Bill Bradley (Former U.S. Senator, NY)

In your experience as a Senator, how did the need to fundraise impact your day to day? Your ability to focus on policymaking and represent your entire constituency and so on.

You know, I don’t think it had an impact in my case because I didn’t spend that much time raising money. I had other people to raise the money. I had to travel to go to events, but I didn’t spend a lot of time dialing for dollars because I felt that that wasn’t what my job was.

How about your colleagues, did you see it impact their day to day?

I think the difference from when I came into the Senate in 1979 to when I left in 1997, there was an enormous shift in the amount and focus on fundraising. It used to be that you were a Senator for four years and you ran for re-election for two years. But in the current world you, basically, run for re-election from the day you arrive, so, you constantly have to raise money in order to get to the number you need in order to be able to run an effective campaign.

And so, it turns the fundraising cycle from a two year cycle into a six year cycle. And if you’re well organized, and you have a lot of good people, that’s not impossible thing to do, it changes a little bit of your scheduling because you’ve got to go to events, fundraising events, as opposed to spend more time talking about policy.

And that number you need to reach has grown, I take it. Have you seen it grown during your term?

When I ran for the Senate in 1978 for both my primary and general election, I think I spent about 1.3, 1.4 million dollars, and in the year 2000 the Democratic candidate who won that same Senate seat spent about 62 million. So, it was a dramatic change. Now, he spent excessively of his own money, but it still represents an order of magnitude. In order to run in New Jersey now it’s probably 15 to 20-million-dollar enterprise, normally.

During your terms as a Senator, how was your relationship with the lobbyists? Was it an annoyance?

Basically, I think lobbyists are part of the Democratic process. People hire people to present their case, maybe it’s the Girl Scouts, maybe it’s the CR Club or maybe it’s Exxon, right? And there’s nothing wrong with lobbyists, I mean I think a lot of times, I mean I’ve had good relationships with some lobbyists and they have brought information that I didn’t get anywhere else.

The problem is the connection between lobbyists and money and unless you can break that connection then every lobbyist is suspect of actually trying to influence things with money as opposed to ideas.

It’s great if they influence things with ideas, it’s terrible if they try to influence things with money. And so, when you have a meeting with a lobbyist and they present some facts, that’s great, but if you then go down the street to the backroom of a bar where you have a little fundraiser and they stuff $2,000 checks in your pocket or they pay them at the door, then that’s a problem.

And the only way to break that connection, which I think is one of the key political reforms of our time, the only way to break the connection between the lobbyist and the elected official is by going to public financing of all Congressional and Senate campaigns. You can do that for a little less than two billion dollars a year out of a 1.6 trillion dollar budget.

In terms of the amount of money that the tax payer will save by breaking that connection, and thereby ensuring fewer special interest provisions, whether they’re earmarks or changes in formula or effective dates, or whatever, far out exceeds the two billion dollars that it would cost. If you did that, you’d break that connection.

In your experience, when you were in government, did they have any role in your campaign fundraising machines?

There were lobbyists who contributed to my campaigns, yeah, but they were largely people from my home state. I don’t think that the — now, I don’t know, I don’t have all the records, but there were not, there was not an organized attempt to milk the lobbying community of funds. If you look at the number of lobbyists in Washington when I was there, it’s much less than now.

I mean for example, in 2000 there were, like, 15,000 lobbyists in Washington, by 2005 there were 33,000. So, what had happened? You know, the sign had been put out, open for business. And so, people charge companies enormous amounts of money in order to lobby. I used to think that one of the most overpaid jobs in the world was the lobbyist. What would happen is, corporation acts would send their lobbyists to Washington and basically he’d read the Washington Post, or she’d read Washington Times and gossip a little bit and write a report, and for that get paid a couple hundred grand.

I mean, as a person who was in the drama, the irrelevance of a lot of these people was astonishing to me.

You’d speak to the problem when the problem with the lobbyist thing is when there’s the money connection.

I mean to some degree is it a problem just to perception or do you think members of Congress might, at least on occasion, take into account the viewpoint of a big campaign donor when voting on a bill that affects that donor? I mean, that really is what it comes down to, right?

Well, that’s the smoking gun, if you can find that. And there have been some examples. I’ve always said that an appropriations bill or tax bill, every big appropriation or tax bill is an opportunity for somebody to win a Pulitzer, because to be able to disentangle all these connections and tell that story, I mean sometimes one would assume there was a direct quid pro quo. But you can’t tell that the way the laws are written often and most times there wouldn’t be a direct quid pro quo. So, you’d have to really get in to each of the bills to try to understand why, what happened happened.

