The first question
concerns
the functioning of our political system and particularly the
disengagement
that many Americans seem to have from politics, which is evidenced by
low
voter turnout. Do you see this as a problem and, if so, how can we
address
it?
ALEXANDER:
It is a problem. And the way to address it is to nominate candidates
that
run campaigns whose goal is to bring out the best in our country rather
than appeal to its worst instincts. I noticed that in the Iowa caucuses
in 1996 the vote total--despite a very spirited campaign--was a lot
lower
than most people thought it would be. Many Iowans told me they were
simply
put off by all the negative advertising that was going on. I didn't do
any of that, and I think it may be one reason that I rose so quickly in
the Iowa caucus.
So
there are probably a lot of reasons for the low voter turnout, but one
way to bring out more voters is to give them something to be proud of,
to give them issues and personalities that appeal to their best senses
instead of their worst senses.
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What about the use
of polling
in campaigns today? There is criticism of President Clinton that he's
totally
poll driven, there's no core there. How do you use polls, and how much
do they shape your campaigning?
ALEXANDER:
Well my advisers say that I don't use them enough. When I was governor
I only took one poll in my entire second term, and that was when I was
in a fight with the teachers' union over paying good teachers more. And
I figured it was a popular idea, and I got a Democratic pollster, Peter
Hart, to take a poll so that I could show to the Democratic legislators
to try to persuade 'em to be for something I was already for. So I
haven't
used polls to shape my beliefs and attitudes and convictions. I do
think
its appropriate to use polls to get a snapshot of where the campaign
stands
after the candidates are pretty well known. And I think its sometimes
appropriate
to use polls to find out if the words you're using convey the meaning
that
you hope to use. Sometimes you can say something, and people don't hear
what you're saying because you use the wrong words.
But
I think it is one reason for a lack of confidence in our political
system
is because so many people seem to go take the polls and find out what
is
first on the polls and then announce that's their position. I don't
think
that's what the American people are looking for. I think they're
looking
for someone with a core of conviction as President Reagan had.
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What is your first
political
memory?
ALEXANDER:
Well one very early one was when I was ten years old. My father took me
to the courthouse one Saturday morning to meet our congressman. This
was
in Maryville, Blount County, Tennessee, right up next to the Great
Smokey
Mountains. And this was an occasion. My father was a member of the
Republican
executive committee in our community and a member of the school board,
an elected member of the school board. And I remember meeting the
congressman.
I remember first being shocked at his appearance, because this was back
before much television in campaigning and he was apparently using his
high
school yearbook picture, and by the time I met him he had grown older
and
fatter and I didn't recognize him. But he took time with me and he gave
me a dime. And I remember when I left I was convinced I had met the
most
respected man I was ever likely to meet other than my father, my
grandfather
and the preacher. So that stuck with me, and I remember how important
it
was in my father's eyes for me to meet our congressman and what respect
we had for him.
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Is there someone who
particularly
influenced your early involvement in politics, a mentor…? I've seen
much
about Senator Baker.
ALEXANDER:
Well, of course Senator Baker, but my parents did. My dad loved to meet
people. And he formed a ticket after World War II of four others and
himself
and they ran for the city school board to take over the school system
and
make it a better school system, and they won and stayed on the school
board
for 25 years until it got to be a first class school system. So he
liked
politics, he liked government; he was a Republican. My mother was
interested
in issues. She made sure that I listened to the radio when it had the
national
conventions on. Together they taught me that public life was something
to be respected. So that was the first thing.
Of
course the first person I worked with in politics was Howard Baker, who
was the son of the congressman that I met on that Saturday morning when
I was ten years old. And he came along in 1966. I was just out of law
school;
I'd been a law clerk in New Orleans. And Senator Baker was challenging
a one-party system in Tennessee. He was young--he was 37, 38 years
old--looked
younger. And it inspired me and a whole generation of people my age to
join him and break up the one-party system and give our region of the
state,
the mountainous region, more representation in Nashville. And I was
lucky
in that sense because there's no school for politics, so you really
learn
from the men and the women that you work with. As it turned out,
Senator
Baker had all the right stuff. He was wise and he was interested in the
issues; he was completely ethical. He saw his responsibility to appeal
to Democrats as well as Republicans, but he was a real builder of the
Republican
party. And he always bent over backwards to create more opportunities
for
me and other young people who came along. So he was the first person.
