[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 86 (Monday, June 17, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4501-S4503]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO DOUG BAILEY
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about Doug
Bailey. Doug Bailey died last week at age 79. The New York Times
reported on Tuesday that Doug Bailey helped define the role of
political consultant in the 1960s and 1970s and that he founded the
Hotline. He was much more than that to me and to countless others for
whom he was an example of how to live a public life.
I am aware that when offering a eulogy it is good form to speak more
of the deceased than of oneself, but that is hard to do with Doug
because he cared so much about everyone he met and everyone he worked
with. I first met Doug Bailey in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1977.
I was here for a few months working with Howard Baker, the former
Senator from Tennessee, who had just been elected to be the Republican
leader of this body. He asked me to come work for him. I think part of
that was to console me, to let me lick my wounds for having lost the
Governor's race a couple years earlier in Tennessee. There wasn't much
prospect for a political future for me then because the Nashville
Tennessean had written that there wouldn't be a Republican Governor in
Tennessee for another 50 years.
So I was here in Washington, and while I was here I became energized
by the Republican Senators. It looked to me as though Jimmy Carter was
already in trouble, and my friend Wyatt Stewart introduced me to Doug
Bailey. The reason I thought it was an important meeting was because at
that time he and his partner John Deardourff represented 7 of the 12
Republican Governors in the country who were still in office after the
Watergate debacle of 1974.
Doug came to Nashville. He sat down with my wife Honey, Tom Ingram,
and me, and we talked about the idea of another Governor's race--this
time in 1978. Doug's view was that I had lost, among other things,
because I wasn't a very interesting candidate, that I campaigned in a
blue suit and talked to Republicans and to rotary clubs. So the talk
was about what would be authentic, what did I really like to do.
To make a long story short, I ended up walking 1,000 miles across
Tennessee over 6 months in a red-and-black plaid shirt, followed by a
group of four University of Tennessee band members in a flatbed truck.
And several times a day we would get up on the truck and play in
Alexander's washboard band. Doug put all that on television, and I won
the election.
Now, to some, that would seem like an ultimate political gimmick, but
if you think about it, the idea of the walk across Tennessee was a good
deal more authentic than the photo-ops and the press releases and the
5-second sound bites that are often what we end up with in politics
today. But let me just say it this way: I would have never been elected
Governor if it hadn't been for Doug Bailey.
He also did something else I had never seen anybody else do--no other
political consultant. He actually wrote a plan and we actually followed
it during the campaign.
The important thing for me to say today is that political consulting
was not the end of Doug Bailey's help. He came to Nashville once a week
during my first term as Governor not so much to talk about politics,
but to talk about how to be a better Governor, which was his idea of
how to be a political success. Our conversations were usually not about
how to follow, but how to lead, and how to deal with the political
implications, for example, of wanting to have three big road programs
and do it on a pay-as-you-go basis so we could attract the auto
industry to our State without running up debt and persuade all the
Republican Members to vote for three gas tax increases, which every
single one of them did.
Doug's advice was that a good tactic was to do the right thing
because it would confuse your opponents; they wouldn't understand what
you were up to.
His advice about recruiting people to work in the cabinet, for
example, was not to just invite someone who might take the job, but to
make a list of the four or five best persons to do the job and then ask
the best one. He said: You might be surprised--that person might be
waiting for an opportunity to serve the public. That was some of the
best advice I ever got because some of the best persons were waiting
for the right opportunity for public service.
All this sounds hopelessly naive, especially today, in a time when
there is
[[Page S4502]]
so much cynicism about politics. But that is the way it was then, and
that is the way I was trained, and that is the way I tried to do my
job. I would wake up every day literally thinking about almost nothing
else other than how I could help our State move ahead.
I called Doug Bailey throughout the last 30 or 35 years whenever I
needed good advice. I called him when the Democrats swore me in early
to remove a corrupt Governor who was selling pardons for cash in
Tennessee, and he gave me a few words I used to speak to the public on
that day.
One of the best pieces of advice he gave me was when the first
President Bush called me while I was the University of Tennessee
president. I knew President Bush was going to ask me to be the new
Education Secretary, and I had about 2 hours to think about it.
Doug said: Ask these two questions. One, Mr. President, may I come up
with a plan, subject to your approval? Two, may I go and recruit a
team, subject to your approval? Well, that may not seem like much, but
after I was announced by the President, I walked into the White House
personnel office, and they tried to tell me whom to hire. I said: I
don't have to do that. I already have the President's assurance that I
can recruit a team subject to his approval. So I was able to recruit
David Kearns, former head of Xerox, and Diane Ravitch and others who
never would have ended up in President Bush's administration, and he
was delighted with them.
