Bert Lance : A Seasoned Political Observer Explains Ins and Outs of the Process

A strong case can be made that, if Bert Lance had never become engulfed by financial and legal troubles, history might have treated the Democratic Party far more kindly over the past 15 years.

In 1976, Lance was a principal architect of the party’s last successful run for the presidency and he soon joined his friend, Jimmy Carter, in Washington. Lance’s importance to Carter far exceeded his official relationship as budget director: He was the President’s right arm, dispensing sage advice and keeping the White House on an even keel.

When allegations arose that Lance had misapplied funds from a small bank he headed in Georgia, Carter agonized and finally let him go in September, 1977--a departure that seemed to mark a downward turn his presidency never recovered from. Lance bitterly contested charges thrown at him by federal banking regulators in the years since and felt vindicated in 1980, when a federal jury acquitted him of a number of charges and a federal judge threw out the rest.

These controversies, however, prevented him from playing as large a role in national life as his talents suggested. Perhaps more than any other non-elected leader of the party, he has understood the mind of the Southern voter and has known that only by regaining Southern support could the Democrats recapture the White House. In 1984, after winning the Democratic nomination, Walter F. Mondale tried to make Lance party chairman. But resistance from the party regulars was too much, and Lance settled for the lesser role of campaign chairman. Mondale wound up losing 49 states.

Lance remains one of the most sought-out men in the Democratic Party on politics in the South and around the country. William Safire, the New York Times columnist whose writings helped to bring him down, has become a friend and turns to him to take the political pulse. Jesse Jackson developed strong political ties to Lance and, during his campaigns, called him at all hours to talk.

Lance, 60, now runs an international financial consulting firm and lives with his family in Calhoun, Ga. He rarely gives press interviews but agreed to this special conversation, speaking from his home the day after the Georgia primary.

Question: How do you expect Super Tuesday to unfold for the Democrats?

Answer: I would think, in Mississippi and Louisiana, that Clinton does extremely well. You’ve been to Texas, so you’ve got a better feel for that than I have. But I would assume that he does well in Texas. If there is a battle in the South on Tuesday between Tsongas and Clinton--it will be in Florida.

Q: I can tell you that, in Texas, Tsongas has almost no presence at the moment.

A: So there’s nobody else for them. There’s no contest.

And Tsongas did fairly well in Georgia--when you consider that he hadn’t even had a presence here until Friday night a week ago. So he got up close to 30%. If he had broken over 30%, he could have said, “I’ve done extremely well in the Southern state, and there are better things ahead.”

But Super Tuesday in the South will not be a good day for him--except perhaps in Florida. If I were he, I would concentrate on Florida. But Clinton’s spent a lot of time in Florida, and he’s well financed. So I would think that he wins Florida also; where Tsongas gets something out of Rhode Island and Massachusetts and perhaps Delaware. So it’s not a clean sweep. But the large number of delegates who would be out of Florida and Texas make a major difference.

Q: Does the fact that Clinton did as well among the long-established Georgia residents suggest that his problems, the charges of womanizing and draft evasion, have not caught hold in the South?

A: I don’t know that you can really draw that conclusion. I think that argument will be made--but again, that hadn’t been the focus of the campaign. Kerrey focused on the draft situation, but Kerrey went nowhere in Georgia, had no support, no organization. It says more to me that you have to have some semblance of an organization, and that you have to have a presence in a state, and the endorsement of the local elected leadership in order to get any support. That issue still has to be debated, to some extent.

Q: Clinton also had the support of the black leadership.

A: He had the black leadership--and the black vote. Jesse (Jackson) did not make an issue. Jesse took the high road about the flap that they had. So all of that caused Clinton to do very, very well in Georgia. I don’t think anybody can say that he didn’t do well.

But I do not believe those issues are behind him in a general election. That’s where you get into the question of what happens then.

Q: Clinton seems to be getting the lower-income vote. The less educated. And he’s getting a lot of the black vote. Whereas Tsongas seems to be getting the upper-income, better-educated vote. They seem to be splitting along class and income. Does that suggest to you that Clinton is building the traditional base of the Democratic Party?

A: Certainly. It goes past just the labor-union base that (Walter) Mondale tried to build, right? So I think he’s been effective in doing that.

