[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.

                          ____________________