutely, and I think the challenge for all of us is can we rise above that and can we make sure that we portray our candidate as, in our case, certainly who he is which is, you know, which is, as Rick said, to talk about the issues that you want to talk about and, with our candidate, I’m confident that if we can do that, we’ll be successful. I imagine others might feel the same.

MR. CAMPBELL: It’s going to be less about process and more about vision because what’s at stake this campaign cycle is no less than America’s place in the world and that’s what’s at stake. And when voters are looking at who can best lead us into this redefinition of America in the world, we believe it’s going to be the mayor.

MS. TUMULTY: And so you think you don’t have to engage these issues at all?

MR. DUHAIME: No, I think we do. I think people can debate, you know, Senator Kerry’s reaction to the swift boats and things of that nature as to whether or not you have to engage on these things. I think there is a level that all the campaigns have to make a decision as to which issues you need to engage on and there are some that maybe you don’t, whether something turns into a one day story or a multi-day story, so there are ways you react.  There is no way the campaign should not be ignoring certainly negative hits that often campaigns do that to their detriment, I think the challenge for all the campaigns is to try to rise above that and make sure that you are portraying your candidate as to what he is and I feel if we can be successful at that, we’ll feel better about our chances.

MS. TUMULTY: And how about you, Alex, on the, as the stories come at you on the personal front, Governor Romney has already, people are writing about his great grandfather, so how do you, how do you engage or do you engage? And grandmothers.

MR. CASTELLANOS: I think you see it all across of politics, I think Mark is right that there is, you see it, for example, in the Obama campaign, there is, the trivialization of politics is itself an issue, and I hope perhaps we can even get to talk about the news media’s role in all that before we continue.  I’ve done a negative spot or two over the years here or there and do not discount their ability to persuade and influence, but the hunger right now in an uncertain world and uncertain time is somebody who is going to, which of these guys is going to lead you into the future and that is a big thing.

So I think a lot of these attacks, you know, who has been endorsed by Anna Nicole and that kind of stuff, is not, I think that kind of politics this year, I mean it’s going to reach a certain noise level and then the campaigns, the good ones, are going to be able to float above that.  It’s going to be an opportunity, I think, for us all.

MR. STEVENS: I think the difference between the swift boat situation and the Giuliani campaign is that he had defined himself, he being John Kerry had defined himself as a combat veteran to an extraordinary degree, I think way, way, over the top, and I think it was ultimately one of his undoings.  I don’t think the Giuliani campaign has likewise attempted to define the Mayor in his relationship to his family.  And I think that, at the end of the day, stories like you had this weekend are going to do nothing but help the mayor.  I think people react viscerally against it and it’s, there are very different distinctions there.

It was a problem Bill Clinton had.  When Bill Clinton got in front of Madison Square Garden and accepted the nomination, he talked about vote for me because my daddy and my stepdaddy was a drunk and my brother had these problems, and he said, look, all of these things in my personal life are reasons you should vote for me.  And then when questions about his own personal life began to be raised, he couldn’t say, well, wait, no, my personal life is off bounds, no, he did that. 

John Kennedy didn’t do that, John Kennedy didn’t say vote for me because I had this domineering father and they really wanted my older brother to win, he said there is a missile gap, vote for me, and I think that’s part of the differences between the approaches and I think voters are very sensitive and smart about that.

MR. GINSBERG: I was just hoping that, in the spirit of a full discussion, you might describe the, in detail, the statement in the February 27th Note, watch closely the nearly below radar efforts of McCain to eliminate Mitt Romney.  If we are going to talk about what the campaigns are doing and how they are engaging the press to help with their own attacks, a fulsome discussion of that might be interesting.

MR. HALPERIN: Yeah. At Harvard, I learned fulsome means smelly and not full, but I take your point—

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: --and we are going to talk about the media after the break.

MR. DUHAIME: I couldn’t wait until after the break to answer my question.

MR. HALPERIN: Well I’m happy to answer that now, but I would answer by asking the McCain campaign the Romney campaign has shared with me a couple of cases of reporters citing your campaign, saying your campaign has been providing opposition research to other campaigns that doesn’t, reporters about the Romney campaign.  My reaction to the Romney campaign is why I’m not being given this stuff and they said take that up with you all.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: But there have been press reports to that account, so are you all already in a practice of disseminating information about Governor Romney’s background and record? Rick? Or Professor Davis, as we call you here at Harvard?

MR. DAVIS: I’m unaware of any discussions that you might have with other reporters and I would love to know who they are.

MR. HALPERIN: Well, no, it’s been printed in stories, the reporters have said.

MR. DAVIS:  Who did they talk to?

MR. HALPERIN: At the McCain campaign?

MR. DAVIS: Sure.

MR. HALPERIN: It doesn’t say, it just says McCain sources.

MR. DAVIS:  Well I would love to know who they are talking to.

MR. HALPERIN: Ben, does that satisfy you?

