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Love of politics brings Lacy aboard
Email iPod-friendly Print By Terry Rombeck

August 25, 2004

Bill Lacy says he had a “mini epiphany” while attending the funeral of his former boss, Ronald Reagan, in June.

Thinking about Reagan’s eight years as president and his own 20 years in government made him realize he missed politics. He had been out of government work since 1996, when he left to run his family’s candy business.

So with that epiphany — and knowing that the family was in the process of selling the Sophie Mae Candy Co. — Lacy sent a letter to Bob Dole, the former senator for whom Lacy had worked during two presidential campaigns and one senatorial campaign, asking if he was aware of any politically related job openings.

“The letter basically said, I worked in politics 20 years, I’ve been Willy Wonka eight years, and now I need a job,” Lacy said.

And that, in a nutshell, is how Bill Lacy, candyman, became Bill Lacy, director of the Dole Institute of Politics.

Lacy, 50, will start Sept. 7 at the Kansas University institute having never worked in academia but with a wealth of political experience. His résumé includes two stints as a White House political adviser to Ronald Reagan, a strategist for Dole’s 1988 and 1996 presidential campaigns and his 1992 senatorial campaign, and a strategist for George H.W. Bush’s 1988 and 1992 campaigns.

Lacy calls his “textbook campaign” the 1994 election of Fred Thompson as U.S. senator from Tennessee. Thompson, best known as an actor, had been discounted by many but won the election by 20 percentage points, with the highest vote total by any Republican in Tennessee history.

The August 1995 issue of “Campaigns and Elections” magazine proclaimed: “If Dole becomes president, Lacy will supplant James Carville as the nation’s most revered political wizard.”

“He’s big on follow-through and planning, and knowing what you’re doing every day,” said Kim Wells, a Lawrence resident who served as senior adviser to Dole’s 1988 campaign. “He was about getting things organized and knowing what the message was for that day.”

‘Big on numbers’
Lacy relied heavily on surveys and polls.

“He’s almost got an academic interest in politics,” said Wells, who assisted KU in the Dole Institute search. “He was big on numbers and survey research. He’s not a fire-breathing partisan who just wants to get on TV every night.”

Scott Morgan, the former Lawrence school board member who was a former chief counsel to Dole, said he developed great respect for Lacy.

“My experience was in a world that has a remarkable amount of cutthroat folks, he stood out as extraordinarily smart and very kind — which is not a word you tend to hear around politics much,” Morgan said.

Morgan said he thought Lacy was well-suited for work around a university.

“In a position that I’m not sure anyone meets the qualifications for, I think it suits him well,” Morgan said. “Clearly he has the Dole side down, with Dole’s respect. Given the way he can work with some amazing egos in the world of high-level politics, I think he can deal well with people at the university.”

Different paths
Lacy left politics in 1996, after Dole lost the New Hampshire and Delaware primaries. The campaign manager offered to have him stay with the campaign in a lesser role, but Lacy opted to resign.

“Political campaigns are extremely heated times,” he said. “We were having disagreements in terms of how the general election campaign was going, and disagreements about how the polling was interpreted in early states. A decision was made there needed to be changes.”

He moved to Olathe to manage a Sophie Mae plant in Edwardsville that made Squareshooter suckers. The plant has since closed, but Lacy remained in Olathe to operate the company, which also has made Moon Pies.

He said lower sugar prices in other countries have hurt Sophie Mae, forcing his family to sell the business.

The timing of the sale, he said, coupled with his realization at the Reagan funeral that he missed politics, was “almost a magical alignment of forces.”

“I didn’t want to get back in the fray, so to speak,” he said. “I want to show politics can be a profession of civility and courtesy.”

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2004/aug/25/love_of_politics/