Transcripts For CSPAN Q A 20130902

Thats when i first started getting bit from the bug i didnt come from a terribly political family or anything like that. Do you know who captain shreeve was . He was a river boat captain, and he broke a logjam on the red river. Thats my high school. In louisiana . In shreveport, louisiana. The captain shreve gators. Is it louisiana or louisiana . It depends on what part of the state, kind of like missouri or missoura. I say louisiana. Everybody thinks their state is a little different from the others, but louisiana really is different. And politics is part of the culture. Less so now, but weve just always had such colorful characters, that it was, you know, there was college football, high school football, and louisiana politics. So it is easy to get bit by that bug in louisiana, or probably easier than in a lot of other states. Who is the first politician you ever met . I think i actually shook hands with spiro agnew in high school once. But the first politician i knew was bennett johnston. I worked on the senate race. He had just come off the governors race and was running for the u. S. Senate. I started working on his campaign. He actually was the first one. Although there was a director of Public Safety that went to jail. He was in my fathers sunday school class. I guess he would be the first. Did that have an impact on you that he went to jail . Oh, no, it was many, many, many years later. I used to come from sunday school, my fathers class, and they had doughnuts. No good, charlie. The reason i asked about politicians, i have a letter written back in 2006. I want to read that and then ask you again, when did charlie cook become charlie cook . The greeks had oracle at delphi. Washington has charlie cook. Please tell us how many seats we will pick up . When did you become known that, well, if charlie says it, it is ok. I started my newsletter in 1984. I had a half dozen jobs out of college. I had no idea where i was going with it. But when i looked back, every single job was good preparation for, you know, doing what im doing now, as editor of the newsletter. It is almost as if it were very carefully planned. Tell us what those jobs were. Well, while i was in college, the first paid job i ever had in politics was as an elevator operator in the u. S. Senate, the second semester of my freshman year in college, which is basically giving tourists, you know, where they are asking for directions and stuff. Then two years as an intern in senator johnsons office, and then i interned for a year at the snorl Campaign Committee. Then when i got out of college, i went to work there for a couple years. Then it was sort of a president ial campaign, a house race, a polling firm. I worked for Business Political Action Committee downtown sort of watching races. Back to the hill with the Senate Democratic policy committee. But by that time i found myself voting for republicans almost half the time. I wasnt becoming a republican, i was becoming a swing voter. I liked politics, and i thought i was pretty good at it, but i didnt feel comfortable working for either side anymore. I started thinking, well, how can i make a living doing this . There were several political newsletters out there, and they were all pretty good, but i had an idea of a different niche. So i took my 6,000 out of the fund, and my father cosigned a loan. So with 16,000, i started a business. We were living pretty much off my wifes salary, and lucy was a real trooper. But in those early, early days and cnn was sort of in its infancy at that point. My good friend and competitor, stu roffenberg would say the same thing. Taking young guys, giving exposure and experience on tv. Huge, huge, huge boosts for my career. We have some footage of you. What you see in North Carolina and virginia, there are two republican parties. There is the traditional, sort of main street, businessorpted, some democrats would say country club, but thats really not fair. There is that group of republicans. Then you have a second group of democrats that are really former democrats that are more conservative than the other republicans go. That is sort of the wing in North Carolina and there is a similar wing in virginia. Simes i think that the far right actually look upon more moderate prince worse than they look upon democrats. So it is a real mess. What turned this sutch upside down back then . Actually, i was listening to that, and thats a fight that we have going on today, between the old republican establishment and then we called them jesse helms conservatives, and now you could say tea party or whatever. It was interesting watching that and thinking, wow, maybe other than 100 pounds and different glasses, not much has changed since that clip. What did you decide with that 16,000 dollars you were going to do, and when did you determine you had something unique . Well, my job was to write memos about races. Analyze whats going on, what are the key dynamics, who is going to win. I basically decided to come up with the equivalent of a memo. Then i got a list of all the top lobbyists and Political Action committees in washington and started mailing it out to them for free for a couple issues. And then sent them a solicitation. And, you know, it started gradually when i say gradually, i mean, six or seven years. 1992 or 1993 is when it started turning the corner. What were you selling the cook original book for . Originally it was 100 and then 195, and then we were at 2. 95 for almost 20 years, and we finally raised it to 3. 50 almost a year ago. What does someone get for 3. 