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Let me ask about fund raising, not a small matter for your candidates now and for the rest of the year, and I would love to ask two questions and I’ll just throw it over first to the Giuliani campaign, and anyone who wants to answer should. One is what is different about fund raising in 2008 for presidential candidates as compared to the past years, to the extent you can say? And the other is no one seems to have caught on in either party yet as the Internet candidate, in terms of raising money the way Howard Dean did last time, the way John Kerry eventually did.

What will it take for someone to become the Internet candidate or at least a strong candidate raising money on the Web in the nomination process? And then, in the general, when presumably that will be a big deal as well?

MR. DUHAIME: Probably better for someone to comment who was involved in more presidentials than I, at least on the finance side of things.  I will say, on this one, I think some differences are the compressed calendar and therefore the pressure to raise more money quickly.  The Bush campaign spent an awful lot of money in 2000, an extraordinary amount of money that they raised in 2000 and were able to spend it on a fewer number of states, so I think that the pressure on fund raising on all sides is greater than it’s ever been before. 

Some of the limits have changed from the 2000 campaign so that obviously gives the ability to raise more money.  The FEC’s ruling on what Obama had requested of them changes some of the dynamics of fund raising as well, as we move forward. 

In terms of the Internet, it may be getting a little later in the process where a certain candidate kind of catches fire a little bit more.

MR. HALPERIN: What do you think it will take though to do that? Is there something specific that can be done to become a good Internet fund raiser?

MR. DUHAIME: There are tactics you can use to become a better Internet fund raiser in order to kind of catch fire. I think it’s a bigger picture in terms of the campaigns catching fire and perhaps a little bit later in the process, we’ll say that there is a demographic in terms of Internet users that skews a little bit younger and sometimes skews a little bit more Democrat, which allows it a little bit easier for Governor Dean, Chairman Dean or Senator Kerry to do that. 

But I think it’s so much different, the Internet has changed things so much and it’s so much different from the last presidential campaign in 2000 that it just kind of remains to be seen who has the ability to take off.  I’ve certainly seen the Romney campaign has done some very innovative things in terms of utilizing the Internet for fund raising. And again, I think my hope is certainly, with Mayor Giuliani’s popularity, that he’ll have a wide variety of low dollar supporters, but I think it remains to be seen.  Again, I think there are tactics you can do to become better on the Internet, I think in terms of kind of an explosion, it just remains to be seen.

MR. HALPERIN: Mark Campbell?

MR. CAMPBELL: One of the things that Governor Dean did in order to raise an enormous amount of money was state positions that would make him completely unelectable but would cause him to be able to raise a lot of money.  So I think one of the stories from the Dean campaign that’s never been told is if you want to go out there and say wild things in order to wildly whip up your base, then that’s great, which is why he is where he is at now, as opposed to in the White House. 

So I just think that this whole Internet fund raising, the more thoughtful, the more direct, it’s a little bit of a slower build, so I don’t think you are going to see any of the Republican campaigns sort of making wild accusations just to sort of, you know, whip up the Internet frenzy.

MR. GOEAS: But I think, going back to Mike’s point, it’s that Dean had to do that to whip up the excitement.  I think there are two things here, do you catch on as a candidate and do you have the tactic in place? Dean got credit because he had the tactic in place and he used it in terms of using that to whip up the enthusiasm.  This year, the issue is going to be separate, everyone is going to have the tactic in place, they are going to have modified approaches in terms of how they do it, the question is going to be who catches on enough to see it move up.

I think the key thing, from a media standpoint, is who does catch on in the Internet this time is probably going to be more predictive of a real catching on, as opposed to a manufactured catching on, and that would be the thing I would point out.

MR. HALPERIN: Stuart?

MR. STEVENS: I think, in the Dean thing, it’s fascinating because I think that, ultimately, he success on the Internet was the undoing of Dean, in part because of the crazy ass stuff that he said, but in part because they got so kind of high on their fund raising that they rejected public limits and, once they rejected public limits, it gave John Kerry permission to do so.  And just like if you woke me up in the middle of the night and you said, oh, I think I’m going to reject public limits so I can spend as much money as I have, and one guy is like a small town doctor in Vermont and the other guy is a billionaire, bet on the billionaire.

(Laughter)

MR. STEVENS: I think it was insane of the Dean campaign, they should have kept to the limits.

MS. TUMULTY: So, up until now though, a lot of what everybody’s campaign has been doing has been basically shadow boxing, kabuki theater, pick your overused metaphor, so March 31st we have the first real fund raising reports coming out, the first real hard data that will measure how you guys are doing, how many people you are hiring, how much you are spending.

Could each of you, maybe starting with Mike, what are the things that you most want to learn by looking at the McCain reports and looking at the Romney reports?

MR. DUHAIME: I think you can tell about the other campaigns in terms of where their focus is, where their focus could be, whether it’s the specific states or specific consultants that they may be using in terms of strength overall.  You can certainly get an idea of the depth of their organization by looking at the payroll and trying to figure where those folks are that—

MS. TUMULTY: And what are you hearing specifically about them and specifically about them that you are going to be looking for the answers to in those reports?

