Even ciphering a political poll takes perspective (an interview with GOP's "Ed" Gillespie)

Edward Walter "Ed" Gillespie is long accustomed to operating behind the scenes as a seasoned administrative assistant, campaign strategist and lobbyist on Capitol Hill. But as chairman of the Republican National Party, he will be out front and on the spot as the party leader during the 2004 elections.

Mr. Gillespie, a New Jersey native, served for 10 years as press spokesman and adviser to Rep. Dick Armey of Texas and was general strategist for Elizabeth Dole's 2002 Senate campaign in North Carolina. Among Washington insiders, he is known for being more pragmatic than doctrinaire, with an informal, easygoing demeanor.

Since his appointment by President Bush to chair the RNC last summer, he has retained his stake in the lobbying firm Quinn Gillespie and Associates, where he is a partner with Jack Quinn, who served as the White House counsel during the Clinton administration. Mr. Gillespie has pledged to do no work for the firm while heading the RNC and will collect no salary.

Last week, Mr. Gillespie was interviewed at his RNC office by Rena Pederson, editor at large of The Dallas Morning News, about President Bush's drop in the polls and the party's chances in the upcoming elections.

QUESTION: Some of the recent polls do not look good for President Bush, showing he has dropped down to a 49 percent approval rating. How important are those figures? Is this a third-year slump?

ANSWER: It is a third-year slump. We said it back in April – I hate to say I told you so, but I did on this – when the presidential approval ratings were in the 80s. We knew that wasn't going to last and said these numbers are going to come down. In fact, you have to go all the way back to Richard Nixon to find an incumbent president who didn't trail the generic opponent or head-to-heads in the third year, and that's where we are – right where we thought we'd be. I'd rather have the slump in the third year rather than fourth year.

ANSWER: He got down to 43. President Reagan trailed Fritz Mondale at this point in the head-to-head. President Clinton trailed Bob Dole. Both of them went on to pretty significant wins. In terms of the data being an indicator, they are not.

QUESTION: What about the head-to-head polls with Wesley Clark that have created such a stir? Gen. Clark has come out of nowhere, and suddenly, he is ahead in the matchups with President Bush. Is that because he is an unknown quantity, a Cinderella effect?

ANSWER: He was the generic Democrat of the moment, I think. He also went right to the top of the ... Democratic field. That's because at that moment in time, Wesley Clark was another word for "other," and in the head-to-head with the president, he was the generic Democrat. I have seen some numbers that he has come down about 6 points since then, as people have seen him flip-flop on the war resolution and noted that he is not a registered Democrat.

QUESTION: Are there other polls you think are more significant? One poll showed that only 32 percent of Americans identify with the Democratic Party.

ANSWER: That was from their own pollsters. Mark Penn, I think. It's the lowest the Democratic Party has ever been in polling. There has been a disaffection with the party. There is a shrinking. It's a party that is becoming smaller in number and more uniformly liberal and increasingly angry and elitist.

The Democrats who are seeking the party nomination are picking up on that and are playing to that. That is why we are seeing this stream of political hate speech coming from the candidates on the Democratic side. That may serve them well in the primary, but I don't think it serves them well in the long term, because the American people like passion, but hatred turns them off. There's no other word for what we are hearing from the other side right now. It's hatred in its purest form.

ANSWER: They are all trying to stir the Democratic base. It all goes back to the 2000 elections. They are still seething with resentment and protesting the 2000 election.

QUESTION: What impact do you think the Howard Dean fund-raising campaign on the Internet will have? Is it going to permanently change the way campaigns are run and financed?

ANSWER: It probably is. Fund raising on the Internet has been pretty constantly evolving. We saw it in 2000 when Sen. John McCain got some amount over the Internet. In 2002, a lot of the Senate candidates did a lot with it. I did Elizabeth Dole's campaign, and she raised nearly $1 million on the Internet, some $850,000, which is pretty significant for a Senate campaign. Dean has taken it to another level in the presidential primary.