50 . In the old days it was stapled in the upper lefthand corner. I guess the original issues were probably 20 pages long, printed. Eventually we got to a point where some went over 200 pages. And the problem with analysis ratings of all house races, each of the senate races, and write ups on every competitive house race and senate race, but it got over a couple hundred pages at one point. Which, at the time it was researched, republican, edited, printed, delivers delivered, was starting to get obsolete. So when the internet came along, originally i kind of wished it would go away, i didnt like it. But eventually i think we switched in i think in 2008 we switched to all online. So we have all of our ratings. We have all my columns columns, and you know, a decent amount of stuff. And thats what most people are interested in, to be honest. Behind the pay wall is the narrative and analysis of individual races. Thats pretty much lobbyists, political junkies, managers, that sort of thing. Probably have to really get into the weeds, though, to get into that. If someone was going to start one of these today, and i know there are a lot of other ones around, what did you learn about what you had to do in order to make a difference in the analysis . I had to convenience the players, the Campaign Committees on both sides, that i was going to play it straight. I remember the National Director of the national sentorle snorl committee, the executive director was a fellow by the name of mitch daniels. He had been lugars chief of staff. I made an appointment. I went over to see him. I said, you know, if this is just some kind of a democratic tip sheet, its not going to stay in business very long. If you give me a chance, im going to show you that i play it straight. He instructed the staff to be cooperative. As long as hes playing it straight objectively, be cooperative. And i did the same thing with the Campaign Director at the nrcc, republican congressional committee, and early on some of the bigger problems i had was democrats thinking i was bending over backwards and being tilted against them. But early on it was sort of demonstrating that even though i had had a partisan past, we were going to play it absolutely objectively. I know if i go for a couple years and one side is really happy with me what you want is sort of for each side to be mildly annoyed but not absolutely going crazy. And if you are walking that line, you know you are sort of roughly in the right place. I know you had a lot of successes, but for talking purposes, whats the biggest mistake you ever made. Oh, lord. How about the most recent one. I thought up until about the first week of december of 2007 that this young obama guy would give Hillary Clinton a real race for the nomination but there was no way he was going to win it. And starting sort of december a couple weeks before the iowa caucus, i started thinking seeing it and saying, wow, this isnt what Hillary Clinton needs to happen isnt happening. And sort of over that iowa caucus over the next couple weeks, i made a real sort of transition in thinking. But i remember being on a phone call with somebody and said, you know what . I now think theres a decent chance shes not going to be the nominee. I was verbalizing something that i hadnt really thought of. So that was sort of the big recent thing. Oh, rush holt who recently lost a democratic primary for the u. S. Senate in new jersey and is a house member. One of only two physicists left in the house. Every time i see him, he says, you missed my race. You said i was going to lose. You know, there are all kinds of little ones like that. Im sure if i thought about it, i would come up with some others. What are the milestones in the last 30 years when things shifted. For instance, when did you start working for a Television Network . Actually, the first network, stu and i did cspan for the 1986 Election Night and did some consulting for cbs for the next couple and did cnn. We were on inside politics. Judy woodruffs show. Rothberg and i were rothenberg and i were on several times. Meet the press i think i have done seven or eight or 10 times. That was terrific. And right after tim died or a couple months after, they did a meet the press from iowa and brokaw was moderating it. That was sort of, kind of, bitter sweet. It was fascinating to do it with tom brokaw but to do it for the first time without tim was kind of weird. But in my business, doing meet the press kind of credentialed one. Stu and i did this week. If i were to look back and say other thing i am most proud of, to me, what i can bring to the table is after having watched this a long time, i think im ok at picking trends real early. In 1994, we could start sensing over the summer just this gut feeling that Something Weird was going on. Democrats had had a majority in the house for 40 years. There was a growing sense all the way up to election day it was never clear whether republicans would hit the 40 seats they needed to get a majority, but the odds were getting higher, a little higher, a little higher, and then lo and behold, they picked up 52 seats. We picked that up earlier, i think, than just about anybody else. In 2010 when it looked like democrats were going to lose it there, six and 10, so spotting patterns early. To me thats something that i really like doing. What do you think of Mark Lebowitz book this town thats been on the best sellers list for a couple weeks now. I havent had a clans to read that yet. I wish you hadnt asked that. And he says hes become a cynic. I think washington is a terribly insular, incestuous selfabsorbed place. Absolutely true. I could see a couple things in the book that were true. Memorial service for tim russert. I almost stopped going to correspondence dinners. I think there were a lot of things he was absolutely right on. But having said that, it was pretty much snark from beginning to the end. I think some places maybe in some poor