Stuart Stevens: ‘Joe Biden? Possibly’

He’s written travel books and memoirs. A few weeks from now the softcover edition of The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear—his novel about presidential politics—will be released.

But maybe my favorite thing Stevens has written is the definitive essay on steroids, for Outside magazine, in which he went on the juice for a year to in order to report what it’s actually like.

Stevens is smart and candid and funny and in love not just with politics, but with life outside of politics, too. Last week we talked over email. Here’s a transcript of our conversation.

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Jonathan V. Last: So . . . Charlottesville? I don’t quite know what to ask about it. My colleague Mike Warren makes the astute observation that Trump has a duty to condemn the white supremacist / neo-Nazi / alt-right factions because they claim to be operating in Trump’s name and as part of his movement. You have to police your own side. This has been the Republican burden for 70-odd years. Buckley did it. Reagan did it. Dole did it. Every mainstream GOP figure for three generations has taken up that commitment.

Trump seems uninterested in this job. His entire political belief system seems to be encapsulated in the game theory strategy of “tit-for-tat, with some forgiveness.” And according to that strategy, he’s never going to disown people who support him.

I’m groping for a question here, so maybe I’ll just try on a Peter Thiel pose where I question the unquestioned conventional wisdom: As a purely political matter, in the short term is Trump necessarily wrong in this calculation? Net-net would he have been any better off treating this situation the way Republicans before him have? Long-term, yes, it’s bad for Republicans. (And America.) But short term, could it be good for Trump?

Stuart Stevens: I’ve been lousy calculating the political consequences of Trump’s actions and see no reason particularly that should change.Trump is Trump. To me he’s been very consistent and true to his campaign, at least in tone and temperament if not legislative actions. I have this sense watching Republicans react in surprise to something like Trump equating George Washington and Robert E. Lee as if a baseball fan would react in horror when Randy Johnson plunked a batter. Really? You didn’t see that coming?

When a party has a president in power, that president defines the party. It strikes me as naive to think otherwise. What are the political consequences of the Republican party led by Trump? I have no idea.

JVL: Something has happened to the GOP in the last year. It’s still not clear if it’s realignment, or an evolution, or a fracturing. Do we know yet what it was? And was it inevitable?

SS: In a year of bad punditry and lousy predictions, I was pretty much the worse at predicting what would happen with Trump. I didn’t think he’d win the primary or the general. There is some reason to believe I was wrong on both counts.

Likewise, my thoughts on what might happen to the GOP post-Trump election are probably equally as flawed as my predictions pre-Trump election. I can only say that as someone who was drawn to the kind of values and tone expressed by Ronald Reagan and both Bush-39 and Bush-41, I struggled to find those represented in the 2016 election and hope they re-emerge as compelling building blocks for the future.

One thing is clear: Trump’s base is white voters with high school or less education. That group is one of the most rapidly shrinking electorates in the national equation. Not to fight the “demographics are destiny war” but Republicans must attract more non-white voters both to continue to win national elections and, equally or more importantly, to serve as a unifying, governing party.

JVL: Looking back on Romney 2012, are there any signs of Trumpism apparent in hindsight?

SS: Of course this depends on how one might define “Trumpism.” But probably it has been present for quite a while. I think those who have looked carefully at the moment Palin emerged have rightly found many similarities. But it seems to me that Pat Buchanan’s run in 1992 was a harbinger as well. And interestingly both Buchanan and Trump ran against each other for the Reform party nomination for president in 2000. Buchanan won. Both Palin and Buchanan were largely candidates of anger and it seems safe to say that both his supporters and detractors consider Trump the essential candidate of anger. So, yes, it was there in 2012 but also earlier.

JVL: Going in the opposite direction, having now seen 2016, if you could go back to the Romney 2012 operation, is there anything the campaign would do differently?

I’ve worked on over 30 winning Senate or gubernatorial races and 2 winning presidential campaigns. I’ve never done a campaign that I didn’t look back on and wish we’d done X or Y differently. Maybe that’s just my nature. But I suspect the heart of this question is “do I think if we had done X or Y differently that we might have won?”

It is very difficult to defeat an incumbent president, particularly in a campaign not operated under federal spending limits. Many forget, but from 1976 until Barack Obama backed out of the system in 2008, every general election presidential campaign accepted federal dollars in exchange for an agreement not to raise or spend beyond a certain limit. This was intended to level the playing field and it did: two incumbent presidents, Carter and Bush, lost.

But when you look back at presidential incumbents not in the federal funding system, the last one to lose was Hoover, and he had a bad year. An incumbent president can raise virtually unlimited money and if that president does not have a primary, most likely they will have a huge monetary advantage over a challenger who has fought his or her way through a primary to emerge broke. President Obama was the first incumbent since Nixon to face re-election not in the Federal funding system.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I can’t point to any one particular moment or decision that might have altered the outcome of 2012. The race was basically very stable: Romney emerged from the primary behind and pretty much stayed behind throughout the race. There were moments when he went down, like the 47 percent aftermath, and moments when he went up, like the first Denver debate. But we never established a lead that was sustainable. In June of 2012, the Obama campaign spent more on television than the combined totals of the entire Bush and Kerry general election ad budgets. That did not help.

Nor did the Sandy storm. Every time I’ve been involved in defeating an incumbent, it requires controlling the agenda at the very end of a campaign. It’s sort of like an NBA game, where the last minutes are critical. Sandy froze the race and greatly reduced the ability of the Romney campaign to control a closing agenda. Which is not to say that absent Sandy we might not have lost by even a larger margin. Who knows? It’s possible that some moment might have occurred in those days that would have hurt the Romney campaign more than Sandy. But it’s also true that Sandy reduced the chances for an uphill win.

