A Conversation With Bill Carrick

Political Players is a weekly conversation with the leaders, consultants, and activists who are shaping American politics. This week, CBS News' Brian Goldsmith talked with veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick about the two states he knows best--South Carolina and California--both of which play critical roles in the Democratic and Republican presidential primary process. The following is an edited version of that conversation:.

CBSNews.com: Bill, according to our latest CBS News poll, Democrats are far more bullish about their presidential prospects than Republicans. Do you think there's a risk Democrats get complacent or over-confident about the challenge of winning the presidency?

Bill Carrick: Absolutely not. I think Democrats' reaction to the Bush years has been deep, deep depression about our failure to win in 2004. I think that that alone will keep Democrats very focused and vigilant in trying to win back the White House. I don't think there's going to be any complacency at all.

CBSNews.com: You're not only a former presidential campaign manager for Dick Gephardt in 1988, but as a native South Carolinian, you're an expert on the Palmetto State's primary process. John Edwards, as you know, won there four years ago and yet he's in fourth there this time. What do you think is going on?

Bill Carrick: He's in fourth. He's behind Hillary, Obama, and who else?

CBSNews.com: And Al Gore if he runs.

Bill Carrick: Well, in 2004, Senator Edwards had the opportunity to put together a coalition of South Carolinians that included a substantial majority of white voters as well as African American voters. And I think this time it's just much more competitive because of Senator Obama's strength, and Senator Clinton's strength. It's just getting cut up. In '04, by the time it got to South Carolina, it was basically a one-on-one race with Senator Kerry. I think if it had been a multiple-candidate race, then he might have seen somewhat the same effect.

I also think it's going to be a much higher turnout than it was in '04. It was about 280,000 voters in '04.

The interest level in South Carolina is much more intense on the Democratic side. And you know, candidates are moving in and out of there all the time. It's getting institutionalized in the same way that Iowa and New Hampshire did in the past. And people are used to the idea. It's no longer a novelty, the primary. And it's not just the top three candidates. It's also Senator Biden, Senator Dodd, and Governor Richardson. They're all in and out of the state all the time.

CBSNews.com: Building on what you just said -- in 2004, 49 percent of the Democratic Primary voters in South Carolina were African Americans. How far does Obama's race get him there?

Bill Carrick: Well I think there's enormous pride in the African American community about Senator Obama's candidacy. And if you look at the past as prologue, Jesse Jackson ran very strongly in South Carolina in '84 and '88. So there's some precedent there for an African American candidate to do very, very well. On the other hand, Reverend Sharpton only got 10 percent of the vote in '04. So you know, it's not a foregone conclusion but I think Barack Obama's appeal there is substantial in the white community as well as the African American community.

CBSNews.com: Now Bill, I know you're a good Democrat, but how do you assess the Republican field in South Carolina? Is it too early to tell?

Bill Carrick: You know, there's such tortured history there. It's fascinating. I mean clearly the McCain-Bush race in 2000 has become legendary. And it works on many levels. It was a really tough campaign with a lot of independent and outside groups weighing in and contributing enormously to the nastiness of that campaign, which included a lot of rumor-mongering about Senator McCain's personal life. He lost. He got beat pretty handily there. But it was a one-on-one race. Senator McCain got 42 percent then. You know, if he gets 42 percent this time, he'll do pretty well.

I think the interesting thing is that South Carolina is a microcosm of the national Republican dilemma, which is you've got no pure conservative candidate. You don't have a candidate on the conservative wing of the Republican Party that has a clear record on all the important conservative social issues.

CBSNews.com: So what do you think explains the ideological pragmatism of Republican Primary voters in South Carolina? Is it just a hunger to hold the presidency in 2008 -- knowing it's going to be a tough year? Or has something fundamentally changed about what they're looking for in a candidate?

And you know that has really opened up a vacuum there. It's interesting. Romney is trying to fill it by becoming more conservative at the risk of this credible engendering of the flip-flop charges, which are rampant against him.

And Mayor Giuliani is taking the other tack, which is, don't change your positions. Be very straight-forward about them and try to change the subject to national security issues, terrorism, and his own leadership qualities. He's ahead, which is, I think, a shock to most people in South Carolina. The playbook there has always been that to win that Republican primary, you have to appeal to the conservative right, particularly the religious right.

Bill Carrick: I think that fact that George Allen was defeated for re-election when many people said that he was going to run for President and be the conservative candidate, then that former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist decided not to run for president after stumbling around a little bit trying to get it going and having a pretty turbulent time as Majority Leader. That absence of having that clear conservative choice, that's created part of this. But I think you're on to something. After '06 and a Democratic victory in the House and the Senate, I think Republicans are traumatized and I think they are saying, "Okay. You know, we'll take a little heresy on the part of our candidates in terms of conservative orthodoxy in exchange for a victory. " And I think that there is a pragmatism there that is surprising.

CBSNews.com: Well unlike Iowa or New Hampshire, South Carolina is not at all a swing state, obviously, in presidential politics. It's voted Republican every year since 1976. Do you think it's a good thing for Democrats that it's remained so prominent in the Democratic primary process?

Bill Carrick: I don't know that it's worked out quite as designed. But I think the idea behind adding South Carolina and Nevada to the mix to respond to the criticism that Iowa and New Hampshire are two states that are overwhelmingly white and have very small numbers of Latinos and African-American voters. So South Carolina got added for really two reasons.

