[inaudible question]

Reich: Role for organized labor? Well, under John Sweeney organized labor is, as you know, feeling its oats. Make no mistake about it, in terms of the Democratic party there are no ground troops other than organized labor. Organized labor is the Democratic party on the ground. Occasionally you have some trial lawyers putting some money in and youve got some environmentalists and youve got a little group of lefties in Massachusetts and a little group of movie stars in California and youve got a little group of people up in Vermont and those are all nice, but basically the Democratic party is organized labor.

     Organized labor under John Sweeney is paying more attention to politics and to organizing. Theyve done, I think, a good job. But over time the odds are against labor because, as you know, in 1955, 38% of private sector workers were in unions and now its under 10%, its 9.2% of private sector workers are unionized and they continue to slip. That has much more to do with the changing structure of the economy than anything else, but the fact of the matter is, this is going to be difficult for Democrats. Organized labor is critical, absolutely critical, and thats why everybody wants to get China WTO out of the way, at least everybody in the Democratic party. Dick Gephardt wants to get China WTO finished, Gore cant wait to get it done, because its deflecting organizing strength away from Gore and other Democrats.

[question]: You talked about how campaigns hate to be spontaneous. One of the things weve been talking about is how to get insight beyond the message of the day. Whats the most effective way for us to do that?

Reich: Good question. There are several things that immediately come to mind: for one thing, there are people around candidates. Theyre not going to go on the air, but they will give you a lot of background and some of it could be valuable in terms of providing a picture of whats really going on. Im surprised at how little of that actually seems to take place and I dont mean just strategy stuff, theres too much of that strategy stuff. I mean people who are working on policy, people who are working on really large questions of what the candidate believes, or interactions with the candidate. Can you get the candidate himself or herself to relax and be spontaneous? Probably not, I would doubt it. Good luck.

     The wonderful thing about the broadcast media and again this goes back to the publics exquisite bullshit meter with broadcast pictures, actual visuals of candidates, the public is absorbing huge amounts of information, huge amounts of very subtle body language and information about a candidate, some of it may be unfair, but some of it is really quite important, quite truthful and quite useful. So a lot of footage, not just the photo op, but other footage, how the candidate is behaving in ways that are, if you can get it, not pre-packaged.

[inaudible question]

Reich: I dont know, I was mystified. I went around for several weeks thinking that [Bill Bradley] had voted against flood relief and it was only after weeks went by that I discovered that it was the amendment rather than the actual bill. The same thing happened with Bradleys position on health care. He allowed Gore to talk for a while as if Bradley was getting rid of Medicaid. Now, this was almost exactly the Clinton/Gore health care plan simplified in terms of what it did to Medicaid, there was no getting rid of Medicaid, it was just folded in.

     Similarly with Gores allegations that Bradley was against and had never been for campaign finance reform when he was in the Senate. The record was just the opposite. Bradley had supported, sponsored, or so-sponsored every single campaign finance piece of legislation that came up for about 12 years. The most important piece of campaign finance legislation in 1991 Gore did not co-sponsor and he was never on any of those pieces of legislation. Why did Bradley allow all of that to go on? Well, your guess is probably about as good as mine. I think Bradley wanted to run a different kind of campaign, he wanted the medium to be the message, he wanted him to be an exemplar and a model of what he wanted politics to be. There was some arrogance in that, obviously, and maybe also the campaign was just unable to respond. I am reminded of Michael Dukakis after the Democratic Convention in 1988. He almost went into a stall mode, just the whole thing stalled. You are now in the realm of human personality and I am not a good enough psychoanalyst to know.

[question]: What do you think about the concept of the zone of privacy. Its one of the things Bill Bradley tried to maintain. What should be off-limits as people try to learn about what makes this man tick?

Reich: I think that Bill Bradley tried to draw off the zone of privacy a little too strictly. He didnt want to talk about his family at all, he refused to have really any discussion of his family, he was very reluctant to talk about much of his past. That kind of puritanical aspect or puritanical approach just doesnt wash. I think that a candidate invariably is going to have to talk about his or her family and his or her background not only the official résumé, but unofficially. What hes proud of and what he or she is not proud of, and thats all going to come out anyway. I think thats legitimate, thats all about this elusive character issue. I do think that in a time in which every candidate is prepackaged, when the party organization itself has disintegrated, when party platforms mean very little, when candidate positions become V-chips and school uniforms, what do we have left except character? It would be different if we had a lot of other things to evaluate, but we dont, all we have is character.

[inaudible question]

Reich: Its going to be big and ugly primarily because a huge amount of soft money, unregulated money is now going into the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee and immediately going into television commercials. This was the precedent established by the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1995. Dick Morris, once again, everything evil in the world I blame in Dick Morris (my dog gets sick, its Dick Morris fault). This was started in 1995 and if you remember nobody really thought that unregulated soft money could be used for issue advertising. There was a little bit of a loophole, but it was not exploited to a large extent until 1995 and by the time those ads went up, I mean, when they started to go up Dole was only about 4 points behind Clinton. They continued relentlessly and they were attack ads and the notion was, as long as you are not saying, Vote for me its not regulated money. You can say, Vote against him, hes a bum and that continued on for months and months. My memory is that the Republicans did not start to respond until very, very late and they had far less soft money.

     Well, thats the precedent, thats what were going to deal with now. Bush and Gore and the committees are raising huge amounts of soft money for negative television advertising before the convention and they are already trying it out in particular spot markets right now.

[question]: We were told earlier today by a pollster that people dont care about campaign finance reform when you ask them about issues that are important to them. But youre suggesting a need for campaign finance reform. How do we as journalists make people care should we try to make people care? about following the money?

Reich: I think theres a distinction between campaign finance reform and the larger rot at the top, corruption in politics, special interest money, iron triangles, corporate welfare, tax breaks going to particular people and companies because they got the right lobbyist with the right money, subsidies going to…its all of that, its a much larger story than simply campaign finance. Its a mechanism, and people say, Whats a process mechanism? Nobodys going to be interested in a process mechanism unless they see it directly connected to a mess that everybody knows explicitly or intuitively is there in Washington.

[inaudible question]

Reich: Well, I think that we should try to eliminate soft money. The difficulty, of course, is that youve got something called the First Amendment. If you have private groups getting together and raising money to put ads on and they say (and its very difficult to prove that theyre wrong) that they are not connected with the campaign, that theres no coordination, thats a hard thing to ever regulate under the Constitution. Thats still a very large loophole. So I think we ought to try, we ought to mount a lot of cases, we ought to try to get the Supreme Court to delineate an area of our politics that really should be regulated, even notwithstanding the First Amendment.

     I own a little tiny sliver of Microsoft, such a small sliver its a rounding error, you know, in the morning. Nevertheless, Im an owner of Microsoft and I dont like the fact that Microsoft is using my money to lobby Congress to cut the budget of the Justice Department, the Antitrust Budget. I like strong antitrust laws. In a perfect world I, as one of the owners of that company would not permit that company to use my money to corrupt the political system. Well, maybe with paycheck protection and also shareholder protection we could conceive of a system in which you didnt have to have your money doing things you didnt want you money to be doing, but thats a long way away.

     Thank you all.

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