MR. DUHAIME: Just the things I just said.  You want to see the depth of their organization, where it’s at.

MS. TUMULTY: How about you, Rick?

MR. DAVIS:  I’m going to be looking at how much money they raise but, other than that, I don’t know.

(Laughter)

MR. DAVIS: I don’t think there is much you can tell right now, I think you’ve got to wait to see the reports.

MR. STEVENS: I’m not sure that, at the end of the day in 2000, money was the story. I mean God knows we had a lot of money in the Bush campaign and--.

MR. DAVIS: Do you want to get into a debate with me?

(Laughter)

MR. STEVENS: No, no, no, I’m just saying that I mean we wasted so much money, I think it’s going to be more about the use of the money than the, just the dollar figure. And I think one thing that’s been shown historically, whoever advertises first loses and that’s a fact.

(Laughter)

MS. TUMULTY: Team Romney?

MR. STEVENS: And that’s, I think it goes to the question of how much money, because we spent more money than God in New Hampshire and we were flying like dirigibles overhead and there is some reason it didn’t work.

MR. GINSBERG: You have to look at the cash on hand too, just as a sort of touchstone test of how well people are managing their money and the campaigns are being managed.

MR. HALPERIN: Let me move to a topic that Governor Shaheen alluded to in the beginning and that’s the role of young people.  It seems like every four years there is this discussion of getting young people more involved, the voting rates not the same as they are for a lot of other age groups.  But an excellent Associated Press story this morning points out that there are more ways to get young people involved now through Face Book and other things, particularly on the Web and new media. 

So, Bill McInturff, let me ask you, what would a successful Republican campaign do in the nomination fight and then in the general election to get young people more involved?  And what’s the potential for that as a voting age that would be voting at the same percentage as other groups?

MR. MCINTURFF: Well, one, just as a poster, it is the one audience where I don’t think phones are a good measurement.  They are a constituency that has cell phones only, I think you have to do panel research, to use Internet panels and I have done a lot of work blending with that age group, blending some phones with Internet research. And so I do think it is an age group where I do think a lot of the media polls, and I do that for NBC, so I do them, but I think it’s a group that is not well represented through the available polling technology and I do think we lose track of that.

I think, if you look at the exit polls and you look at 18 to 29 that had phones, had cell phone only, the Kerry margins over Bush were extended.  Now I don’t think it made a difference in the public polling, it was by a point or two, it’s well within margin of error, but that’s an issue. 

Number two, I don’t think, what I know for sure is it’s not chronological age.  There is sense of do you, there is kind of do you get it? Having seen Bob Dole’s data in ‘96 and looking at his vote with women under 30, when you are losing by 40 points in California, okay, not going to win that one.  I think, as a Republican, you have to be competitive. 

And three, there is some data that says they are, and this is the thing that is very, really cool about this data, we have a lot of data that says people over 65 are more concerned about Iraq than younger voters and we have, if anything, the first anti¬war senior generation in American history, as far as I can tell. 

And fourth, I do think that what you find is, when you look at them, they tend to spike on two issues, one is, and Republicans always talk about them, one is education because they are just out of that process and two is job training, and job opportunity and economic opportunity.

And where I think the Republican Party can attract those people and we, again, have under represented, is what we would do to kind of deal with kind of their economic insecurity because, as a group, once you are out of college, they very quickly kind of get the joke about like what is our careers going to be like and what is our economic opportunity?  And every time you look at who is concerned about those issues, they spike through the roof.

And then I think, three, they are, however, an incredible constituency against the status quo, and I think the Republican nominee, and I do think what we’ve said about Senator McCain, just given his persona and given what he is like, I think he has a unique ability to appeal to that voter group that the traditional Republican candidates never had and is therefore a compelling candidate.  Because they see the guy and, you know, John has always been, his entire life, the guy who has been against the system.  I mean it’s been in his high school, naval career and everywhere else and there is an appeal to that that’s very, very different than the traditional Republican candidate.

MR. HALPERIN: Ed, every vote counts obviously, but how important could young people be in the nomination fight and then in the general election?

MR. GOEAS: Well it’s changing.  I mean we saw, from 2000 to 2004, the youth vote went from 16 percent of the votes cast to 18 percent of the votes cast, we didn’t see what was coming in that, in that their increase, percentage increase in terms of the vote was the same as the other age groups that year, so they kind of matched the higher intensity grassroots campaign but didn’t overcome it. 

What we didn’t see coming was that, in the off year, it increased from 10 percent to 12 percent of the votes cast over, depending on who you talk to, I think at a minimum, 1.2 million, it could be as much as 1.5 million.  I know there is another group out there claiming 2 million new voters that didn’t vote four years before.

The difference in both elections that Republicans have to look at is that they have targeted turning out those votes and we have not targeted turning out those votes because we didn’t think there was a much vested there.  We saw, in the 2004 election, their attention level staying longer because of discussions about the possible draft, that’s what kept them engaged longer, that is not what kept them engaged in this last election. What kept them engaged in the last election was a focus on the war and they went from voting actually for Bush by 2 points in 2000, to losing him by 11 points in 2004, to we lost him 2 to 1 in this last election.

