What makes the difference between a successful bid for the White House and a failed one? The first great factor, of course, is the personal quality of the candidate. The second is the organization behind that candidate. The latter is commanded by the campaign manager, the candidate’s senior political adviser, and a few others.

These individuals are the generals in the quadrennial war for the White House, and they share much in common with their military counterparts. There is an "air war" — arranging television advertisements, radio interviews, and debate appearances. There is a "ground war" — making sure the candidate can make an appearance where he or she is needed most, get back on their airplane, and strike an hour later two hundred miles away, in another television market. There is also a "hidden war" — using pollsters to learn just what voters want, researchers to find something in the opponent’s past that can be used against them, and campaign workers to fax "talking points" to supporters of the candidate who may be speaking to the press during the next news cycle. All three of these are, ultimately, the responsibility of the campaign’s manager and political adviser.

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT spoke with three top officials of recent presidential campaigns. JAMES A. BAKER III is one of the most influential Americans of the late twentieth century. He has run no fewer than five different presidential campaigns: Gerald Ford in 1976; Ronald Reagan in 1984; and George Bush in 1980, 1988, and 1992. President Ford named Baker Undersecretary of Commerce in 1975. In the Reagan administration, Baker was White House Chief of Staff and later Secretary of the Treasury. When Baker’s management helped Bush to succeed Reagan, Baker became the new administration’s Secretary of State, and was widely credited for a resumption of peace talks between Israel and a number of its traditional adversaries in 1991. The following year, Baker resigned to return to the position of White House Chief of Staff, as well as to general Bush’s reelection attempt. Today, he lives in Houston and currently works as a lawyer, bank director and diplomat. DR. SUSAN ESTRICH was the manager for Michael Dukakis’ losing battle for the White House in 1988. Before that, she worked for members of the United States Senate and the United States Supreme court. She is currently based in Los Angeles, where she works as a law and political science professor. A prolific author, Estrich has written such diverse books as Making the Case for Yourself : A Diet Book for Smart Women, Real Rape, and Getting Away With Murder: How Politics Is Destroying the Criminal Justice System. She is also a newspaper columnist and television commentator. STUART SPENCER, it could be said, was on board at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution. He ran Reagan’s two successful campaigns for governor of California in 1966 and 1970, then drifted from the Reagan camp and helped Gerald Ford fend off Reagan’s challenge for the Republican nomination in 1976. Four years later, hard feelings (mostly on the part of Nancy Reagan) were put aside and Spencer served in the key campaign function of Senior Political Adviser as Ronald Reagan won the White House, a post Spencer retained throughout the Reagan administration. Today, he splits time between his home in Palm Desert, California and his ranch in Oregon.

This interview was moderated by Dan Sanders.

STUART SPENCER: For Reagan’s two campaigns as governor, ‘66 and ‘70, we were the total political management firm, running the campaigns. In ‘80 and ‘84, the two presidential campaigns, I was Senior Political Adviser.

STUART SPENCER: Back in ‘65, just after Reagan had given what they called "The Speech" — for Barry Goldwater — he became an individual that a lot of the Republicans in California tried to talk into running for governor. And in that process, we were brought in, about May of ‘65. When he decided to put an exploratory committee together to run, we were hired to do the work. There was a small group put together, some lunches and such, and we began to plan how to make Reagan governor of California.

SUSAN ESTRICH: I got my job when my good friends John Sasso and Paul Tully were forced to resign from the campaign for what now would hardly qualify as a misdeed: giving reporters a tape they had made demonstrating the similarities between Senator Joe Biden's stump speech, and one by an English Labor politician. It was the fall of 1987, and the loss of John and Paul was seen, rightly, as a crushing blow; many speculated that we wouldn't survive. I'd had nothing to do with the tape __ I had helped set up the campaign, then gone back to teaching at Harvard Law School and commuting to see my husband in California __ but I knew everyone in the campaign, including the candidate, who asked me to come back.