taste. There were individual things i thought were ok, but i didnt enjoy it. I think fundamentally he was right. Do you think if people read it they are getting a pretty good picture what goes on here . I would hope that anybody that reads it, its not the only thing they are going to read. I dont know if there is anything in the book that isnt true, but something can be true but not the whole truth. He barbecued some people, and some people deserved it, but it was sort of trying to make everybody look bad. And i think some of these people are very well intentioned hard working people and didnt necessarily deserve this. Here you are at the omni in atlanta in a 1988 Democratic Convention talking to a bunch of closeup kids, and you predicted a few things. Lets see how you did. The question is, i think for any group you used to say that a catholic could never be elected president. We used to say a divorced candidate could never so each of these barriers, they fall one by one in their own little sequence. I think that probably we will see a woman president first of the next groups. But i think we will see a black or hispanic president within the next 20 years. Part of the problem is you have to think of it like a pipeline where, you know, how many women have started the process of school board, state legislature, worked their way up to congress to all the way up to the place where you pick your running mates, which is generally speaking, the United States senate, its governor, occasionly the house of representatives. 25 years ago you picked a woman to be president before an africanamerican. Yep. [laughter] what changed that allowed this to happen. I dont mean allowed but after all these years of only having a white male . I think watching that race between Hillary Clinton and barack obama, obama had just won the iowa caucus. I flew home, and all her kids were home from school. People were bar acknowledging me with questions about barack obama. I thouth thought thats great. I dont care who they are interested in, but im glad they are interested in politics. I asked my daughter the next day. Does it matter to you that weve never had a woman president . Weve never even had a woman nominee. Clearly it meant nothing to her. Thats when it dawned on me that there is nothing my daughter ever wanted to do that she couldnt do because she was a woman and that she did not consider herself to be part of a discriminated class. And the fact that wed never had a woman president or nominee, it seemed almost coincidental to her. But electing the first African American, that was change. That was really something. And when i realized that, that nominating a woman wasnt enough change for where the democratic and maybe the country was at that point, it was like, wow, this is Something Different from what i thought. A larger thing is, i like to watch data, but anecdotal evidence sometimes helps you understand. How many kids do you have . Three. Rebecca is 27. Shes a genetic counselor at the cleveland clinic. David is 24, hes a specialist in the u. S. Army, 82nd air borne, and our youngest, jeffrey, is going into his second year at elon university. He is 20. And how long will you keep this going . How big is the staff . There are six of us. Jennifer duffy, our Senate Editor has worked with me with one brief interruption since 1988. David wasserman, our house editor has been with me for six or seven years now. Recently amy walter came back. Shes our national editor, and she came back to us from abc news and the hotline. Then we have two young people on board. Lauren fulton runs the web site. Ashton barry runs everything else. There is so much younger i turn 60 later this year. There is so much younger talent in the place that i can see this thing going on, you know, even after i start slowing down. I think i have to go full tilt through one more mings election, and then soort of, you know, kind of gradually downshift a little bit for a while longer. What has happened to your interest in politics since you started all this . I still like politics a lot. But i have to tell you, by the time i get to december of an Election Year heck, by the time i get to december of an oddnumbered year, im kind of here. I have to go into a month or so where, you know, where i try not to think about it at all. But a lot of what is said about washington, it is true. And two friends of mine my friend wrote kind of an indictment. They tend to blame republicans for a High Percentage of the problems while i tend to think it was, you know, 5050 more give or take of the problems that have happened over the last 30 years or so that have changed it from a washington that was that existed when i came in 1972 to where it is now. I can point fingers at both sides. We kind of get the blame. I do want to ask you, i dont care what the answer is, how much has Television Changed thing. I remember arguing with c span that it would ruin things and it would cause show boating. To a certain extent that has happened, but if i were to rank order all the things that have made washington as bad as it is, cspan would be number 288. There has been a little bit of showboating. But you trade off with the transparancy and the understanding of the process. I think clearly cspan is a winner. Yeah, there has been some showboating, but there has also been a lot more understanding of how the place works. Would people be as cynical about Politics Today if cspan never existed . Yeah, i think so, actually. Well, then, whats number one . If i were to point to one single event when i was doing my newsletter, 1984, and there was a house race in your home state, between mcclossski it was almost like florida president ial 232000. God only knows who really won that race. It went back and forth. The secretary of state