So I think, number one, the answer is we are going to have to target that group and assume that their intensity, at least as long as the war is going on, is to stay high. But there is also good news and that’s because we haven’t targeted those voters on our end that you’ve had a disproportionate turn out of Democratic young voters versus Republican young voters. And those young voters who are still Republican are very Republican. And so I think what you are going to see by all the campaigns, and certainly by our nominee in the fall, is we will be targeting not only from a message, how do you get more of the young voters overall being for us, but you are also going to see tactically us targeting very specifically Republican voters because they are intense, they are higher attention voters than even their other age, more Democratic voters from their age group.  But we just have to have the mechanism to start going after them and spend some of our resources on that and I think we will.

MR. HALPERIN: Al Gage, what are some of those mechanisms, besides throwing your candidate on Jon Stewart? What can you do to reach younger voters?

MR. GAGE: Younger voters?  Well I tend to think it is a structural—

MR. HALPERIN: Can you turn on your mic, please?

MR. GAGE: Oh, I’m sorry.  I think there is a great census report that comes out after every election, voting and registration, that’s a huge national survey that’s done and the fact is that age and education are the two single most important factors that influence participation in voting.  And I don’t have them in front of me but it’s as low as 20 percent among the least educated and younger up to 80 percent among the older and more educated.  I mean there is a structural thing here that seems to have crossed generations, I mean this has been for a long time.

So what are the things that engage them?  I think things that engage them are issues, things that all of a sudden you figure out that, hey, wait a minute, this has something to do with, it’s relevant to them.  And it’s very hard for them to figure out what’s relevant, but wars and things like that can catch their attentions pretty quickly. I don’t think, and we know the Republican electorate, you asked earlier of influence on this particular, in the nominating process.  It’s going to be, our electorate in the nominating process is going to continue to be what it is, it’s an older, etcetera, etcetera.

So of course they are an important vote and anybody that can figure out how to actually mobilize them, because there are huge numbers of them, both in primaries and in general elections, that’s a, it’s a big task and anybody that can figure it out, please let me know.

MR. GOEAS: One thing we did see is, before 2004 when we had this higher instance of the Democrats on identifying and turning out the vote, there was one determinate among young voters that showed that they would vote higher and that’s if they attended church once a week, they voted 40 percent higher than any of their other, from that age group, any of the other voters from that age group.  That has been neutralized in the last two elections, so I think part of the answer is we do know where to go to find some of those voters but it’s a matter, again, of going back to tactically going after them, beyond just worrying about where the war is.

MR. HALPERIN: Stuart Stevens?

MR. STEVENS: I think it may very well be, usually I’m wrong about these things, but that the youth vote is going to play more of a determining role in the Democratic primary because I think the energy is there and I think it’s going to really, Hillary Clinton has the problem of being a pro war candidate and running for an anti-war party. And I think that the energy that you see in Obama is going to capture that.

I think the key for Republicans is that the Iraq War not become definitional for a generation in a negative way, the way the Vietnam War did, and we have to address that in all kinds of ways. But I think the largest role that the youth vote is going to have is determining who the Democratic nominee is.

MR. HALPERIN: Yeah, go ahead.

MR. HENNICK: Mark, I was just going to add we are learning a lot already of what younger voters provide, certainly in social networking and how they believe conversations among themselves, politically, have more believability, even coming from campaigns.  So I think this year we’ll draw a lot of direction from younger voters. They want authenticity, they want character, certainly the future on issues cut strongly from younger voters, but I think you’ll see a lot more effort on social networking and tools that campaigns will use.

MR. HALPERIN: So they would be involved.  Even if their voting percentages aren’t higher, they are still an active part of—

MR. HENNICK: Not only an active part, I think they are going to be largely driving a lot of the discussions that you are having here right now.

MR. DAVIS: I think where Ed and I would probably agree, if you looked at the Republican primary and you look at people under 30, those people are not that dissimilar to their older counterparts, meaning that they are very religiously active and they tend to be social conservatives.  And so the younger people in our primary who come to vote in our primaries are, have that profile.  And so it’s not a disconnect in the Republican message, it’s not like you have to do something different because those people under 30 who participate, other than, well other than in New Hampshire, which is a very secular state, and in Michigan and a handful of states where independents vote, the younger voters who are independent are very different than that.

But if you are talking about a Republican under 30 voter, you know, they are kind of right to life and very religious and that’s why they are showing up at the Republican primary, they are not disconnected from the rest of our primary electorate.

MR. HALPERIN: I know you all sit in on a lot of meetings and conference calls to deal with campaign issues and I know this has been a long first part of our session, so I appreciate everybody sitting through.  We are going to take a break now until 25 of, at which point you will hear this, and everybody will get back in their seat and we’ll pick back up and talk, as we promised, about the media, thank you.