But just on a layperson’s point of view, or an average citizen, say a member of Congress gets on a regular basis x tens of thousands of dollars from one particular pack, or an industry, a bill comes up somewhere in during their career that affects that industry, isn’t there at least a moment? It wouldn’t be just human nature that if not the member of Congress, their staff is going to point out?

Well, I don’t think that the staff, or at least I can speak for myself, the professional staff of a Senate office was totally separated from a fundraising operation. Nobody on my Senator’s staffs, the person who does banking, or tax or energy or transportation, that person has no idea of what the fundraising is, because that’s not a Senate operation, that’s a campaign operation. It’s some place off and in back in there home state.

And so, it’s totally separate. But I do think that, you know, there’s an appearance sometimes, and that appearance is the only way you deal with that is you break the connection by going to public financing.

Well it’s just that Allen was telling us when we were with Cody that he would have a staff person, maybe not connected with a particular department, but alert him to, hey this is coming up, you remember speaking with them? He would be alerted in his experience and I just wondered if you had.

Well no, I specifically had that wall between substantive staff and fundraising. So, my substantive staff had no idea of who was contributing money, but I do have the experience of becoming a subcommittee chairman on a committee, which means you had committee staff, right? And I became the subcommittee chairman and within a matter of a few weeks, the head of that subcommittee staff came to me and asked me if I would like to have a fundraiser put on by the interest that they were represented in that subcommittee. I fired the guy, right?

But, obviously, this had gone on before or he wouldn’t have approached me. And he is the permanent staff, he’s there sometimes longer than the Senator is. So, when you look at the appearance of problem, you have to look not simply at the center, but at the professional staffs on the committees. Now, I think that’s very rare, I think that that’s very rare that it happens, but that’s in my own experience with that.

We were at the House yesterday and just happened to stumble upon something. We were there to take an interview with Colin Peterson, and while we were there we ducked in and we looked at the House Ad Committee hearing room, quite an ornate room and so on, and it was festooned with pumpkins and elaborate cornstalks and so on. All with a little white tag, and I went and looked at the white tag and it’s the Fertilizer Institute. Basically, the Fertilizer Institute was putting on a harvest time reception for members of the Ag Committee. It was the Fertilizer Institute, that’s a trade organization.

You know, they’re public buildings, anybody can come in and hold a reception, whether it’s, you know, Mothers Against Drunk Driving or the Fertilizer Institute. But the reception itself is not an issue, the reason they do that, obviously, is because they think that they might make connections or talk to people. But to me, that’s not the same thing as actually making monetary contributions to a campaign. It’s a way you meet people, but it’s not the way you directly influence legislation, if that’s what you want to do.

In your opinion, what percentage of legislation being introduced and worked on in Congress is actually in the interest of most American citizens as opposed to some bill that’s designed to give it financial advantage to one interest?

Well, I think that the bigger the subject, the more likely that it’s going to represent all of the people. When you pass a Medicare bill, for example, you’re doing it for all senior citizens. When you pass an education bill you’re doing it for all the kids, or all the kids that might go to college.

So, the bigger program, I think the less likely you are to have mischief. That doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be some provision tucked away in the big program, it might be irrelevant to the broader purpose, but that’s not the main purpose.

And there’s no way to assign what percent is to the special interest, actually, get out of every appropriations bill. It’s not an easy thing to get to.

We taped some interviews with people who were elected with public funding and one of the women that is in the House just told us, she goes, “You would not believe how much of this our day to day, is just spent over these little laws that give advantage to one real estate group over” –

That’s my point. The bigger the issue, the less likely you’re going to have mischief. But in the legislative process, on a finance committee you can spend as much time doing a tiny bill as you would a big bill because, you know, work expands to fill the time. And the smaller bills are the one’s where you have all the mischief.

Are you of the opinion that public funding of federal elections would help bring forth better leadership?

I think so. Because I think that is a tremendous burden on politicians, to know that if they’re going to be a Senator they’ve got to raise 10 million dollars. It’s a kind of daunting task. It gives the advantage to the super wealthy who can spend their own money because that’s the only way you ever give the appearance of being totally clean. If you have to raise the money, there’s always a presumption that there’s a problem, if you don’t have to raise the money, then it’s your qualifications, your vision, your ability to touch people, your specific commitments that you make to the citizens about what you want to do if you’re elected for your state and for the country.