said this and the local election board said this and this and this. What they should have done is what they actually did in a New Hampshire senate race earlier, saying, the heck with it, were going to rerun the race. But they didnt do that. Tip oneil was the speaker of the house then. Under the constitution the house is the final judge of its members, and finally the house said, to heck with it, were seating our guy. At that point republicans were in the minority for 30 years. They were pretty docile. They were sort of living off the crumbs that the democratic majority threw them. What sort of reseating frank mcklofsky, it so enraged house republicans, and even 134 some of the most mild mannered most moderate members Nancy Johnson from connecticut, for example, one of the more liberal republicans in the house, was incensed and started supporting Newt Gingrich and his rise to sort of take over the republican apparatus. And bob michael who had been leader for a good while and was sort of a get along, go along kind of guy. To me indiana 8 started the revolution in the house. The takeover of newt, going after jim wright. If you are going to say when did the spiral in the house start, where i would put the general siss is indiana 8. Then things became so partisan and bitter between the two sides, with plenty of blame on both sides, you started seeing a bunch of house members coming over to the senate. It was almost like a contageon coming over from one body into another body. It took a long time before the bitterness that was in the house moved over to the senate. Now it is in the senate. Now the rules in the senate are such that it is a much bigger problem in the senate than in the house where fundamentally it is just majority rules. When i came to town there was only one woman in the senate, margaret chase. Now there are 20 . Yes. How did that happen . I think it was inevitable. It never hatched in happened in our history, but now in the last 30 years. Well, as soon as you started getting more women elected at lower levels and middle levels and getting to the point where they had a realistic chance and they had a chance to raise the money, to build up the awareness, to have the credentials that you need. It sort of all started gradually happening. The truth is, its happening slower than it ought to. But, you know, i think it was inevitable that it was going to happen. And i would say one of the problems that republicans have is that i think emilys list on the Democratic Party has done an enormous amount to encourage and bring along and raise money for women on the democratic side to move 0 up. To the extent that there are analogous groups on the republican side, they are not neaferly not nearly as big, effective, influential and have enough money. I think there are other reasons why there arent as Many Republican members in congress as democrats, but i think thats also a problem. If republicans if i were a republican woman executive of some big company, i would want to create some entity for business republican women to help people like us, you know, move up over there. Because i think it is something that would be very healthy for the republican party. Both parties have issues and things that arent particularly healthy. One of the things weve had come along in the last 35 years, we have had lots of interviews. Heres jerry sibe interviewing you back in 2010, getting you to predict whats going to happen to the g. O. P. I think it is more likely than not that the house is going to tip over and go republican. We are sort of seeing 35 to 45 seat gains for republicans. They need 39 seats. Frankly, i think we are being very conservative with that. I think the odds of it being higher than that range a lot better than lower. In the senate, we now see the number of seats. There are enough seats for the republicans to pick up a majority in the senate. But they have to really run the table. I think they are going to end up coming up short. There are 18 democrat or republican seats that could change hands. Republicans would have to win 1618 to score a 10seat net gain. You were careful, but the house didnt pick six, they picked up eight. And you predicted between six and eight. Where do you get your information . My staff is meeting with hundreds of seats each election cycle and spending hundreds of candidates each election cycle and spending hundreds of hours with thesm. Then you come back and with the experience of having watched these elections before and notice patterns and similarities with certain years. You know, tip oneil is famous for the adage all politics is local. But i remember, i wasnt working there anymore, my wife was, but being at the Democratic Senatorial Committee in 1980, and democrats lost what, 12 senate seats . And watching birch bye lose at 6 30, because in indiana the polls close first, and basically watching a senate seat tip over from every halfhour from 6 00 p. M. To midnight, when you see Something Like that, all politics is not local. To me it is like, all politics is local except when its ton not except when it is not. There are these occasions when we have this wave elections where it is like an invisible hand pulling down the candidates from one side and putting them on for the other. What are wave elections in your mind . 1974 hurt republicans a lot. 1980 was one. A little bitty one was 1982. President reagans first bid term election. 