We get a lot of contributions off the Internet here at the RNC, and the re-election campaign does as well. I think '04 is probably going to be a significant year in terms of shaping the future of campaigns as they relate to the Internet. The thing we have yet to see is the people who come into political participation via the Internet, do they take the next step literally to the polling booth and vote? It will be interesting to see if Dean can translate his Internet Web site hits into votes in the caucuses and the primaries.

QUESTION: I understand the Republican Party has an outreach program to women, a women's initiative. Is that mostly to get more women candidates or more female voters?

ANSWER: Both. We are recruiting more women candidates to run for office, highlighting the women in our party like Sen. Elizabeth Dole; Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison; Rep. Deborah Price, the fourth-ranking Republican woman in the House; Linda Lingle, the governor of Hawaii. We also want to get our message out to women voters. We closed the gender gap in the last cycle, and I think we'll close it in this one as well. The Democrats have had a gender gap of their own that is not often written about – they haven't picked up with men voters.

ANSWER: I am a big believer that the more the public can see of Laura Bush, the better off we all are.

QUESTION: If the economy turns the corner or if Iraq turns the corner for the better, will we see a difference in the polls? And are we closer in both regards than is often recognized?

ANSWER: On both fronts, yes. When it comes to the economy, there are now projections for 5, 6 percent growth, the highest we've seen since 1999. Other micro-indicators, in terms of durable goods orders being up and inventories being down, tend to foreshadow job growth and employment growth. That may take a while, but what we have to watch is payroll. Are we adding payroll or losing payroll each month? I think we will start seeing that we are going to add payroll.

On Iraq, there's an old saying that no news is good news. There's a flip side to that: Good news is no news. There is a lot of good news going on in Iraq right now that is not being seen or reported. They have new currency going into circulation this month that is being accepted by Iraqi people. There is a civilian police force of 45,000 Iraqis being established, a new phenomenon in their society rather than the Baathist regime or thugs that were responsible for order there before. The governing council has come together, and they are appointing ministers. The factionalism that people feared between the Kurds and Shia and Sunni has not taken place. The schools, the hospitals and universities are up and running, so there is a lot that is positive.

People have gone over and come back saying this, but that is not going to drive news coverage or television coverage in the way that we're seeing the attacks against our troops drive it. I think the American people understand the long-term goal and are committed to it. They understand this is not only about liberating the Iraqi people, this is about America's national security interest.

QUESTION: Didn't Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld comment this week that observers who were recently in Iraq said they saw a lot of progress, but that was not reported?

ANSWER: It was not. In fact, Democratic Rep. Norman Dicks of Washington, a ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, had been over there, and he noted that things were going pretty well and we were going to succeed in our efforts there. But that doesn't get the kind of attention that Sen. Byrd does when he attacks Secretary Rumsfeld.

ANSWER: Our assessment going into the next year is that the country remains pretty evenly divided. The parties remain pretty evenly divided. And the electoral college is pretty evenly divided. We are anticipating a close race and always have, even when the president was at an 80 percent approval rating, we were anticipating a close contest for next November.

But I feel good. The fundamentals are very sound. There are a lot of elections going on in '03 – Haley Barbour, my old boss, is running for governor of Mississippi. Ernie Fletcher, our nominee in Kentucky for governor, is doing well there. We have a chance in Louisiana. In California, we gained a governor.

So we have New York, Florida, Texas and California, all under Republican governors, the four largest states, and we are likely to pick up two out of three if not all three of the other governorships. That's in spite of the concerns out there in the media about our fortunes. If you look at what is going on, the way people are casting votes, it is looking pretty good. And I think that is going to be the case in '04.

QUESTION: Are the efforts to pin blame for the leak about Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife and her post in the CIA part of an effort to discredit or force out Karl Rove, and in effect, the brain behind Bush?

ANSWER: The Democrats are obsessed with Karl Rove. They just can't stand him. He drives them crazy. And I guess if I had been beaten by him as many times as they have been, you can understand their feelings.

The fact is when Wilson said Karl Rove should be arrested, he had no basis to make that rash claim. And other Democrats are playing politics, too.

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