SUSAN ESTRICH: My interest in presidential politics stemmed from my interest in issues and public policy. I thought presidential campaigns were the time the country engaged in a public debate, or at least public discourse, as to where we were headed -- remember, this was around the time of the Vietnam War -- as well as who would lead us there. My first staff job in a campaign was in the 1980 Kennedy campaign; I'd gone from a Supreme Court clerkship to a job as special assistant to then chief counsel and now Justice Stephen Breyer, and when the opportunity came to move over to the campaign, I jumped. Losing campaigns are a great way to learn if you start out at the bottom; many of the people above you leave, and by the end of the campaign, I was running the platform process, traveling with the Senator, negotiating with the White House, and totally hooked.

STUART SPENCER: Politics was an avocation back in the Fifties. My hobby was politics, I was involved with Young Republicans, stuff like that. One thing led to another, and in about 1960 I went into politics. We were running campaigns at the local level, some statewide campaigns, and got involved with Nelson Rockefeller and his presidential effort in 1964.

JAMES BAKER: Every campaign is different, and your development of a strategy or a game plan depends upon who your opponent is, the issues that are current in the electorate, or the issues that you want to emphasize with the electorate. And it depends upon the state of play in terms of where your candidate is in the horse race. I mean, you take the ‘76 campaign. At the Republican National Convention, President Ford challenged Jimmy Carter to a series of debates. That was unheard of, really, for an incumbent president. Bit it was an integral part of our strategy, because we were thirty points behind. So we had to do something fairly dramatic. We also had, in that campaign, the issue of the Nixon pardon by Ford, and our polling showed that it was a very difficult issue for us to overcome. So we wanted to emphasize that the "long national nightmare" of Watergate was over, and that President Ford had been the right person at the right time in terms of restoring the nation’s trust and confidence in itself and its leadership.

STUART SPENCER: In 1980, I think the big strategy for us was for Ronald Reagan to be what he was — and that was Ronald Reagan. His ability to articulate, his ability to communicate verbally, his body language — and his ideas. We had to make sure that was in the forefront, because Ronald Reagan had the great ability to really understand what people were interested in, and the ability to communicate with them on a very fine level. The incumbency of Jimmy Carter was not a very positive thing, what with the hostages and all that. So we were just going to try to play off Carter’s weaknesses and Reagan’s strengths.

JAMES BAKER: I was the lead horse for George Bush in 1980, and at the time he started he was an asterisk in the polls. Nobody knew who he was, and one of our major objectives was to get him known. We accomplished that when we upset Reagan in Iowa. Then everybody knew who George Bush was, but nobody knew what he stood for, so we had to put some flesh on the bones coming out of Iowa. In a six or seven-man Republican field, he was the only candidate to get any delegates against Ronald Reagan. In the 1980 general election, I was senior adviser to the Reagan campaign, and I was the debate negotiator, and the debate strategist for the Reagan campaign. We made a rather controversial decision by debating John Anderson.

JAMES BAKER: Yeah, and we had some argument within the Reagan camp as to whether we should or should not debate a lesser candidate like John Anderson, but we thought that the impact of doing that, with Carter not being willing to appear, would give us more political benefit than not doing it. Some of us, myself included, thought that Reagan was a terrific debater and he’d wipe the floor up with Anderson, which he did. And Carter lost a lot of ground; really, from that point the race began to turn in our favor. So, ultimately, the Carter folks decided they needed a debate. And we said we’d be willing to do it — just before the election. In the 1980 campaign, the "debate about debates" played a big role.

JAMES BAKER: That’s correct, but you can’t forget, either, that Ronald Reagan ran on a few very well-formed issues. Peace through strength in regards to restoring our defense capability, easing the tax burden on the economy so it could grow, reducing the size of government and federal spending. In ‘84, we pretty much ran on our record. And it was not a particularly difficult race, as it turned out. We had one little glitch in the second debate, when President Reagan didn’t do as good a job as he normally does, but we won forty-nine states. Things were good, times were good. America was respected again, by our allies and our adversaries.

SUSAN ESTRICH: Grand strategies are something you have in politics when you win, not when you lose. Our grand strategy for the primaries in 1988 was to finish credibly in Iowa, win New Hampshire, and then take a "four corners" approach to the country. This meant we’d try to show strength not only in our northeastern base, but in the South -- Florida, full of transplanted Northeasterners and New Yorkers, Texas -- where we were strong among Hispanics, and the Northwest -- Washington and Oregon. As for the general election, we had many strategies; they kept changing as nothing worked. There was a faction in the campaign, myself included, that wanted to open by simultaneously pumping Dukakis' record of accomplishments in Massachusetts on jobs, education, health care and welfare reform, and pounding George Bush for being a weak elitist who was a number-two man.