One is a substantial African-American voting population. And also it's an easy, manageable state to get around early on in the retail tradition of Iowa and New Hampshire. And then Nevada has a growing Latino population that is starting to change the state's politics.

Now of course, there were some people who said that's fine but you're still not doing anything about the front-loading in the rest of the calendar.

Brian Goldsmith: There is a school of thought that with all these big states moving up to February 5th, as you just mentioned, money and organization matters the most. And then there are others who think a win in Iowa or New Hampshire three weeks before February 5th would produce such momentum that no amount of campaign cash would be able to stop it. Which school of thought do you think is more compelling?

Bill Carrick: I'm more in the momentum school. I think that what we've seen in this process is momentum drives the nomination. And it's very hard to reverse momentum.

We've only really had a couple of occasions when it's happened in the Democratic process in '84 with Mondale and Hart. And of course in 1980, Senator Kennedy came back and started winning in the second half of the calendar. It was too late, but he started winning primaries. You know, very few times have you seen a reversal of momentum.

I think it's even more important because the size of February 5th. The size of the states involved are just huge. Nobody's going to have the money to really compete. And I'm going to give you an example.

Governor Schwarzenegger can get re-elected, spend $120 million, $125 million in California. And we're talking about national budgets for these candidates, at the maximum level, of about $100 million.

So there's just no way anybody's going to be able to compete in a state like California at the same level somebody would if they were running for Governor or US Senate statewide. So you're going to have far less expenditure of television advertising dollars and much more influence from media coverage.

CBSNews.com: In addition to South Carolina, obviously you also know thing or two about California. You've lived there for years. You've helped elect two mayors of LA. You were media consultant to Senator Feinstein and to Phil Angelides last year. So now that California has moved it's primary up to February fifth, is it finally going to become something more than an ATM machine for presidential candidate?

Bill Carrick: The June primary here has just made California ridiculously irrelevant to the nomination process in both parties. I mean, back in '68 Robert Kennedy beat Gene McCarthy. And then '72, George McGovern beat Hubert Humphrey here, all of which were decisive primary outcomes. After that, we started to become more and more irrelevant. And 1980, Senator Kennedy beat Jimmy Carter here and it was so late in the process it didn't matter. In 1984, Gary Hart beat Fitz Mondell here. It was late in the process and it didn't really matter. Then we became even more irrelevant starting in '88.

And we continued to be an after-thought in 2000 and in 2004. I think from a parochial standpoint, it's better for California. I mean it'll be more relevant.

The candidates come here all the time. They come here all the time but they weren't doing public events. They weren't campaigning. They'd just come in and do fundraisers, and leave. You know, come in, do the fundraiser, get on the red-eye, and go back East. I think this time, we're already starting to see candidates actually campaigning. McCain, Giuliani, Obama, Clinton, Edwards have all done campaign kind of events since the debate on moving to February fifth started up.

CBSNews.com: So if you were tutoring a Democratic presidential candidate on California, what are the most important two or three things that he or she needs to know?

Bill Carrick: Well I think most important element of the primary process is to move around the state in a way that is seen as getting beyond the confines of West LA or downtown San Francisco.

That means, you know, traveling to the inland empire, Central Valley, Sacramento, San Diego, as well as parts of Los Angeles like the San Fernando Valley and the eastern part of LA County. And then the Bay Area, Oakland, San Jose.

Because I think often times, primary voters feel taken for granted here because the candidates have not been in their communities.

I think the other piece that's important to remember about California is you've got to really touch a whole lot of different communities. Everything that exists in the country exists in California, from very liberal Democratic voters to conservative Democratic voters, from very moderate Republican voters to very hard-core conservative Republican voters.

Obviously we have a substantial African American community, a very substantial and growing Latino community. They're growing in their political activism. Asian voters are a growing and expanding group of voters inside the Democratic party.

And often times, those communities have their own communications and media outlets that need to be touched as well. It's a very complicated state. Now the reality is a lot of the primary voters are in the Bay Area and in the Los Angeles media market. But in a close race, it really makes a difference if you can get around the state and touch all the rest of the various communities.

CBSNews.com: You're obviously a media consultant, but how important are TV ads going to be this cycle with the rise of all the various new ways of communicating through the Internet?

Bill Carrick: I have a strong feeling that advertising in the Presidential process has less influence than it does in the normal, state-wide Congressional races. Because the 24-7 news cycle, the web, all the ways people get information on their own is just so much more intense.

So the advertising doesn't fill the information vacuum that it does oftentimes in a governors race, or senate race, or congressional race. People get information from a much wider variety of sources and they get a lot more of it. You know, even now you look at the front page of almost every paper in the country and it's filled with presidential politics every day. There's a lot of presidential politics on the network news. Obviously cable is obsessed with it. The talk show world is obsessed with it.

Now having said that, it's still pretty strong influence on the process. And there is obviously a lot of hunger out there to learn more about these candidates. And it'll be a tough task for all these campaigns to make sure that people understand who their candidates are, where they are, what positions they have on issues, and where they want to take the country. And advertising can help do that, but it's not as dominant as it is in the state-wide races.

By Brian Goldsmith