1990 was a big one, gingrich. Then 2010, 2011. That was weird. In those you can people that probably shouldnt win do win. And people that probably should have lost, some of them win depending on which side they are on. It is where, you know, in the real big wave elections, you will have candidates that didnt get a dime from their Partys National Campaign Committee win. Their own side didnt even think they were going to win. Thats what you have when you have these big, big tidal waves. I think our country is voting more parliamentary than it used to. In the house, how many seats are absolute givens at this stage in the game . We only have 25 or 26 competitive races at this moment. But kind of broaden that out. I would say we have a very, very, very, very good idea who is going to win. 360, 370 out of 435. And a pretty good idea for 400 out of 435. I got on your web site and found that jose shirano in the last election barack obama got 95 of the vote and the other side got 3 . It is the biggest swing in the whole country. The republicans dont have anything like that. Hes the bronx by the way. And i recall at one point jack fields had the most. Texas. Yeah. I dont know who has that now. But the thing about it is, republican votes are more efficiently allocated than democrat votes. Where democrats roll up the score and it doesnt matter if you are talking about the presidency, the house, or whatever they roll up the score well, lets take president ially. California and new york. You dont get bonus electoral votes for winning big. You get these votes. Texas is the only enormously populated state that republicans can count on, and it is sort of gradually come 2020, 2024, it is not going to be a blue state, but it will be a purple swing state and thats going to change the college math. I got on your web site and i wrote down a couple races. These are all africanamericans. Their difference is enormous. Barbara lees district in california. 88 for obama, 9 for romney. Janis hawn 85 for obama, 14. Fredericka wilson 8812. Charlie rangel 955. What do you think of the facts that these districts are so onesided and how does that happen . Well, there are several different reasons. Some innocent and some not so innocent. On the innocent side is, some of it simply reflects Population Trends of who lives where, what kind of density, and whats adjacent to it. So you can go to places in new york city and los angeles, some of these places where youve got an enormous number of minority voters lets just say africanamerican voters in an area and it is enough for several congressional districts. And it sort of is what it is. Sure, you can probably design one to dilute it if you wanted to, but you would have to go out of your way to do it. So theres that. Then on the other side, there was a transition if the, and i think it was the 1991 redistricting, where republicans became somewhat more enlightened about the minority districts. And they started realizing that the more very, very heavily africanamerican or hispanic districts there were, the wider, therefore more republican more conservative, all the other ones were. And there is a really horrible racist term called bleaching. By creating a lot of heavily minority districts you are bleaching out the adjacent districts. So you start seeing lots of legislators and governors who had kind of some had not been terribly happy with the idea of minority districts saying, hey, this is actually good for us. Obviously the Minority Community wanted to maximize the number of minority members they could get elected. And the members everybody wants a safe seat. So it was sort of the con influence confulence of a few things. Texas, georgia you see republican legislators and governors doing everything they can to create, you know, as many minority districts as they can, and then in other cases, it is just a factor of who lives where. I dont have the full quote here. Few political analysts have a longer track record and then later on it says hes rarely had reason to be disappointed with their results. And thats a guy named nate silver. Yeah. What do you think of nate silver . Hes just gone to espn. Yes. Is he in your business . No. Ive only met him once. We were on a panel together years ago. Hes a very, very bright guy. And he has a statistic cal tool kit that i could only dream about. I think hes intellectually honest. I could probably guess where his politics are, but hes very rigorous in his analysis. So i think hes very good. What he does is kind of like let me use a money ball example. People ask me, was there a need for a charlie cook or a stu rothenberg to do races when we have a nate silver. And the analogy i draw is, theres not a team in Major League Baseball that does not employ more than one statistician. That is incredibly important in any sport, and particularly baseball. At the same time there is not a single Major League Baseball team thats fired all their scouts. If people have watched the movie money ball or read the book about the Oakland Athletics . Yes. Where there is the Old Fashioned gut instinct, there is that, or what i would call the art, or there is the statistic side on the other side, what i would calm the science. And just as no Baseball Team has gone completely statistically oriented, i think it is sort of marrying them together. One of the thing nate spends four or five minutes in a book where he spends a day following David Wasserman around and sat anonymously through an interview with a house candidate. Even a guy as numbers oriented as nate is appreciated that meeting with candidates and theres a real value in the qualitative information in addition to the quantitative information. We have a clip here. Were looking at a probable democratic net gain between zero and 10 seats in the house. There is a lot that is going to be turning over compared to the last nonwave year we had where we had 32 competitive races. This year we have between 50 and 55 races that are genuinely competitive. We have 62 house seats with no one on the ballot, which is a record. So there will be a lot of freshmen in the house, just not a whole lot of partisan change. Now, that