The
other person who was a great mentor to me in politics was a man named
Bryce
Harlow. I worked for him in the Nixon White House in 1969 and early
1970.
And he was a diminutive man, about 5 feet tall, from Oklahoma, who had
been President Eisenhower's favorite speechwriter. He worked for
President
Nixon as chief of congressional relations. And I also learned a lot
from
him. He also had a high sense of ethical standards and a good sense of
humor and an innate sense of politics. So I was fortunate to have a
couple
of good mentors early on. I can still see today the many lessons I
learned
from them.
Were you Howard
Baker's campaign
manager in that '66 campaign?
ALEXANDER:
No I wasn't. I was one of three or four people in the campaign. It was
a very small operation. I'm not sure that I had a very important title;
I'm not sure we had a "campaign manager." I just did what there was to
be done, whether it was raising $25 from doctors I knew in my hometown
or putting out the press releases or doing the schedule or travelling
with
him.
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Talk a little bit
about
what you learned from your first campaign.
ALEXANDER:
Number one, it was 1974. So I learned it's better not to run in a year
when the president of your party is nearly impeached and resigns,
because
the voters are likely to hold you responsible for it. After 1974 there
were 12 Republican governors left in the country and I was not one of
them,
so I lost that year.
The
second thing I learned was to find a way to campaign in way that's
comfortable
for me. I flew around the state in a little airplane in my blue suit
and
spoke to Republican audiences, and while I won the primary in an upset
win, must not have waged too effective a campaign.
So
when it came time to run again in 1978, my wife said if you run again
in
'78 the way you ran in '74, you'll lose, so why don't you do some
things
you like to do. So what I like to do is to be outdoors, so I decided to
walk across the state. And didn't want to wear a blue suit, so I wore
one
of my--a red and black plaid shirt every day. My favorite thing was not
to go to Republican meetings, so when you're walking across the state
you
meet a lot of people normally who won't go to Republican meetings, and
you broaden your base of friendships. I liked music, so we formed a
little
band called Alexander's Washboard Band, and I played the washboard and
the trombone in it.
So
we had a good time, and the campaign caught--had a lot of enthusiasm
and
generated enthusiasm in the state. So I learned to be myself and to
enjoy
myself when I was campaigning and to meet lots of new people and not
just
the same people all the time.
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You're elected
governor
and serve two terms. What is the most intractable problem you dealt
with
over those eight years, something that just kept hitting you on the
head?
ALEXANDER:
The problem I dealt most successfully with was low family incomes. The
problem that I dealt with, and spent the most time on, but I didn't
make
as much success as I would like to was improving public schools. I
thought
the two went hand in hand. I thought better schools meant better jobs.
While we were very successful in recruiting Japanese industry and
bringing
in automobile manufacturing for the first time and creating an
environment
in which new jobs could grow, and we actually became the fastest
growing
state in terms of family incomes in the country in the mid-1980s, I was
not able to make the progress in terms of improving our schools that I
would have liked to.
Some
individual programs were terrific. We became the first state to pay
teachers
more for teaching well, but I ran into the teachers' unions trying to
do
that. We created a number of programs for gifted students in the
summer--governor's
schools for teachers of writing, and for students in history and
mathematics
and science, and those are still there. And we created Centers of
Excellence
at the universities and Chairs of Excellence and those are still there,
but in terms of completely restructuring our schools, remodeling them,
getting rid of the overhead, setting higher standards, giving parents
more
choices of schools, that was the most intractable problem I ran into
and
it's still a problem.
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Teachers' unions
were the
main obstacle? Are there other obstacles?
ALEXANDER:
There are many obstacles. The teachers' unions, not all of them--Al
Shanker,
who was the head of the American Federation of Teachers, actually
supported
my idea of paying good teachers more for teaching well, but the
National
Education Association, the dominant union in our state, fought it tooth
and nail. So that was an obstacle. Whether we're trying to get rid of
overhead,
giving parents more choices, paying good teachers more, changing the
tenure
laws, the teachers' union is always against that.