SUSAN ESTRICH: Dukakis did not agree with this strategy, refusing to attack Bush and coming back to Massachusetts for much of the summer, while Bush pounded us. The rest is history.

JAMES BAKER: In 1988, we started out behind. I’d resigned as Treasury Secretary in August to go run the Bush campaign. They’d been having trouble, because they’d had a committee running it, six people, and you can’t ever run a campaign that way. We were eighteen points behind when George Bush and I went to the mountains in Wyoming, to avoid the Democratic Convention — so he wouldn’t have to hear all the crappy things they were going to say about him. (Laughs) So we went fishing up in the mountains, and came back with a fairly aggressive debate strategy. But as it turned out, we began to pick up ground so quickly, we probably agreed to more debates than we really needed to. President Bush — and this is something in retrospect — we didn’t run as a third Reagan term, we were out there saying that the policies and programs of the Reagan-Bush years had brought peace and prosperity to America, and we needed to continue those. That was the real theme. But the fact of the matter is, the American people wanted a third Reagan term. Vice presidents have a really tough time running for president; Bush was the first one since Martin Van Buren. Why did we win all but ten states? Well, I think it was because our message got through that the peace and prosperity that Reagan-Bush had provided to America, people wanted four more years of that. That’s why we got it. And you can draw some real parallels to what’s going on this time. I’m not sure people want a third Clinton term, but that, of course, is coming from a biased Republican . . . (Laughs)

SANDERS:  That’s the uphill fight Albert Gore faces — when a vice president runs for the top job, it’s really a referendum on the outgoing president, and voters crave change.

JAMES BAKER: That’s right. Change is the only constant in politics, don’t ever forget it. If you cannot portray yourself as an agent of change, you have a really tough time. It’s very tough for two-term, incumbent vice presidents to do that. Now, we didn’t try, because we had a good record to run on, and we did talk about "kinder, gentler," and a few things like that, but we basically were out there in ‘88 extolling the virtues of peace and prosperity, and that message carried us through.

JAMES BAKER: In 1992, we had terrible problems; there was no way we could portray ourselves as agents of change, because we’d been in power for twelve years. It was extremely difficult. Furthermore, we had a third-party candidate, Ross Perot, and regardless of what he says, he did take two out of three of his votes from us. And he got nineteen percent. We got thirty-eight, Clinton got forty-three. You take two-thirds of Perot’s nineteen, and Bush gets fifty-one percent. But that wasn’t going to happen. And we made some mistakes, too. In the aftermath of Desert Storm, when President Bush’s approval ratings were at ninety percent, we should have gone to the Hill in January of ‘92 with the State of the Union with something like ‘Domestic Storm,’ and said, "Okay, now we’re turning our attention toward domestic problems and away from foreign problems." We didn’t do that, and we should have.

STUART SPENCER: They’re long days, fourteen-hour days. Really, what happens on that day starts the night before, when you have the last meetings about the schedule for the next day. Where you’ll be, what speeches you’ll give. All the advance men are involved that are working whatever part of the United States you’re in. The 11:00 meeting the night before is the important thing. So you roll out of bed in the morning, and get everyone organized, then you hit your first event. Then your second event. Then your third event. And you just keep going. You try to keep it on time, keep it rolling. The big hazard you live with is that, in politics, every twenty-four-hour news frame is a potential problem. (Laughs) That’s what you wake up to — what’s going to happen today? Can we control what happens today? Are we going to be on the defensive? On a daily basis, you’re always thinking -- what are our problems, what are our weaknesses? -- so you can react to them in the correct manner. Or take advantage of happened on the other side during the last twenty-four-hour news period. It’s really a lifetime every twenty-four hours, the way communications are today.