(Whereupon, at 3:22 p.m., there was a short recess.)

(3:40 p.m.)

MR. HALPERIN: Good afternoon again.

We are going to go to about 5:00, which is as scheduled, and I applaud everyone, we applaud everyone for your forthcoming remarks.  Feel free to be more forthcoming and particularly when we talk about the press, which we are going to do in just a bit. You know, there is a tendency when things heat up for you all to just yell at reporters, and to expect the worst from us and we often don’t disappoint, but I do think that this is one of the few opportunities you’ll have in any forum with some national political reporters in the room, and certainly people writing about this and thinking about it to really give us, to challenge us to tell us what you think we can do better since we are, as you all know and sometimes to our delight, a big part of this process.

We would like to do a good job and we would like to define doing a good job as being in the public interest, which is often in your interest, so please don’t be shy.  I would urge you to use this opportunity to tell us your thoughts about how we can do a better job.

And with that, I turn it over to you, Karen.

MS. TUMULTY: One thing, we’ve already talked about some of the things that make this election different, you know, the calendar, Iraq, is there something here that we are missing, Ben Ginsberg?  What else makes this cycle particularly unique?

MR. GINSBERG: I think the press is doing a perfect job, by the way, I wouldn’t change a thing.

(Laughter)

MR. GINSBERG: Well I think this cycle is unique for sort of all the obvious reasons that’s been stated, no incumbent president or vice president in either party, the money race, the complete sort of disintegration of the campaign finance system has made the need for all the campaigns to get money, has speeded up the process tremendously, the nominating calendar which you are sort of writing about but not completely writing about yet.  I think it’s unique for Republicans that there is not an inevitable front runner at this stage, that’s very different behavior for us.

With all due respect to my friends in the McCain camp, I mean I think that there is not—

MS. TUMULTY: But that’s one thing I was wondering, has there been a time in anybody’s memory where like you look at the insider polls and they have what the

L.A. Times did this weekend with RNC members and it gives you a totally different result than what the public polls of the country do.  I mean this sort of disconnect between what party insiders are seeing and feeling and where public opinion is going, is that new?

MR. GINSBERG: No, I don’t think so.  I mean I was awfully pleased with the results of the L.A. Times poll but, in all honesty, it’s been a long time since the distinguished members of the RNC are going to carry a state for any one candidate.

MS. TUMULTY: How about you, Bill?

MR. GINSBERG: DuHaime.  No, I haven’t actually, state chairmen are terrific.

(Laughter)

MS. TUMULTY: Bill, do you see anything that’s turning this into a unique cycle beyond these forces that we’ve already talked about?

MR. MCINTURFF: Yeah.  I think, as I said, you know I’ve already mentioned Newt, I think Newt is a huge factor in this race and is going to be a huge factor in this race, and I’ve interjected it now twice. But I don’t think the press, I don’t think the press really understands that we’ve not, we are not seeing all the candidates displayed and he is going to have a major impact on the Republican primary, in my view.

And look, I think the next thing is, you know, Senator McCain was that candidate for me in 1999 and 2000.  I spent a long, long, long time thinking about what would be a Republican Party that would create a new 55 percent stable majority? And you know, a 55-57 percent stable majority and win an election 57-43, and what would that party look like and what would its issues be or its composition be like?  I thought Senator McCain was that candidate and I think we ran a campaign that, had we won the nomination, he could have done that. 

The Iraq War makes, frankly makes that vision a lot more complex.  But the point is we are not going to be a George Bush Republican Party and the nominee of this party is not going to be a Bush Republican, there is going to be a different definition and there is going to be a new era of the Republican Party. 

And in general, I think each nominee, each winner of the election becomes as part of the cultural zeitgeist. The cultural zeitgeist in ‘99 and 2000 made Bush the nominee and president, the zeitgeist, I believe, a zeitgeist for this next president is we’ve had 16 years of very ideological politics, and people are very worn out and they are looking for a generation of leadership that will get things done.  And I think the person who wins this race and becomes the next president is the person that conveys that there is in fact a different generation, a different style and the capacity to solve problems on behalf of the American people, and to me, the person who conveys that most powerfully and can get that done for 2008 is the person who becomes the next president.

And by the way, that could be a Democrat, I mean we are --.  And I think the last thing is the Republican Party is not, is at a low ebb and I think however difficult it looks after 2006, I’m not sure our own party has absorbed some of how difficult these national numbers are and the extent to which it needs to be a very different nominee and a very different party that’s going to require, required to win an election, and I think all those things are being under-counted in terms of the press looking through a very traditional filter of how they look at the tactics of where we are right now.

MS. TUMULTY: And, Brett?

MR. O’DONNELL: Yeah, I think that, I think Bill has hit on an important point, I think it fundamentally makes the election unique for both parties because I think that there is sort of a fundamental redefinition of what both parties stand for that is going on right now on both our side and on the other side.  I mean I think that’s true of the Democrats where, you know, they realize they cannot nominate another sort of old school, John Kerry, liberal type candidate and so they are attempting to find where their voice lies most effectively in this coming election.