But
the other obstacles are the courts. I mean when the courts get so
involved
in the schools that you're busing kids for an hour, an hour and a half
each way to school, parents feel like they don't have control of the
school.
And other obstacles are broken families--families that are broken and
don't
have time for their children or who are working too hard to be--are so
busy working that they don't have time to tend to their duties as
parents
make it difficult for teachers. And then the community at large has
gotten
older. You know after World War II two-thirds of American families were
busy raising children. Today it's about one third. So these are the
taxpayers
and others who have interests other than children. And finally the
culture.
I mean there used to be a very supportive culture for children in
schools.
You had Roy Rogers on television and Captain Kangaroo telling stories,
and today you have Jerry Springer and in many ways an indecent culture.
So the odds are stacked against parents raising children, which is one
of the most important things I'd like to change.
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You stayed for six
months
in Australia [in Sydney]. What did you learn from being over
there?
ALEXANDER:
Well of course I learned what a magnificent country Australia is. It's
so open and friendly and beautiful, and it has so many different kinds
of animals--koala bears to kangaroos. But what I mainly learned was
about
our country. Living in Australia you look back and see the tremendous
influence
that our culture--the Today Show, the National Geographic… has in other
countries. I had one woman in Australia offer me, say, "I'll swap you
my
vote for a third of yours." I said, "Why would you do that?" She said,
"Well we don't have anyone who can talk to Gorbachev like your
president
can, and we don't want to be blown up either." One night on a camping
trip,
an Aussie said to me, "Have you ever realized that country has
interstate
highways just as you Americans do." And I hadn't thought about that.
And
coming back home after being away from America for awhile I remember
sitting
in the Detroit airport just watching people go by, watching Americans
go
by, of every shape, size, background and color, and realizing what a
magnificent,
diverse country this is. So I had a much better sense of America. And
the
other, of course, that I was taught was… this was 1987 and we came home
through China and our children were making lists of things they could
do
in America, like choose the school, choose the person they'd marry,
choose
the city they live in, choose the job they work in, that they couldn't
do in China in 1987. And we rode the train from Moscow to Paris and in
doing that crossed the Berlin Wall. And we saw the marching guards and
the barbed wire and got a reminder of what freedom is. So living in
Australia
was a great lesson about the United States.
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Building on that
last comment
on the Berlin Wall…[with the fall of communism] in 1990, for example,
in
Poland, there was just such excitement…[people were confronting
questions
such as] is there a third way, how are we going to deal with freedom?
Another,
way to look at it is the idea of the frontier, in Australia. Is there
any
way we can get a big picture going here in America. People just seem so
blasé, and busy. Is there any way we can get a big picture going
here in America or is that not possible?
ALEXANDER:
No, it is possible. The change of the century is a good time for that.
There are certain times of our history when we step back and think
about
what does it mean to be an American--when the Pilgrims arrived, when we
wrote the founding documents, when we fought our wars, when we shot for
the moon, when we watched the Berlin Wall fall--we all stopped and
thought
more about what it meant to be an American. And that's one of the
functions,
mainly the main job of a president, is to lift us up and paint a
picture
of what our future is and what our country can be. I think Americans
will
be ready for that. We have new issues, new leaders and new century.
It's
a good time to think about the principles that unite us as a country
and
make us proud to be Americans.
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Another
significant thing you've done is President of the University of
Tennessee
[1988-91]. Did you like academia?
ALEXANDER:
Well I love the University of Tennessee; I'm not so well suited for the
academic life. I was better at governor than I was a university
president.
In the university, the leadership job is more of a consensus-building
job
and you appoint a lot of committees and things take a long time. I was
more effective as chairman of the board of the University of Tennessee
when I was governor because I had control of the budget and I could
move
things my way more rapidly. So I'm better at setting an agenda,
developing
strategies, persuading people I'm right than I am at being a university
president, although I'm very proud of the University of Tennessee and
of
the time I spent there.
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You helped to start
a business,
Corporate Child Care. What were the biggest challenges of building that
company from scratch?
ALEXANDER:
Well the first challenge was to figure out what business we were in.
What's
your niche? My wife and I and Captain Kangaroo--Brad Martin--and
Marguerite
Sallee founded this company in 1987. And it was to provide worksite
childcare.