Doug always had a project. Some were zany. Some were downright
brilliant. One of the most recent was to try to persuade someone to run
for President on an Independent ticket online. He didn't succeed at
that. He was starting another project when I saw him last at a dinner
at the end of January in Washington this year.
Ironically, Doug Bailey was an expert in the technology, TV ads, and
the Hotline, which have contributed to today's polarization in
politics. But he withdrew from politics after a while and from
political consulting because he didn't like what politics had become.
He thought more elected officials needed to understand that there is a
difference between campaigning and governing and that differences
should be resolved in the middle rather than entrenched in the fringes
or on the extremes.
In a tribute, Judy Woodruff wrote about perhaps Doug's greatest
passion and his greatest legacy: inspiring youngsters such as Chuck
Todd and Norah O'Donnell--whom he paid almost nothing to work at the
Hotline--to care about and be involved in America's political system. I
am sure Chuck and Norah would tell you that Doug considered it even
more important and an even nobler calling to actually serve in
government, and that he spent most of his life teaching and helping
those who were willing to do it.
I would never have been elected Governor without Doug Bailey's help.
More important, I will give Doug most of the credit for whatever
success I had as Governor and in politics. It has been a long time
since I regularly checked with him before I made a political move, but
when I did, I always felt as though the next step was a surer step and
a step more likely to be in a direction that served a larger purpose
other than my own political existence.
I have never known a person who cared more about each person he met
in every issue he tackled. So I wanted to come to the floor today and
express this tribute to a public life well lived, and to offer my
condolences to his wife Pat, his children Kate and Edward, his brothers
and his grandson.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record following my
remarks the New York Times story about Doug Bailey's death and Judy
Woodruff's blog about his passing. It has lots of comments from other
people, and I have not seen a blog in a long time where all the
comments are positive. Usually that is not the case.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, June 13, 2013]
Doug Bailey, G.O.P. Political Consultant, Dies at 79
(By Paul Vitello)
Doug Bailey, who helped define the expanding role of
political consultants in the 1960s and '70s and later founded
The Hotline, a digest of political news, distributed by fax,
that became an indispensable tool of the political trade in
the pre-Web 1980s and '90s, died on Monday at his home in
Arlington, Va. He was 79.
Mr. Bailey, who had health problems in recent years, was
working at home on several projects when he died, apparently
in his sleep, said his daughter, Kate Bailey.
His consulting firm, Bailey Deardourff & Associates, which
he started in 1967 with a fellow political hand, John
Deardourff, worked mainly for moderate Republican candidates
like Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, Mayor John V.
Lindsay of New York and Senator Charles H. Percy of Illinois.
At one point in the late 1970s, the firm had 11 of the
country's 19 Republican governors as clients.
Its work on behalf of President Gerald R. Ford's campaign
in 1976 against Jimmy Carter, then a former Georgia governor,
was widely credited with helping to narrow Mr. Ford's deficit
of much as 20 points in the polls--most of it attributed to
his pardon of President Richard M. Nixon for his role in
Watergate--to 2 points by Election Day.
The firm made some commercials featuring ordinary Americans
questioning Mr. Carter's lack of national experience, and
others focused on Mr. Ford's likability and long government
service, all to the tune of a campaign song, ``I'm Feeling
Good About America.''
``We said to ourselves, what the country knows about Gerald
Ford is that he pardoned Nixon,'' Mr. Bailey told The New
York Times. ``Let's tell them more, let's give them a view of
Jerry Ford the man that's upbeat.''
Mr. Deardourff died in 2004 at 71.
Mr. Bailey, who had grown dismayed by the polarization of
national campaigns in the 1980s, started The Hotline in 1987
partly as an experiment in bipartisanship, he said. With the
Democratic strategist Roger Craver as his partner, he sought
to expose the professional political class to a broad range
of issues across the ideological spectrum.
Mr. Bailey told interviewers that in The Hotline's first
year, potential subscribers asked three main questions:
``You're going to do what?'' ``You want me to pay you how
much?'' And ``What's a fax?''
The Hotline's 500 or so paying subscribers--among them
politicians, pundits, political operatives and Congressional
staff members--received an exhaustive aggregation of
information at 11:30 each morning, including news about state
and local election campaigns and grass-roots trends like tax
revolts, term-limit drives and environmental initiatives.
It also offered a roundup of political jokes from the
previous night's talk-show monologues. Before ``The Daily
Show,'' The Hotline was one of the most prodigious purveyors
of political humor in the country.
``That's part of political communication these days,'' Mr.
Bailey said, presciently, in a 1991 interview with The
Washington Post. ``As a practical matter, if you want to know
where the people are, their views come from television, and
more from programs that don't try to influence them directly,
such as the late-night monologues.''