And I think that given the fact that there is no kind of George Bush, Ronald Reagan type conservative, though I think that we represent the best of the Ronald Reagan conservatives in the race, I also think that there is a fundamental redefinition of what constituencies are important within the Republican Party and I think there is a little battle right now in terms of how that influence will play out across the election and so I think that will lead to a fundamental redefinition of both parties, at some point.

MR. STEVENS: I think it’s fascinating that you have two of the, let’s say major, three major candidates, at least two of the three represented here who are from the northeast, who, in their last elections anyway, ran as pro choice candidates, who, you know, weren’t members of the NRA, who refused to sign tax breaks.  These are all things that we thought were sort of not likely to happen in a Republican primary, and I think it’s a healthy sign for the party that it is and it makes, it’s good for the general growth of the party and the whole kind of definition of the party.

MS. TUMULTY: Do you agree with that, Ed?

MR. GOEAS: I do. Again, I rely a great deal on past data, on past history and I think there were two things that were interesting coming out of the 2006 election, kind of understanding again what happened and what didn’t happen.  One is that we actually matched in the exit polling within a couple of points both turnout and loyalty. Turnout was consistently what it had been in past years, compared to consistently where the Democrats were, there was, it was not a 1994 disproportionate higher turnout. And party loyalty of Republicans voting for Republicans versus Democrats voting for Democrats was within, again, the margin of error.

The big difference was is we lost independents by 18 points and I think that factor is coming into play in terms of this election, kind of an understanding that, and again, that’s going to be a different mix of voters, it was only 50 percent, this time it will be about 75 percent.  But those independents only grow in terms of a presidential year and their proportion of the votes that is cast, so I think that is having a factor.

I also think there is a lot of misanalyzing what happened.  I love these polls that talk about the 26 point advantage that Democrats have over Republicans on Social Security or on Medicare and health care and you know, just we are dead in the water with these voters because it’s a Democrat issue and those are going to be the issues.  They miss the fact that, in 2006, we actually won with seniors by 49 to 48 and we did it in large part, and I think the key was we did it in large part because we passed Medicare Part D and seniors liked Medicare Part D and what they were seeing from it. So what you are going to hear up here and what actually is happening down here are two different things.

I think there is several different factors that you are going to see in the campaign, one is you are going to see Iraq an issue, but it’s not going to be just Iraq in terms of are we winning or losing, it’s going to be Iraq in terms of do we still keep in view beyond Iraq what is happening with the War on Terrorism, that’s going to be one major issue. 

Another major issue is going to be the economy, that frustrations of the administration aside, that they feel they have not gotten credit for a good economy.

This campaign is going to be able, allow everyone, Democrat and Republican alike, to redefine where the economy is and where the economy is going in a much different way than the kind of box that Bush has been caught in in terms of the war in Iraq.

There are, under the surface, I think probably the two biggest things, from a Republican standpoint, is that we bought, as Republicans, some of what the Democrats were saying, that they took Katrina into the ports, into the mismanagement of the war to raise a question for many Republicans, using the spending issue also, using the issue of can we govern.

And a lot of what the Republican campaigns are going to be talking about is showing that we can govern not only to get back any Republicans that didn’t vote in this past election but independents and where they are. 

And then there is one last factor that probably no one talks about in public and that is there is a, we saw, after Bush was elected, that he got the benefit for a period of time of being very plain spoken because it was such a nice contrast to Slick Willie that you couldn’t trust what he was really saying. 

Many Republicans are now getting back to, whether it’s a, you hear talk about deer in the headlights press conferences, just that you are going to see the articulate, the ability of candidates to be articulate on our principles.  It’s not that Republicans disagree with the principles of Bush, they feel like it has not been articulated quite as well as what they would like to see in the battle versus Democrats.  And I think you are going to see a focus, whether it’s Romney, or McCain or Giuliani, on who can best articulate the future of the party, and where we are going, and why we should govern and how we are going to govern and I think all those factors are going to come in play in terms of this election.

MR. STEVENS: That’s probably why Tony Blair is going to come and run here.

(Laughter)

MS. TUMULTY: So what happens if in fact we do have a nominee by February 6th?  It’s just such a long, long general election campaign, Mike, how do you handle that as the nominee?

MR. DUHAIME: I hope we get a chance to figure that out, I think everybody does. Again, it’s like other campaigns, like we talked earlier about the primary process, this is a new world, and at some level, we are all going to look back after November and say, boy, we should have seen that February 5th was the most important thing or, boy, we should have seen that Iowa really was as important as it always was. And by the same token, people will look back and say, boy, you know, the nominee really wasted March, that really was the most important month.

I think all of us are going to have to, you know, as we talked about before, all of us have to get to the primary first and then deal with it after the fact, and worrying about how we deal with a long general election cycle would be the problem that each one of us has to deal with and I think it would be faulty of any of these campaigns to say, well, I need to position myself so that the day after I win the nomination, and this is the day I need to win it on, and this is how I’m going to raise money or this is what I’m going to do would just be, I think it would be so premature and I think we would be taking our eye off the ball if we worry too much about that.