JAMES BAKER: You’re going to have your normal, regular staff meeting. You’re going to be paying particular attention at that time to the expenditure of your money and your budget. You’re going to be thinking about getting in your last-minute ad buys. Obviously, you’re going to be looking at your electoral-vote strategy, the states you want to concentrate on. You’re going to be meeting with your pollsters, making sure you know exactly what the tracking is showing in each of those states. You’ll probably be having conversations with the candidate; you might not be meeting with him, because he or she might be on the road, but you’ll talking about the message, and making sure everything is in order for the final push.

SUSAN ESTRICH: A day two weeks before? After the second debate, when Governor Dukakis -- who was sick that day — by his own admission blew Bernard Shaw's question about what he would do if his wife were raped and killed, the bottom fell out under us. We were no longer a few points behind, but looking at a landslide, and party leaders and elected officials were as nervous as we were. So we spent our days recrafting the campaign message to one that the Governor had initially rejected: "I'm on your side." I spent most of my day on the phone, bucking up groups to energize them, reassuring elected officials, and talking to reporters; a fair chunk working on new ads, rewriting speeches, and huddling with our pollster, and a fair chunk reenergizing our own campaign. It had been a very hard fall for me personally; after remaining in the state for most of the summer, and Dukakis focusing on his gubernatorial duties, we were dropping in the polls, and Dukakis decided that he needed John Sasso back. What could have been accomplished easily at the time of the Convention, what I would have welcomed, became our own us against them at the staff level inside the campaign. Many of those who had worked for me for the last year thought I'd been slapped in the face; and while John and I tried hard to make it work with the two of us, he'd had a hard year too, being on the outside, and moved to reassert control. The ads I'd put on about Dukakis' record as governor were replaced by new ones, about handlers; I didn't like them, and they became another source of contention. The Labor Day speech was rewritten, to drop the liberal appeals to "our side" -- cement your base first -- and my role shifted. After the second debate, with the ground under us gone, most of those who were in it for offices in the West Wing departed, John and I worked together in a way we hadn't before to prevent disaster, and we managed to lose without a landslide that could have cost us House and Senate seats.

SANDERS:  (to James Baker) You’ve been quoted as saying, "Never let the other fellow set the agenda." When you’re running a presidential campaign, how do you make sure it’s your candidate’s agenda that the campaign is turning on, day to day and news cycle to news cycle, and not that of the ‘other fellow’?

JAMES BAKER: The first thing you have to do is to be really quick with your responses. And that’s become more and more the case, much more so than when I was running campaigns back in ‘76 and the eighties, and even ‘92. You want to make real sure that, if you’re attacked, that your response is in the same news cycle. And you want to time your attacks so the opponent can’t get a response in the same news cycle. You want to make sure you have something to serve up every day that will make the kind of news that you want to make. You can’t always set the agenda, but you should try.

SUSAN ESTRICH: How did I get my candidate to stay on message? I didn't.

STUART SPENCER: It’s just a matter of discussion, bringing it to the candidate’s attention, and not letting it slide. That’s about all you can do. An agreement is made prior to a trip, prior to a speech, prior to a certain day that, hey, this is the message, and this is what we’re gonna stay on. Don’t get trapped in the type of q-and-a’s that are going to divert it, or step on your news stories, so to speak. That sort of thing. It’s a matter of trying to instill discipline in the candidate. To stick to it. It’s very easy to start wandering around with issues. And at the point when you’re, say, two weeks out from the election, the candidate’s so tired that they see a face in the audience that reminds them of something — and they start talking about that something else! (Laughs) I’ve seen that happen. It’s just a matter of discipline between the manager and the candidate.

JAMES BAKER: I think it comes with experience. Most everybody who runs for president has had some experience in electoral politics, and they understand the importance of staying on message. It’s discipline. It’s also being able to talk to your candidate as a peer. The candidate has to have enough faith in the campaign manager to accept the manager’s comments as a peer’s comments. You need to be in a close enough relationship that you can disagree. That was one thing I think I was able to do with my friend of forty years, George Bush. He wrote in his book that I was the one person who could tell him no, or tell him exactly what I thought, regardless of what I thought he’d think about it. I wasn’t afraid to argue with him, and I wasn’t afraid to argue with President Reagan. Reagan encouraged you to tell him what you really thought. So did President Ford. I was always able to tell when the argument was over with President Bush, because he’d say, "Well, if you’re so smart, why am I president, and you’re not?" (Laughs)

JAMES BAKER: True, but they need people around ‘em who can tell ‘em no. If you’re advising a president, you need to give him your best shot. "Yes men" are terrible.