You remove a whole area of grayness and cloudiness that now hovers over the whole process, because it’s very difficult to determine, as your questions earlier indicate, whether something is being done because of subsinent reasons or because of political/fundraising reasons. And I think that, that’s why it’s one of the more significant reforms that we could pass.

What’s your take on things we hear about some of the critics of public funding is that campaign money from a special interest is an expression of freedom of speech.

Well that means people with more money will have a microphone and people with less money will have a megaphone. And I think that the freedom of speech argument is ludicrous, to equate money with speech, I think Buckley Valeo was a colossally misguided Supreme Court decision, because it equated money with speech. And I’ve heard the argument that well the total amount of money spent on political campaigns in a particular year is less than the pharmaceutical industry or the oil industry or whatever spends on advertising in the same year. Well to me, that’s irrelevant.

The question is, do you believe that money is distorting the Democratic process? In American history when there have been things that have distorted the Democratic process, there is a way to deal with that, and you deal with that through a Constitutional Amendment. Now I think public financing is a much easier, and clearer, way to deal with it and it provides the option that somebody doesn’t have to take the public financing, but as long as his opponent will get more and more and more, it’s kind of mooted the advantage of money.

But if you want to rid the process totally of money then you need to do the same thing we did when we passed the Constitutional Amendment that gave women the right to vote or the Constitutional Amendment that directly elected senators, as opposed to having them sent to Washington by corrupt state legislatures. And that is, you would pass a Constitutional Amendment that simply said it would void Buckley Valeo and simply say federal, state and local officials may limit the total amount of money spent on political campaign.

Now, given those two paths, I believe public financing is the one that is more likely to happen, because you then would avoid totally any serious discussion about the First Amendment.

Well, you’ve already eluded to the fact that people, to get into office, sometimes tend to be on the wealthier side, the advantage being it gives the impression they’re not beholden. By and large, people are of the opinion that they’re really not that represented. The people who are actually in our Congress, is essentially millionaires, people that are wealthier than they are. Do you think that publicly financed elections can bring more citizens of average means into office?

The answer’s yes. I mean there’s no question about that. I mean, if you don’t have to raise money, then the wealthy person doesn’t have the inherent advantage over the average person. It then depends on how well you work the system, present your case and convince the people. So, yeah, I think you would get — now does it mean that you’re not going to find people who’ve done very well in the private sector who are public spirited and want to contribute to their country won’t run for political office? If they want to, they should run for political office, but it means you don’t disadvantage those people who are of average means and look at politics as a daunting profession because of the amount of money that that you have to raise.

So, I mean, I look at that and I say, that’s another reason why public finance is a no brainer in the terms of in terms of the skepticism. I mean when I traveled around the country promoting my book, The New American Story, in which it says that the old story is a can’t do story, we can’t solve Social Security, we can’t give healthcare, we can’t break our addiction to oil, we can’t make a public school a great school. That’s the old story, we’ve been in the grip of that story.

And there is another story, a can do story, it’s called The New Story, we can do all those things. And The New Story says tell people the truth and put country ahead of party. And if you had public financing of elections, that would help you do that in a fundamental way, because the focus would then be on, what do you have to say? With that said, I encountered a lot of skepticism. I’d lay out what you specifically do in healthcare, education, pensions, oil, so forth, and people would say, it sounds great, it’s common sense, but it’ll never happen.

Why won’t it happen? Because the politics is in the grips of the special interests. In other words, of the wealthy or the special corporate interests and not my interests, right? Well, I would always say to those people, if you, if you want to make sure that that kind of world continues, then continue to believe you can’t make a difference. And the reality is that the power still rests with the people, it can be now in a way propelled through the internet to levels of effectiveness that we’ve never known in the past.

And the reality is, you can do and you can influence the political process. You need public financing, you need more people to vote if you want to believe the biggest change in American politics is it would be if we could get the turnout from 50 percent of the voters to 80 percent of the voters. We’re 42nd in the world in turnout, Italy’s number one with 92 percent, we’re a little under 50 percent. If we could get the turnout 80 percent, who are the 30 additional percent that would come? They’re often people who are working now and can’t get to the polls or they’re people who have become so skeptical about the process that they’ve checked out, or they are disproportionately poor, minority and young.