MS. TUMULTY: Are you guys thinking beyond the second, first/second week of February, Team Romney?

MR. GAGE: I came here hoping that somebody would leave their user manual on their chair and I’d take it home with us.

MR. HALPERIN: We got two out of three, we are just looking for you guys.

MR. STEVENS: Rick can speak to this, as both of us being veterans of the Dole campaign, the awful thing in the Dole campaign was we were taking public financing and we were broke after we got the nomination, that’s not going to happen, so I think that that dynamic will never exist again.  It was an awful, awful, I mean just it was just, you know, you, and the Clinton campaign was utterly ruthless in its exploitation of that campaign finance rule.  So who knows how it will play out this time, I really think it’s completely—

MS. TUMULTY: But, Stuart, isn’t it going to be more than money? Isn’t it going to be sustaining people’s interest, and you know, given the tone of the general election campaign, keeping people from just getting completely turned off on these candidates?

MR. STEVENS: Well I think a lot of it will depend on what’s happening.  If you exist in a world where, say, that the nomination was decided that early on the Republican side, will the same happen on the Democratic side? Because I think you can exist in two very different worlds if you are running against a presumptive nominee in the Democratic Party or the Democratic Party is still tearing itself apart going to the convention, which I think you could argue could happen.  I have my own opinion about what’s going to happen in the Democratic primary but I don’t think it’s going to be pretty, and that will be a huge determining factor, who knows?

MR. GINSBERG: I think the other premise is more interesting, I think if it’s over on the morning of February 6th, that’s pretty a playbook that we ran in 2000 because Bush was done by Super Tuesday, it’s a month different.  We sort of knew in 2004, once Kerry was nominated in early March, there is not the ‘96 public financing limit.  That’s easy, we know how to run that play.  What’s more interesting, if it’s on February 5th, this school of thought that says there is not a clear cut winner after that point because there are so many states, and at large and congressional districts, it’s not a determined convention at that point, that’s the more interesting premise where we don’t really know how to play that one out and that’s where we’ll really be sort of maneuvering on the fly.

MR. HENNICK: But, Karen, you just recently had a Tindale report that came out this week that showed, of the press coverage of the networks, yours, Mark, first and all the way through the networks, you’ve covered the first two months where at February 27th there had been 95 minutes of combined total coverage of the campaign already, that’s more than the last four presidential cycles and I think in 1991 it was a total of one minute.

MR. HALPERIN: More than the last four combined.

MR. HENNICK: The last four combined and you’ve had one, I guess 94 minutes now, this campaign, the first two months than you had the last four cycles.  So your question about where will we post a long general election campaign, I mean this is well advanced in a primary and it also shows you while this campaign knows that, and the mayor knows it more than anybody, he is out to earn the nomination and is going to work hard to earn it, as opposed to looking strategically ahead about where we are going to be post February 8th.

MR. GOEAS: By the way, probably the only ones smiling about all this is the Bush Administration because what that means is the foot is being taken off the gasoline in terms of the constant beating up of the President and that’s why you are going to start seeing his numbers start inching up, just because he is not the only focus. So it’s good news for him, probably bad news for the rest of us.

MR. HALPERIN: Let’s start talking about the press role in this and, again, feel free to make points, constructive points, Professor Ginsberg, about the way the press can do better.

Rick Davis, which of the candidates represented in this room has gotten the best coverage to date would you say and why?

MR. DAVIS: Oh, I think John McCain gets great coverage only because of length of time, I mean he has remained a person in the campaign field for a long time who has driven the debate in our country. 

I would say, let me ask you a different question, if we are going to talk about the media side of this thing.  We touched on this in the earlier questioning, as to where the boundaries are going to be in this election cycle, we have already seen the first reporting of people’s families involvement in the campaign, we certainly had our share of that kind of thing in 2000. We had instances of networks running interviews with people saying that John McCain has got a family out of wedlock and when the reporter on camera said, well, what evidence do you have of that? He said, well, that’s up to McCain to disprove, you know, and that seemed to be, whoever the editor was of that network seemed to think that was okay to broadcast. 

We saw other examples of that throughout the course of the campaign.  Where do you think the limits are going to be from the press perspective? I actually wish Alex was here because I know they spent a lot of time on this in the Shorenstein Center.

MR. HALPERIN: That it’s a fascinating rhetorical question but—

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Before we engage, well I don’t think there is anybody in the room who is interested in what I think and, if there are, they can buy my book and read it because we address that.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Rick, you didn’t really answer my question, do you think Senator McCain has gotten the most favorable coverage to date of the three candidates in the room?

MR. DAVIS:  I think most all the coverage McCain gets is favorable, I don’t know, I wouldn’t compare it, I don’t—

MR. HALPERIN: Okay. Alex, which of the three candidates do you think has gotten the most favorable coverage?

MR. CASTELLANOS: I think as of late, I would say the rap up would probably be Giuliani.

