Avenue - July 2009

SIR HAROLD EVANS: You’ve written a brilliant and lucid and very forceful book suggesting that the Republican Party is not dead. How did you get to where you are? Did your mother and father influence you? Did your dad give you advice that was useful politically?

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Well, actually my father told me he was going to vote for my opponent in the first campaign. So I don’t know how useful that was. I do remember when I was five watching my first presidential election and staying up all night with him.

deficits. I decided it was time to run. I had no money, no name recognition, no nothing. I was 29.

HE: Do you still think you could be
president?

JS: Well, I don’t know. Look at the quality of candidates. Seriously, I could walk through most corporations of America or newsrooms and find 10 or 20 people that would do a much better job running the Senate and the House than who we have now. The quality of people in American politics has just plummeted.

HE: When was that?

JS: It was Nixon and Humphrey.

HE: Did you support Nixon then?

JS: Well, I was five years old. I had to. My father still thinks that Richard Nixon was framed. So he’s a conservative guy.

HE: Was your dad, who lived during
the Great Depression and who worked
for a great company [Lockheed],
influenced by FDR and the New Deal?

JS: No, but my mom was. My mom said that when FDR died she was 12 and their entire family thought a king had passed away. They were Democrats, always voted for Democrats. They had contempt for Truman. I grew up thinking Eisenhower was a buffoon who golfed all day. My mother voted for Kennedy. Didn’t tell my father, lied to him for 40 years, saying she voted for Nixon when she voted for Kennedy. My mom and her family stayed Democrat through, I think, McGovern.

HE: What made you want to run for
office?

JS: Bill Clinton.

HE: Before or after Monica Lewinsky?
HE: You have very strong words to
say about the influence of money in
politics. Is that why the quality of
candidates has plummeted?

JS: The problem is why would anybody who is doing well in business decide to get pounded in the press while trying to raise money 10 hours a day by $2,000 increments? Candidates can’t run like FDR or like Gene McCarthy did, where he had one supporter who was a dove and was against the Vietnam War, and could write big checks. I think that would get a lot more people involved—if they didn’t think they had to spend 75 percent of their time raising cash.

There should be no limits on campaign financing and there should be immediate recording. You can scan it, and put it on the Internet in real-time for complete transparency so people can judge whether candidates are being bought off.

HE: Should groups like moveon.org
do whatever they like?

JS: The problem with the 527s right now is that you can shield the identities of people who give to those groups. I think you have to have complete transparency to figure out whether George Soros on the left or T. Boone Pickens on the right is behind any attack ad.