STUART SPENCER: Well, it’s a lot of euphoria, the first couple days, then you wake up and realize that there’s a lot of work to be done before you take office in January. You have to choose the teams that are going to pick the personnel, and handle the transition to the new presidency from the old one.

SUSAN ESTRICH: The first couple of days after a losing election are incredibly painful. On the one hand, it was such a relief that it was over; on the other, everyone is writing newspaper articles about how stupid you were to lose, and if you're trying to do it with dignity, as I was, at least trying, you really don't get in a back and forth about what was whose fault. i spent three days thanking people. On Friday, I left town.

JAMES BAKER: It depends on which election you’re talking about. In 1988, the first couple days after the election, I left Houston, where I’d been for election night with George and Barbara Bush, and flew out to my ranch in Wyoming. I don’t have a telephone there, and I wanted to get away from telephones. (Laughs) I didn’t do anything for a week. But that’s because I was not going to be heavily involved in transitioning to the Bush presidency, except for the State Department. In 1984, when I was chief of staff for President Reagan and we ran that campaign, really, from my office in the White House, it was business as usual after the election.

STUART SPENCER: Well, number one, Ronald Reagan is the best communicator in politics since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And the ability to communicate today is very important. It’s somewhat demonstrated by Clinton, who is a good communicator. Number two, Ronald Reagan was sort of a man for his times — what he believed, what he thought, what he articulated, what his ideology was — all that was very, very paramount in America in 1980. With the communist threat, the economy, things of that nature, he was sort of in the right time at the right place. That, with luck, is as important in politics as anything.

SUSAN ESTRICH: Do differently? This is a hard one for me. The critical period in our campaign, for me, was the month of August, when the candidate was in the Massachusetts State House, barely talking to me everyday, our numbers were sinking, and I was negotiating for time on his State House schedule. Should I have gone up there and threatened to quit and tell everyone why if he didn't leave the State House? Maybe. Gotten someone older than me, who he might see as an equal, to take over? I tried to bring Ron Brown in, who was someone Dukakis did trust, but he declined to take my job. I know that we should have never let Bush off the mat; taken on Willie Horton and the flag early, admitted error and inoculated ourselves; and spent more time with the Washington insiders who can kill you, but whether that would have been enough, who knows? The fact is that our pollster, Tubby Harrison, sounded the alarm bells in June, when he found the number of people who thought the country was on the right track steadily increasing to a comfortable majority __ which is a vote for continuity. For all our mistakes, and the Bush campaign's brilliance __ let me say, Jim Baker is the best, and we didn't have his equal __ we didn't have any problem that five points of unemployment wouldn't have solved.

JAMES BAKER: That 1988 campaign was pretty much governed by images. The television advertising -- Dukakis and the tank. And a lot of people give the Willie Horton thing a lot of credit, but the truth of the matter is, we didn’t do the Willie Horton ad — it was done by some independent expenditure group. But we did capitalize on Governor Dukakis’ prison furlough policy.

SANDERS:  The ad with the revolving door, prison convicts going in and out of it.

JAMES BAKER: Right, we argued that furlough issue, and that was a legitimate issue to argue. Then, in the debates, when Bernie Shaw asked Governor Dukakis, "Governor, you’re against capital punishment, what would you do if your wife, Kitty, was raped? . . ."

SANDERS:  It was the first question of the debate, and Dukakis just stood there, no emotion, like Mr. Spock.

JAMES BAKER: Yeah, he said, "Well, I’m against capital punishment, and — " It was pretty much all downhill from there.

SANDERS:  Will the soft money and other campaign-finance shenanigans of today’s politics ever go away? Or is that just the way it is?

STUART SPENCER: They’ll change if the public gets really tired of the situation and reacts to it in a manner that they have in other big issues such as taxation, overwhelming issues like that. It could become that kind of an issue. Politics is a very market-driven thing. I don’t know if it’s going to happen in the near future, but I think there’s going to be major changes in the campaign-finance laws in America in the next decade.

