This is already a few months old (mid 07), but I had not seen it until now.
It is an interview by Kerry to the Center for Public Integrity concerning his views of campaign financing, including the 04 campaign.
http://www.buyingofthepresident.org/index.php/interviews/john_kerry/
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The first thing I would like to ask you your views on the future of the matching-funds system. Do you think that has any future? Do you think candidates who don’t opt out of the system can have any kind of reasonable chance to be nominated?
Providing you have a sufficient base, based on an issue of the moment or your own record and experience, it’s possible — I underscore “possible”— for a matching-fund candidate to win. But it’s much more difficult unless the matching funds are, themselves, reformed, so that you have a sufficient level of match that is guaranteed and a sufficient total level of funding timely delivered in the appropriate quantity. If that doesn’t happen, it is doomed. And frankly, it’s flawed, because it forces battleground-state campaigns rather than national campaigns. In my experience, we had to ration money, and in fact even pull out of three states where we were perilously close. And I believe if we could have stayed and afforded to stay, it would have made a world of difference. But the finance situation doesn’t allow that.
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How would you reform it?
You have to have a comprehensive reform. You have to have a limitation on these individual groups and the nature of their attacks. And you got to have some kind of response capacity. I mean, we ought to get back to some sort of equal time or other free advertising time. There are any number of options that have been on the table through the years. This lowest unit rate to candidates is a joke. I mean, the lowest unit rate is exorbitant. Campaigns spend tens of millions of dollars and the media, which are licensed by the federal government, walk off with these incredible amounts of money.
I have advocated that ever since I came here. I was one of the leading advocates of full campaign finance, public funding, full funding reform. I wrote the bill with David Boren and George Mitchell back in the ’80s. We actually passed it at one point. And George Herbert Walker Bush vetoed it. And I went with Bill Bradley and Joe Biden to visit with Clinton in 1993 in the Oval Office to persuade him to do campaign-finance reform when we had the majority of both houses and the White House. And he declined to do that. And I think we paid an enormous price for not having done that. But you have to have a comprehensive reform. I am not for Band-Aid reforms anymore. I am not for coming in and limiting Congress and what they can do here, and then individual groups can go out and just murder you on their own. Enough of that.
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Do you think that the presence of money in campaigns inevitably means campaigns are going to become more negative?
No. It’s entirely up to the nominee. I was highly criticized because I ran a positive convention. I thought America wanted to have a positive view of where we ought to go. And we didn’t spend our time bashing Bush. We spent our time giving America visions of the future. And, I might add, we came out of the convention five points ahead of Bush, which was about the maximum that was available. I mean, there just wasn’t much greater leeway. So it was a very successful convention. And in fact, if you go back and review all of the comments of the pundits post-convention, they all were superlatives raving about how we accomplished what we needed to do.
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Is there an increasing danger that consultants get ahold of campaigns and take them over from the candidates?
First of all, in the end, that’s up to the candidate. And the candidate, whatever happened to my campaign, I take the blame for it, because ultimately it’s my decision. But the old adage is, “Don’t be your own campaign manager.” So you hire people. You trust them. You listen to their advice. And you go with them. But in the end, it’s my responsibility, not theirs.
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I’ll tell you what. I have more people who come in this office ask me to do something, who I know voted for the other guy, who I know are Republican, hard-core conservative, whatever. And they come in here and ask us to legislate their monopoly or something. Far more people have asked me to do things for them who never supported me than people who supported me.
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