That was the niche we finally settled in. We recognized that with
larger
numbers of parents, including moms, working away from home, that family
work schedules were a mess, and that we needed a private sector
solution
to that, and that many employers might be over time providing help for
parents who worked for them with their child care responsibilities.
So,
number one was settling on the idea that we would only be in the
business
of helping employers provide childcare at the worksite for their
employees.
We didn't get into competition with Kindercare, for example, on a
street
corner childcare center that was open to everybody. Number two was
raising
the capital. Brad Martin and I loaned $200,000 to start the
corporation.
Number three was recruiting the customers. And number four was being
patient
long enough to make a profit, which took us six or seven years to do.
Now
the company's been very successful. It's gone public; it's mergered
with
its major competitor. It operates 250 childcare centers at the
worksite--well
more than that--it operates childcare centers for 250 major
corporations
around America, including Citibank and Saturn and Boeing. It's been a
big
success.
Are there a lot
of regulations?
Does the federal government get into that at all?
ALEXANDER:
Well there are not a lot of federal regulations in this case. I used to
joke and say to people I did what every governor ought to be sentenced
to do: I started a company under the rules I set while I was in office.
There are lots of state regulations which regulate how many infants or
children per teacher there can be, and there are safety regulations.
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Do you have a
framework
or a formula or a set of criteria or a bottom line for how you think
about
the role of government?
ALEXANDER:
Well one bottom line is if you can find it in the yellow pages, the
government
probably shouldn't be doing it. That government is not a very good
manager,
and if you can buy a service, for example a janitorial service, a
cleanup
service, from the private sector that's usually a better use of money.
You get a better quality product and it often costs less. So that's a
good
framework.
A second
principle would be, there are a great many things that state
governments
can do properly that the federal government has no business doing, or
doing
much of. For example, I think elementary and secondary education should
be primarily a community and local as well as state responsibility, and
that the federal government should be limited to giving money to
parents
in the form of scholarships which they then spend at schools that their
children choose.
A third
limit is, we should limit the size of government generally. That this
is
a country whose central organizing principle is freedom. A government
that
is too large restricts our freedom too much. For example, I believe our
level of taxation today is too high and I favor giving more of the
money--allowing
us to keep more of what we earn as a way of limiting the size of
government.
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If you do decide to
run
this time, it would seem that you're running from a position of
weakness.
You've been running for president for the past five years; you haven't
held elective office for over a decade. How do you respond to that type
of criticism?
ALEXANDER:
Well a great many of our best presidents have been unemployed former
governors.
Do you have some
one in mind?
ALEXANDER:
Well Governor Reagan, for example.
I think
I'm running from a position of pretty considerable strength. I mean the
way you win a presidential race is to have the strongest message and
the
most experience among the candidates running. I believe I'll have the
broadest
and best experience, and I hope to show the American people that I
understand
the country well enough to bring out the best in it.
Number
two, because of my experience, I'll be one of two or three Republicans
who are able to raise enough money to run for president.
Three,
any Republican who wins the nomination will have to do very well in
Iowa
and New Hampshire. While I did well last time, and came within two or
three
percentage points of actually beating Senator Dole in New Hampshire in
the first primary, I start off with a great many advantages this time,
including the support of the governor of Iowa, Governor Branstad.
No
Republican since President Eisenhower has been elected president the
first
time he ran. Ronald Reagan ran two and a half times. George Bush and
Richard
Nixon ran more than once. So if someone wins this time who has never
run
before it'll make a little history.
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You've been
described as
the "easy listening" candidate [by Charlie Cook]. What does that mean
to
you?
ALEXANDER:
I don't know. But it may be about what the country's ready for by the
year
2000 after all we've been through. I think the country's ready for
finding
the good in America and praising it. They're ready for a campaign and a
presidency that unites our country. They're ready for a president who's
willing by his words and deeds in an age of responsibility, to follow
up
the struggle for freedom that we've had in this past century. And I
think
we'll be looking for a president who is likely to behave himself while
he's in office. So after the tumult of a Clinton presidency, maybe an
easy
listening candidacy will be just what America is ready for.
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Copyright 1998
Eric M. Appleman/Democracy
in Action |