was 2012 in the house. How did they do . Fabulously well. I tell you, when amy told me she was going to the hotline to replace chuck todd as editor of the hotline i offered David Wassermanned job before there were four people that knew there was an opening. Had he been a student of larry sabateaus, and i saw that kid and i thought, holy mack relevant makarel, this kid is brilliant. Amy is back with you. Whats her job now . National editor. Shes basically providing big picture content. Kind of like what i do. All my columns on our web site it is delay of 96 hours, 36 hours, but they are on National Journal first, but we wanted something frankly in a fresh different voice. For those who havent watched, here is amy walters who works with you. This is a great race. Rogers has a great story. He comes across well on tv. Diane byrum is also a great candidate. Shes followed in debbie sabinaws footsteps for years up the political ladder. All the polls i watch show this race in a dead heat. Thats a very young amy in 2000. Yes. Amy is great. She guest hosted for glen ivel on washington weekly. Were very excited to have her back. A little down on the first page, he says the midterm elections are two weeks away. But the powerful cannot wait that long to learn of the outcome. And they call in cook who for a fee of 5,000 to 20,000 gives his audience an early return. Thats in 2006. First, leading authorities, one of your bookers, has this video on their web site of you. A legacy. And this is where i kind of get fairly critical of the Romney Campaign, because i think they have made a major, major strategic decision. They sort of remember, romney kind of won the republican nomination very tactically. He basically raised more money than his opponents. He outorganized them, out maneuvered them, and lets face it, in some cases, were talking about a group of migits. I mean, this was not an Impressive Group of people. They came out with this over confidence. The thing about it is, they have never told his story. Migits . Well, there was a certain gong show element to the i think thats one of the reasons Republican Leaders now are not so public about having so many debates. I bet in 1984 you couldnt get 5,000 to 20,000 to make shows speeches. Sure. When did that start . In four or five years i got 500 or maybe 1,000. As you get better known and more widely recognized. And to be honest, one of the biggest boosts for ill say rothenberg and me was the ban on honoraria for congress members. When congress banned honoraria it was a big boost for other people to go and speak to trade association or corporate offices or meetings or labor unions or other groups. People see you in public all the time, you are on this network a ton, you are on other networks, what would we see you doing when you are shoving that information into your brain . Where are you . How long do you spend doing it . What is your best source of information . Well, what i think people are looking for is someone to cut through the clutter and explain to them but what i mean by this question is, where do you do your work that we dont see . How long do you spend doing it . I spend a lot of time going through polling data. You know, every time a Washington Post abc news poll comes out, im going through the crosstabs. Im looking for original data. I spend a lot of time talking to pollsters. Tell me i dont need to run the numbers. But tell me what you are seeing. So i am trying to do that. Well, you know, American People are often cynical about polls. They can be or not, but i think i am a pretty good reader of polls. You did a whole column recently on gallup, and they had a bad year, and i think you were surprised that they were mea culpa . The thing that is instrumental in getting out of the weeds, the gallup voters were actually one point off. They developed a likely voter model based on seven or eight questions that historically had worked very well for predicting who was going to vote and this time it just sort of didnt. At the same time there were a lot of very, very talented republican pollsters who have a history of being right a whole lot, and suddenly they were wrong. What we started seeing what i was doing during the three months leading up to the president ial race was emailing back and forth for some of the Top Republican and democratic pollsters from either side and saying, ok, what are you seeing at this date . This date . This date . And i started seeing this huge great difference between what democratic pole centers pollsters were seeing and republican pollsters. And im not talking about the cheerleaders that think everybody is going to win, im talking about the pretty cold blooded people. Republican pollsters looked back at the 2008 election and said, this was the first African American nominee for the presidency and it created turnout dynamics among African Americans, other minority voters, young people. It was a onetime event, and that 2012, the turnout will be closer to normal. And democratic pollsters were just as adamant, no, the country has changed and this is a new normal. So each one was sort of weighting their numbers and making certain assumptions as they were polling on what proportions of young people, africanamericans, latinos, and this and that they were using different assumptions and coming up with different numbers. But to me, i was watching this thing and seeing, you know, if you think what was the high water to me the mistake i was alluding to in that clip earlier was that the Romney Campaign never defined them. They never told a story. To me, you do biogrphical testimonial ads to, a, build your candidate up, but also to provide a tephlon coating, to protect your candidate from the attacks that you know will come. The Romney Campaign, their