The Hotline, which was bought by The National Journal in
1996 and is part of its Web site, became a training ground
for political reporters, including Chuck Todd of NBC and
Norah O'Donnell of CBS. Its currency has been somewhat
devalued in the past decade by free political sites like
Politico and Talking Points Memo, whose creators acknowledge
The Hotline in their lineage.
Douglas Lansford Bailey was born on Oct. 5, 1933, in
Cleveland to Walter and Marion Bailey. His father ran a
manufacturing company. After receiving a bachelor's degree
from Colgate University, Mr. Bailey received his master's and
doctorate degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy at Tufts.
Besides his daughter, Mr. Bailey is survived by his wife,
Patricia, a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission from
1979 to 1988; his son, Ed; a brother, David; and a grandson.
In 1999, again with Mr. Craver, Mr. Bailey founded the
Freedom Channel, which offers politically oriented video
online on demand.
In 2006, Mr. Bailey joined with the Democratic political
consultants Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon in founding a
political reform organization, Unity08. It suspended its
activities in 2008 after a failed effort to draft Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg of New York to run for president.
``The two-party system has worked well for 200 years and
can continue to do so,'' Mr. Bailey said at the time, ``but
only when elections are fought over the middle. Our goal is
to jolt the two parties into recognizing this, by drawing
them into a fight over the middle rather than allowing them
to keep maximizing the appeal to their bases at the
extremes.''
Asked in another interview about politics today, Mr. Bailey
said, ``Candidates listen too much to consultants because
they're driven by winning and money.''
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: June 17, 2013
An earlier version of this obituary omitted one survivor
and erroneously included two brothers among the survivors. Of
Mr. Bailey's three brothers, only one, David, survives him;
Robert and Richard are deceased.
____
[From the Rundown, June 13, 2013]
Remembering Doug Bailey
(By Judy Woodruff)
It doesn't happen often. But every once in a while, you
meet a person who carries the
[[Page S4503]]
human equivalent of sunshine around with them. It's the guy
or girl who always seems to be smiling--if not outright, then
just beneath the surface. And not in a goofy way, but rather
as if they love life and what they're doing and have decided
not to let the gremlins throw them off course. My friend Doug
Bailey, who died this week at the age of 79, was like that. I
never had a conversation with him, over the course of more
than thirty years, when he didn't have a piece of good news
to share. He was one of the most upbeat people I've ever
known.
What may surprise you is that he spent his life in
politics. Given the partisanship and negativity that define
today's political arena, it's hard to imagine. But Doug got
his start when things were different, when candidates could
be moderate Republicans (as most of those he supported were),
or conservative Democrats, and still get elected to office.
This was back in the 1960s and '70s when Republicans such as
New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, and Sens. Charles Percy of
Illinois, Howard Baker of Tennessee and Richard Lugar of
Indiana were running for election and re-election. Doug
Bailey worked for all of them, and for President Gerald Ford
in his re-election campaign of 1976.
Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, whose
gubernatorial campaign Bailey worked on in that era, told the
National Journal in an interview this week, ``He cared about
every person he met and every issue he tackled.''
President Ford's close loss to challenger Jimmy Carter was
hard on Doug, but what caused him to leave campaign work
altogether, he later told friends, was the negative tone
politics started to take on in the 1980s. He went on to
create the Hotline, a pioneering daily newsletter on
campaigns and candidates, and later to launch a succession of
projects aimed at bringing the two parties together,
searching for the increasingly elusive common ground between
the far left and the far right.
But what I remember best about Doug Bailey was his passion
for getting young people turned on to politics. He refused to
accept the idea that entire generations of Americans would
grow up and be repelled by the thought of a life in public
service. When I first talked to him in 2005 about a rough
plan for a documentary project, traveling around the United
States and profiling the group that has come to be known as
``millennials,'' no one was more enthusiastic than Doug.
He put me in touch with the surprisingly large national
network of young people he knew--all leaders, many then still
in college; at the same time, he urged me not to forget to
talk to young people who were not in school. In 2007, when
the project was over, after two documentaries and other
reports had been aired or published, he urged me to do a
sequel. Since then, and as recently as this spring, he's had
one idea after another about how to engage young people in
public life. In the hundreds of tweets that popped up after
word spread of his death, there were scores from young folks
he mentored.
Doug was not only really smart; he was wise. He believed
politics was meant to help people and to make this a better
country, and he thought political people should work together
to make that happen. He never gave up on the idea. We honor
his legacy by not giving up either. Doug Bailey is survived
by his wife Pat, their children Ed and Kate, and a
grandchild.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I yield the floor and I suggest the
absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum
call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________