The good news for Bill Clinton in Tuesday’s vote: . . . If you can win in Georgia, then you can win in other states throughout the country. You can take that message and go to Ohio or California or Texas or Florida, New York, whatever the case may be.

Q: Can you spell that out a little more?

A: Sometimes a candidate who could win in New York, for example, couldn’t win in the South--because he would be weighted down by all the interest-group support of the Democratic Party.

What Clinton has so effectively done with the Democratic Party, in my judgment, is that he has focused on elected leadership support. There’s a big difference. Mondale never could get that because the governors and the members of Congress and so on always ran from him. (Michael) Dukakis couldn’t get that. Even though he had (Sen. Lloyd) Bentsen on the ticket--which gave him the opportunity to try to get it--he never really did.

What happens is that somebody who can be elected in New York, for example, because of appeal to the interest-group make-up of the Democratic Party collectively, then comes to a state like Georgia--and the cumulative weight of all those interest groups works against him.

Now, if you can come to Georgia and win based on whether your message is being heard or not, then I think you can go to New York, or you can go to Illinois or other parts of the country, and have a chance at winning. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to win--but it gives you the opportunity. . . .

Q: With Tsongas, by contrast, in the South, is it a matter of not being known?

A: I think that’s exactly the problem. He’s got a message. He shows the power of an idea once it gets started--because he really hasn’t had any organization that I know anything about. And he hasn’t had any time on the ground in these Southern states to campaign. So to get close to 30% in Georgia is not a bad performance in a week’s time. That’s really all he’s had.

So he does have an appeal. He is believed to be telling the truth. He has a consistency of message that is important. And people are paying attention to him.

Obviously, he didn’t beat Clinton in Georgia, but when you look at the whole of the Democratic Party, either one would have a chance. . . . In November, Clinton has a better chance in the South than probably Tsongas does. But both of them could possibly take the issues to Bush.

Q: What would be your sense of it after Super Tuesday between Clinton and Tsongas--with, I guess, Brown as a wild card?

A: You can’t tell how Brown may play. He has had presidential experience. He worked on Carter in those late primaries in ’76. He’s not new to the game.

I think, after Super Tuesday, that many folks will be saying, “Well, it appears that Clinton’s on his way to the nomination.” But I think that Michigan and Illinois will determine who the nominee is.

If either one were to win both, then, I think, they become the presumptive nominee. Tsongas got a leg up in winning Maryland because, next to Illinois, Maryland probably is the most representative state in the country of the Democratic voter--the makeup and the demographics and what have you. . . .

Q: If you were a betting man on Illinois and Michigan, who would you back?

A: If Clinton continues to be able to attract the black vote--that makes a difference in Michigan. And it makes a difference in Illinois.

See, it’s interesting. If I were Clinton, I’d ask Jesse to campaign with me, as being one who was able to attract black support and so on. Jesse’s said he’d campaign with any of them. That’s what caused that flap, I guess, to some extent. But he could ask him. It doesn’t harm him with his voters, I wouldn’t think.

Q: Would you assume that Clinton, if he has a strong Super Tuesday in the South, has the edge in Illinois and Michigan?

A: I’m not going to say that, because I don’t think you can make that assumption until you see what else develops. I think, when you go to Michigan, because of the economic circumstances--the automobile problems and what have you--that it’s going to be an intense kind of campaign.

. . . Michigan and Illinois will tell the tale. It’s wide open. . . .

Q: How much damage is Pat Buchanan doing to George Bush?

A: He’s doing damage to him in the sense that you’ve got the historical perspective that a sitting President challenged within his own party since, I guess, (Harry) Truman’s time, has not been reelected. . . .

Right now, Buchanan’s harming Bush for the general election. Bush will have to recover from that as time goes, because obviously, he’ll get the nomination. Buchanan’s not winning anything.

What is interesting about Buchanan is that he’s very smart, and a good campaigner. But you can imagine the derision he would heap on somebody if they were on “Crossfire” and Buchanan were back in his previous position of being able to talk to that candidate--because here’s what, basically, he would say. He would say, “I’m going to label you the ‘New Math Candidate.’ We went through the new-math syndrome in this country and everybody laughed about it and decided it didn’t work. You’re new math is so bad that you’re saying that 30% or 36% is a win.” He would heap derision upon anybody who came and tried to make the case that he was, in effect, winning, when, in reality, he’s losing every time.