SUSAN ESTRICH: Will the soft money go away? Only if we both pass new laws and the people create a political disincentive __ punishing bad behavior and rewarding good, which would make violation of the law cost you more than it gave you. Right now, it's a one-day story __ and the money is forever.

SUSAN ESTRICH: That depends pretty much on the situation he faces and who the candidate is.

STUART SPENCER: I’d say: "Number one, you’re not in an incumbent situation, so that’s a plus for you. And because of that, you want to set the agenda, for the next presidency. You have to be very clear and very concise on some very big issues the American public is concerned about. Starting first with national defense, because this administration has been weak on national defense and foreign affairs. Secondly, does your platform really address in an intelligent manner the education question in America? And show some compassion, because you’re not going to win unless you get a substantial amount of women’s votes out there — young women, who are uncommitted, really, to either party, and don’t look too kindly upon the Republican Party at this point. You have to get through to those women, and to some of the minorities like the Hispanics and the Asians here in California." So those would be the keys: set the agenda, be compassionate.

STUART SPENCER: (Laughs) Ronald Reagan didn’t change. Ronald Reagan didn’t change from the day I met him to the day he left office, other than to be a little wiser, a little savvier, which is a natural thing. He believed in 1965 what he believed in 1988. What you saw with Ronald Reagan was what you got, there was no "other" Ronald Reagan in private. He didn’t change.

JAMES BAKER: Well, it’s very debilitating. It’s hard work. Everybody is an "expert" in politics. You don’t need to have run a presidential campaign to pontificate on politics. Everybody loves to tell candidates what they’re doing wrong, how they should be speaking, what they should be doing or not doing. So you have to be willing to turn the other cheek and accept a hell of a lot of criticism.

JAMES BAKER: I personally found public service extremely rewarding. I never intended to do public service; I intended to practice law. My grandfather was a prominent lawyer in Texas, he had a motto that he’d tell young lawyers: "If you want to be a good lawyer, work hard, study hard, and stay out of politics." Politics was something sort of dirty, that really good lawyers didn’t involve themselves in. But one thing led to another — the tragedy of the loss of a wife, my friendship with George Bush, and one or two other things. I was a Democrat in 1970, for goodness’ sakes, and "converted" to help George Bush with his Senate campaign, and six years later I’m running the campaign of an incumbent, Republican president. I think what I would tell people today is that it can be extraordinarily rewarding, that each of us has some obligation to put something back into a system that is the very best system in the world, and it’s very gratifying to serve your country in that way. And you don’t need notoriety, necessarily. Oftentimes you get it, perhaps more than you really want. I wouldn’t give anything for my eighteen or so years in public service; on the other hand, I’m at the age and the stage in life where I don’t want to do any more of it. (Laughs)

JAMES BAKER: I’m approaching seventy, I’m a senior partner in a major law firm in Houston. I’m a partner in a merchant banking firm in Washington. I’m the honorary chairman of the James Baker Institute for Public Policy, at Rice University in Houston. I’m doing a job for Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, as his personal envoy for the problems in the Western Sahara — basically, a war between Morocco and Algeria over the last colony in Africa, Spanish Sahara. And I give a few speeches. I’ve basically stopped doing a lot of politics, though I am helping George W. Bush raise a little money, things like that.

STUART SPENCER: I’m semi-retired. I talk to a lot of friends who are running for office, but I’m not working on any campaigns.

SUSAN ESTRICH: I'm now working for Fox News as a political analyst, writing a syndicated column for Creators' Syndicate, and am a contributor to USA Today. I teach a course in presidential politics at the University of Southern California, where I’m the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science.

SANDERS:  (to Susan Estrich) Could you be talked into running a campaign again?

SUSAN ESTRICH: Here's the problem, and maybe it only affects women . . . I have two kids now. I think I’m much smarter, more mature, more able to deal with politicians as equals, better judgment, et cetera __ but I’m also not in a position to go off and work for eighteen months, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, the way you do in campaigns. That's why you often get young people at the top; a good many of the people I know in Democratic politics, men and women, who learned a lot in the Eighties and Nineties, arent playing in the year 2000. On the other hand, there is Gina Glantz, whose kids are grown, and she has come back -- we worked together in ‘80 and 84 -- to run the Bill Bradley campaign. But I had my kids late, so I just kibbitz.