feeling was any day or dollar they spent talking about anything other than obama and the economy was a wasted day. It was just going to be a referendum up or down on the economy and that romney had almost nothing to do with it, which i think was a horribly flawed view of the race. So the Obama Campaign took around 60 million that they had budgeted for tv and put it into june, july, and august into advertising in eight states and they just beat romneys brains in with the bain capital ads, beat him to death, so that romneys numbers were upside down by the end of the summer. But in those eight key states, it was horrific for romney. A good example of how Television Ads work. Then you say, what was the best moment of the campaign for mitt romney, that first debate, where he clearly beat the heck out of president obama. Right after that debate romney was effectively ahead in one swing state, North Carolina. Basically even in florida and virginia and behind in every other swing state. The thing is, even on his best day, the Electoral College vote was not even close. I cannot leave out Jennifer Duffy who at many times is another very important part of your sixperson team. Whats interesting about this cycle, we have two or three blue states, massachusetts, connecticut that have fairly Competitive Senate races with more moderate republicans running. So the caller was actually asking, what was her incentive to vote, and i get this question a lot. And i say that voting assures your right to complain about who gets elected. If you dont vote, you dont let your voice be heard, then you really dont have much to complain about. What is her expertise . Janet has been watching senate races since actually 1985 and 1986 she was the Deputy Director of the republican sefatorial committee. I found she was very good. Very objective. Probably more objective than she should have been in that job. When i had a chance to hire my first additional person, she was the first person i went to. She has seen every senate race i mean, every state many, many, many times over. She just knows the rhythms, knows the players. Does she go to states . We dont go to states. That would take a horrific incredible budget. Downstairs we were at johnnys halfshell talking b on background about their race. She has done this so many times. I want to show what you do when you dont quite want to say what you know. This is a short time ago in july of this year. Sometimes they have gotten either conservative or too liberal or too moderate and id logically out of sync with their state. Sometimes they might have scandals or Something Like that. I cant really find any of those with mike enzie. It would be uncharitable to say that this is just about personal ambition. [laughter] and my mind is open to be persuaded that thats not the case. All right. What are you talking about . Well, were talking about Vice President cheneys daughter running against mike enzie in wyoming. You know, maybe it is having been in town for 41 years. I hate to kick people. And i really dont like to be unfair. You know, i dont want to cast doubts on peoples motives. But sometimes, you know, you have to kind of work very hard not to do that. Because it sure looks like something. Actually, talking about some of the fun things, it was 2006, and it looked like democrats were going to take back over the house. It was looking pretty bad for republicans. And Vice President cheneys office called and wanted to know if rothenberg and i could have breakfast with him. So we went over to the Vice President s residence and had breakfast with him. I had met him before. First of all, it was unbelievable how much he knew about he had been to so many of these districts over the years as one of the Republican Leaders in the house, this and that. Basically he was sort of asking us how bad is this . And we were saying, yep, its pretty bad. But thats kind of fun when you get to do that or talked to the various caucusses on both sides and you get a glimpse on the inside players. Two quick questions. Your wifes name . Lucy. You met her where . I met her working at the Democratic Senatorial Committee. If you told lucy you were going to go to New Hampshire on vacation, what would her reaction be . She went. She did . Oh, i thought you knew this. No. We went up in 1995, the family vacation. We went to New Hampshire. She said why dont we go up to new england, we can drive up the coast of maine, and i said, yeah, then we can drive back down to New Hampshire. So the cook family vacation, we have also done iowa before. So our kids say they dont like politics, but they actually know more than they think. What is your favorite airport . My least favorite airport is atlanta. Gosh, i dont know. Youve been in all of them. Oh, shoot, i dont know. Of all the politicians you have seen in your lifetime, which one is the biggest i dont want to say in your favor, but had the biggest impact on you . Well, i never personally met president reagan. But just bill clinton was a hell of a politician. Just the skills. The raw skill that that guy had was pretty amazing. And im sure, had i had any personal experience with president reagan i would probably feel the very same way. But you know, when you see people that are singlea, doublea, triplea ball players and then you see someone that is not only major league but hall of fame, whether you agree with them or not or whatever, you just say wow. Charlie cook, we are over time. Charlie cook, cook political reports. Thank you. Thank you. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2013] [captions performed by national q a programs are also available as cspan podcast. Coming up nextaf,e aa previews of the g 20 summit in st. Petersburg, russia. After that a discussion on u. S. Russian relationship