If I were President Bush, I’d say, “Look, I have lost an election. I’ve won most of them. But every time I got below 50% I lost, and every time I got over 50%, I won. If Pat’s not smart enough to figure that out--then he’s not smart enough to be President of the United States.” Then I’d move on.

Q: Do you think the media is helping Buchanan create this?

A: Absolutely.

Q: By treating it as a victory?

A: By allowing the conversation to always focus on that, he’s doing better than expected. . . . For the media to constantly say Buchanan is doing better than expected, or he’s sending a message when he’s consistently being beat everywhere--I don’t think that’s valid. I think people think that the media is not playing it straight up. . . .

Q: On that basis, should the Bush forces be telling Buchanan either win or get out?

A: No. I think they ought to continue to let him do whatever he wants to do.

Q: But should they continue paying so much attention to him?

A: I wouldn’t pay any attention to him. Look at the numbers in Georgia. Bush got 80,000 or so more votes in Georgia this time than he did in 1988.

. . . . The great irony is that the Bush folk--and I assume it was the Bush folk because they controlled the party in Georgia--made a tremendous mistake in not allowing David Duke on the ballot.

Q: Why is that?

A: If they had, two things would have happened. Buchanan and Duke would have slugged it out, and one of them would have gotten 18% and one 17%. More than likely, neither one of them would have been viewed as promoting a challenge, really, to George Bush. . . .

The second thing is, if he had been on the ballot, Bush would have been able to have attracted black voters for perhaps the first time. That’s the opportunity they really missed, because a lot of black voters instinctively would have crossed over--if they were Democrats, which, I think, they are. They would have crossed over and voted against Duke. Therefore, voted for Bush. Bush would have had the opportunity to have established a relationship and tried to build a bridge to black voters for November. . . .

Bush would have been through with Pat Buchanan now if they had allowed Duke on the ballot.

Q: Has Bush hurt himself in the general by seeming to move right to accommodate Buchanan? He says, “I made a mistake on the tax issue”; he goes to Evangelical churches; he fires the head of the NEA?

A: Yes. I think he made a real mistake. If he were going to say that he made a mistake about the tax issue, he should have done it early on--because now it appears to be in response to those circumstances. As you well recall, I always thought it was wrong, and I always thought that the rap put on Carter about vacillating and not having a philosophy was due to the fact that he did change his mind from time to time on policy issues. That hurt him badly.

So Bush now is running the risk of what they used to say when a congressman appointed the postmasters--that out of 20, they would create 19 enemies and one ingrate. He’s running the risk now of alienating both sides. . . .

So he should have admitted it, if he feels it was a mistake, at the time he did it, and explained that he had reasons for doing it--and move on. He’s had sufficient opportunity to do it without appearing to be pandering to other supporters.

Q: How do you see the general election unfolding? Richard Nixon has said recently that he thinks it’s going to be very close--that he would expect Bush to take the South, but might lose California; and the Democrat would take the Northeast and it would then hinge on Illinois and Ohio as the key states. What’s your analysis?

A: The South, obviously, is awfully important. If George Bush can win in the South--and I think he’s shown that he can previously--that is a big advantage.

Clinton would be strong opposition to him in the South because of what we’ve seen thus far, and, I imagine, what will happen this week.

Tsongas would be having a pro-business message--which would sell well in the South. This is where we want to see jobs created, and a lot of jobs have been created in the South.

So, it will be a close contest in the South. But, even in my heart of hearts, saying that I’d like to see a Democrat, I have to be candid in saying that I think, at this point, Bush has the advantage. Even though, right now, he’s not the most popular President that we’ve ever had.

But if the economy turns and is moving upward, then that will make a difference. If the economy worsens, then, I think, he’s beat. I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference who the candidate is at that point in time.

So it was like Carter in ’80. I always felt like, if inflation and interest rates were in double digits, that he was beat no matter what the circumstances were. I think if the economy is still moving in the wrong direction, then George Bush is beat. If it’s moving in a revitalized sense, then it would be close, but I think George Bush would be hard to beat.