MR. HALPERIN: Hit your mic, please.

MR. CASTELLANOS: Oh.

MR. HALPERIN: Okay, you say as of late and why do you think that is?

MR. CASTELLANOS: Because he is, the announcement, the freshest face on the scene and I think voters on both sides are hungry for Christmas in July a little bit, they would like a change, they would like something new and Giuliani is the best known, least known guy out there, so he is going through his little boomlet now.

MR. HALPERIN: You all have gotten a fair amount of positive press, do any of the four of you want to speculate as to is that your doing?  Is that luck?  Is that poll standing?  What’s causing it?

MR. DUHAIME: I think it’s, I think what Alex says is right in terms of being kind of fresh to the scene, there is an awful, you know, big push as to whether or not he was running, whether or not he could win that’s been I think disproved, and part of that is just a process story in and of itself so I think that’s driven the press.  I don’t know that it’s all been positive, I think you certainly saw, over the last week, some stories that you could argue were otherwise and a push to get those out there.

MR. HALPERIN: All right, Ben Ginsberg, the last two successful candidates, a few people who have been elected president, Clinton, President Bush, those two campaigns spent a large amount of time consulting with policy experts, coming up with serious policy proposals, packaging them, announcing them in a way where their substantive policy proposals got a fair amount of attention and I would argue played a role in their getting elected in ‘92 and 2000.  Is that something that your campaign or a campaign should aspire to in the 2008 cycle? And what are the tricks to getting that done?

MR. GINSBERG: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think if the implication in the question is there hasn’t been much of that yet, you’ve got to remember this is still February of the off year, and by and large, those policy pronouncements and those other campaigns came out later at that point.  I mean the tricks of getting it out are just having a truly broad based coalition of experts who bring all sorts of different views to the table and then hammering out a policy that your candidate is comfortable with and disgorging it in the proper setting.

MR. HALPERIN: Brett O’Donnell, when I talk to Democrats, they all say that those issues will be that they will come forward with plans on Iraq, if that, if the world demands that.  Health care and energy are the two they cite, and in your party, in the nomination process, what will be the areas that you think people will feel compelled to come forward with policy, detailed policy proposals, and to launch them and try to get attention for them?

MR. O’DONNELL: Well I think they are some of the things we are already starting to pay attention to. I think one of the issues that hasn’t been talked about very much here today is the environment and I think that that’s something that people are starting to be more sensitive about, especially younger voters are especially sensitive about that and so I think the environment will be discussed a lot.  Energy dependency relates to the environment, obviously we are going to be talking about the war, but I also think that another issue is sort of the uncertainty that lots of American workers feel in the economy right now.

One of the reasons why the Bush Administration I don’t think gets the kind of credit that it deserves for the economy is because there are a lot of workers who are nervous about their own job security and so, while they might live in a good economy, they live in an uncertain future.  And so I think that that’s something that deserves some attention and should get a lot of attention by the various campaigns. 

And I think that reframing the Iraq War in terms of larger security issues will be something that ought to be discussed by our party.

MR. HALPERIN: Ed Goeas, the same question, what are the issues you think will require not just positions but detailed proposals and how do you get them into the bloodstream and the nomination process?

MR. GOEAS: Well I think, quite frankly, that I guess I would answer a little bit differently and that’s, from a personal level, the one thing that has impressed me in the meetings that I’ve had with Giuliani, in terms of talking about the campaign, putting together the campaign, talking about issues is you bring up an issue and he answers with, this is how I would solve it, as opposed to this is what the policy ought to be. And I think we are going to see maybe different types of policies coming out, at least in terms of this campaign, not being this is a policy statement but here is the problem and here is how we think we can solve this problem.

MR. HALPERIN: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I don’t quite understand what you mean by the distinction.

MR. GOEAS: It would be more instead of saying here is what the policy should be, for example, on welfare reform, which you had in the Clinton campaign during ‘92, more what ended up being the policy in terms of this is what we are doing to solve the problem that developed later legislatively.  And I think you may see, because of this pressure that is there in terms of showing you can govern, maybe in all the camps, more of a not just saying here is our policy to put up against someone else but here is our solution to put against someone else and see what the American public, how the American public reacts to that.

MR. STEVENS: Let me just jump in on that for a second.  I always thought that one of the, that the two people that probably did more to win the campaign for President Bush than anybody were Josh Bolton, who ran the policy team, and Michael Gerson, and that synergy between policy and language, it was one of the few times that the memorable phrases came out of the Republican campaign in the general election. And I think that the Bush campaign really went through a process of asking themselves what did it mean to be a new Republican, just as the Clinton campaign it was a new Democrat.

For Clinton, it was you are like for the death penalty or against welfare.  For the environment we are in in 2000, it had a lot to do with education for the Bush campaign and all that, and I think that that’s going to be a very interesting marker here of which campaign is able to dominate the language of the campaign because it’s not a bad indicator of who is dominating the debate on the campaign.  And that’s something, just from my perspective, I thin