Well if those people came into the polls, as you counted votes, you’d have to address their issues. And if you address their issues, you’d be dealing with some of the basic problems that the country faces, such as health, pensions, education, breaking our addiction to oil, cleaning up the environment. And that does not mean that’s enough.

Now what I was going to say was it’s not also just the people that don’t vote. I mean, the reality is that, the Congress today is not a competitive place. There are 435 seats, there are about 40 of them that are competitive. Democrats won more than their fair share of the 40 in 2006, therefore Democrats control the house. But the little secret is about 395 of them are not competitive.

And so, what does that mean? Well if I’m in a district that’s 60/40 Democrat, I don’t care what Republicans think, I don’t even need to listen to them. I know that I’m going to have no problem in the general election because 60 percent of my district is Democrat, they’re going to vote for the Democrat. But what I’ve got to be worried about is a challenge on my left, or if you’re Republican, a challenge on your right. So, what you do is you play to the policy interests, to the most extreme elements of each respective party, and what is not addressed is what 80 percent of the people want in terms of public education, quality, healthcare for everybody, secure pensions, breaking our addiction to oil. Everybody wants that, but the process in order for it to happen means Republicans and Democrats have to talk to each other, as opposed to simply have partisan warfare.

And right now, there’s an incentive for partisan warfare, because all you have to do is avoid a primary conflict. So, if you appear reasonable, you’re more likely to get a primary conflict on the right, for example, you’ll get some right-wing wahoo challenge you if you’re a moderate Republican talking about, well how do we get healthcare for everybody? Let’s compromise here and there.

And so, what we need to do if we want — and this I think is one of the most fundamental, I put this up right there, and maybe even a little ahead of public financing, although maybe even with public financing, and that is instead of allowing state legislatures to draw the Congressional lines, which has produced this situation where 395 of the 435 seats are safe seats, and therefore nobody talks across party lines to each other, we’ve got to turn that responsibility over to citizen’s commissions.

That was proposed the end of the 19th Century, that was one of the progressive reforms, and although we did succeed in having the people elect senators, as opposed to state legislatures, we have had continuing state legislatures writing what the Congressional district lines is, and thereby, whoever’s in the majority, Republican or Democrat, trying to maximize those by drawing crazy districts, that will let their candidate, their party win.

Instead, we should turn that responsibility over to the people in the form of Blue Ribbon commission that would be selected throughout the state, and partly some Republican, Democrat input, but also, citizen’s groups. And they would be charged with drawing Congressional districts that would have as close to possible balance. You’re not going to have balance everywhere, and you shouldn’t contort the whole structure of the district, but, you know, it should be contiguous like states and not like spaghetti.

And if you did that reform you’d have a major change in politics and you’d see people across the party line talking to each other, and ultimately that’s the way you make things happen.

Public financing elections would cost about two billion dollars a year, now we spend about that much promoting Democracy abroad. So, I ask you, investing two billion out of a 1.6 trillion dollar budget to take all the special interests out of the legislative process and break the link between the lobbyists and the ultimate piece of legislation, is probably about the best investment of $2 billion that anybody in America could ever make.

You might end up with even a savings of taxpayer dollars, because you wouldn’t be feeding the lobbyist money beast. You would be essentially worrying about your district, and you would be worrying about the country, and so, you’d find a lot less special provisions.

Everyone seems to be starting to get the sense that the Iraq war is quite a boondoggle and a tragedy that we’re not out of yet. To what degree do you think that a foreign policy that lands us there is related to an energy policy that has been shaped, at least in part by special interests?

I mean, I think there’s a connection between our dependence on oil and two wars in the last 15 years. Does anybody think we’d ever not only not be in Iraq, but we’d have been even in Kuwait if we did not have to be dependant on oil? I mean, there is a direct connection.

So, why haven’t we been able to break that dependence? On one level it is because the people who benefit from that, various energy industries in the oil area like what they have, particularly when prices go up as they are now.

But they don’t want prices to go up too high because then that would kind of make other forms of energy competitive, but at the same time what we need to do is we need to recognize that to break the grip and the ultimate special interest, of course, is OPEC, to break OPEC’s control of our live, is within our reach. There are answers to our problems.

If we simply had the mileage standard in all of our cars that Europe has today in their fleet, average of 45 miles a gallon, we would import no oil from OPEC, five million barrels less.

To make that transition go faster, what you do is you say it’s a free country if you want to buy an SUV or a Hummer, great, but you’re going to pay a big tax. But none of that tax money goes to the government, all of that goes back to the people in the form of a rebate to those people who buy more fuel-efficient cars. And if you did those two things, you would dramatically reduce the amount of oil that we consume in this country.

Is there a connection on the money side? Yeah, I argue that, you know, if you really want to deal with global warming, then you can make it a partisan issue. You can go into Congressional districts where people have voted straight down the line, with the interests that don’t want global warming solved, don’t believe it exists, and you can point out that the hurricane happened here in part because of global warming. And there are Congressmen who should be acting to prevent global warming, and therefore less hurricanes, has instead been in the pocket of this industry or that industry, who benefit from continuous of status quo.

I’ve argued that is a potential cutting edge issue for people running in political campaigns.

Well with regard to the money, why would fuel efficiency standards? The first thing that you speak to, the lack of political will to make that happen thus far, isn’t that connected with money?

Well, it’s in part connected to money, but it’s also, connected to the fact that not only the automobile industry, but the unions involved have great difficulty breaking out of what is status quo. That’s partly money, but it’s not just money. And so, that means that to the extent that you can be clear about what has to happen, you’ll be able to make it happen.

I had some people come in here and talk about an energy project that would reduce our dependence on oil. We calculated it to reduce a million barrels they’d need 15 billion dollars of public investment of investment from the private sector. You know, to get a million barrels less. If you had 45 miles a gallon, you’d get five million barrels less, so, why don’t we just give the automobile companies the two billion dollars they need to produce that car?

I mean, you know, there are ways to solve this problem. But you have to see it clearly and you have to be specific about what you would do, and then you build a constituency around doing what is in the long-term interest of the country, so, that America will not just survive in the 21st Century but we’ll thrive.

Bill Moyer used to say if you slide into home plate and you’re waiting for the call and instead you hand the umpire a thousand dollars that would be considered a bribe. But if you kind of sneak up to politician at a fundraiser and give him a thousand dollars, that’s called a contribution.

If you want to block all money from politics, the public financing won’t do that. Public financing is what I support, I think what we should do, but it doesn’t prevent the rich person from spending as much as money as they want to when an election, right?

Nor does it prevent somebody who’s wealthy or can raise a lot of money from special interests, from not going with public financing. But public financing should — the one who does take it will have enough to make his or her case.

But if you want to block all of the money coming into politics what I say is money in politics is a little bit like ants in your kitchen. If you want to prevent them from coming in, you’ve got to block all the holes. To block all the holes in the fundraising apparatus requires a constitutional amendment to say that federal, state and local officials may limit the total amount of money spent in a political campaign, then no ants will get in.

Congress left to their own initiative, it’s in their own self interest to maintain status quo, and therefore, for people to wait around for Congress to take us to public funding of federal elections is going to be a long wait, and this is a case where the emphasis has to come from we the people.

Yeah. I mean, people in America today have never been more potentially powered to effect change in the political process then they are today. And they just have to do it. If you want public financing, what you do is you start a public financing meet up in your community. You go to meetup.com and you get people together, try to figure out you’re going to do that. And pretty soon 8:00 on Wednesday night is the public financing meet up.

And every place in the United States that want public financing, they go to meet up and they meet that night, and they share their results with each other. They share photos of who they are, they create a community that has the power that no one person could ever equal, and when they create that community of interest to make change in America, it will happen, because politicians will respond to what they see is truly a popular as opposed to a special interest induced uprising.

Do you think we have a problem that we need to restore real Democracy and is public funding a way to do that? Is that too broad stroke or too idealistic?

I think that there three things we have to do in order to restore Democracy to the people in this country, make them in charge.

One is public financing, the other is allowing citizen commissions to write Congressional district lines and the third, quite frankly, is making it easier for people to vote by moving the election from Tuesday to Saturday and Sunday, where people can go and take their kids and teach them the value of being a citizen in a Democracy, and at the same time not having any conflict with work.

If we did those things and the turnout moved from 50 to 80 percent, you’d see a totally different set of policies in this country and they would be policies to address the broadest range of the American people and not the smallest range, in some cases a very narrow range of people who’ve managed to influence the process through money and through citizenry that has chosen to sit at home and treat politics as a spectator sport. As if their only role is in a political equivalent of American Idol and that is to vote. And half of them won’t even vote.

So, it’s both a change that needs to happen in Washington and a change that needs to happen in every town or community in this country.

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