JVL: A lot of people seem to assume that Trump will be a one-term (or less) president. Most of the objective indicators—job approval, right track/wrong track numbers—suggest that he could be an incredibly weak incumbent. But on the other hand, one of the lessons of 2016 is that you don’t have to beat the ’27 Yankees. All you have to do is beat the guy in front of you. Is it too early to know anything useful about 2020? And which potential Democrats would be the most formidable? Who would be the least?

SS: To me, it’s very difficult to begin to imagine 2020. What will the economy be doing? Will we be in aftermath of war with North Korea? Or Iran? At this point, everyone thought that the 2008 general election would be about Iraq. It turned out to be about the economic crisis.

But one early sign would be the emergence of a primary challenge to Trump. A primary has historically been one of the key indicators of possible incumbent defeat for an incumbent president. Even a candidate as weak as Pat Buchanan hurt Bush significantly in 1992.

As for the Democrats, I’m hardly an expert. Their bench looks weak, but then how many in 2005 looked at Barack Obama as likely to win a sweeping election landslide? My view is that parties, like countries, tend to invent leaders when they most need them. It was true with Reagan, Thatcher, Churchill, etc. All were resurrected from the dustbin of history to become transformative figures. My guess is that the next Democratic president will be either someone who is relatively unknown or a very well known figure who emerges for a surprising final act. Joe Biden? Possibly.

JVL: One of my large-scale concerns about Trump is that he might have been the beginning of an era of celebrity candidates, where the dynamics of a national campaign are such that celebrity has become an indomitable asset because celebrity now has an absolute value sign around it. And celebrities aren’t held to the same standards as normal pols.

After all, seen in a certain light, Barack Obama in 2008 wasn’t just the first African-American president—he was the first celebrity candidate. My concern is that if Oprah or Mark Cuban become the Democratic nominee in 2020, then it’s Katy-bar-the-door: We’ll never have a conventional politician as president again.

Talk me off the ledge here. Is this worry insane? Am I over-rating the power of celebrity in national politics?

SS: My feeling—and it may be wishful thinking—is that the celebrity factor for Trump was not the reason he won. Remember that he entered the race with shockingly high negatives even with Republican voters. I’d say the celebrity factor is like someone who drinks a lot at a party, makes it safely home, and then concludes that alcohol improves your driving. Not really.

Trump defeated what turned out to be a relatively weak field. But it should not be underestimated how much Trump benefited from the inability to imagine him winning. (I was certainly in this camp.) Because it seemed axiomatic to many that the Republican party would not nominate Trump, most of the candidates spent tremendous time and energy trying to kill each other for the right to be the last candidate facing Trump. The assumption was that position would assure victory. It’s like World War I. The fact that no one could imagine it greatly increased the odds it would happen. (This also happened in the general election but that’s another story.)

JVL: Electoral politics is part science, part art, and part magic. Have any of the laws governing those disciplines been altered permanently in the last few years?

SS: If the premise is that Trump winning has permanently changed the laws of politics, my suggestion would be to look at other big races for governor and Senate. Are there many Trump-like (whatever that means) candidates winning? So far the answer is no. There have always been instances of quirky candidates pulling off a win, like Jesse Ventura in Minnesota. He was an interesting character running against two of the most boring white men in America. But have more Jesse Ventura candidates subsequently dominated Minnesotan politics? Not really. They pretty much went back to boring white guys (and some boring white women.) I expect this will prove to be the case with Trump. But then again, I didn’t think he’d win the primary. So I’m probably wrong.

JVL: If you were going to red-team the 2020 election and advise Democrats, what would you tell them to do? And I don’t mean what would you tell them to do in a perfect world, that conforms with the things that you and I believe, but within the reality of the political constraints the Dems face right now. How would you advise them to play their hand?

SS: Lord. I have no idea. There is tremendous talent in the Democratic party on the operative side. My guess would be that the desire to win would ultimately triumph over any other concerns and they would nominate a candidate with the best shot of winning.

And let’s don’t forget that Clinton did win by 3 million votes. I worked on Bush 2000 and well appreciate how difficult it is to win the Electoral College when losing by half a million. To lose by 3 million and still tank the Electoral College is mathematically very, very difficult. Think of it like the side effects listed for Tylenol. They sound horrible but everybody takes Tylenol and seems fine. Except those things must be happening to some poor folks or they wouldn’t be listed. It’s just rare. So it is with a 3 million vote loss coupled with Electoral College victory. Call it the side-effect election. I doubt we’ll see a spread like that every again.

JVL: I’ve never settled on whether Trump’s 2016 victory was the result of an inevitable dialectic of history or a perfect storm. But in a sense, that no longer really matters: It happened and it’s influencing the world. What’s your best-guess at what the Republican party looks like six years from now?

SS: Man, I don’t have a clue. But if you look at the numbers, unless white people can figure out how to quit dying—which, being white, I’m all for but skeptical—it is critical that the Republican party do better with non-white voters. I think that is a moral imperative as well as a political imperative. Yes, Trump won by increasing white turnout as a percentage of the electorate. But that is harder and harder to do as whites decease as a percentage of the electorate. To a certain degree, I look out at the current success of the Republican party and I can’t help but think how Wang once dominated the word processing market. Are you preparing for the future? The world changes fast.

JVL: What’s your favorite campaign story? Feel free to change the names to protect the innocent. Or guilty.

SS: Unnamed presidential campaign in unnamed city. We lost a primary we were expected to win and it was a miserable night. There was a shortage of hotel rooms and I was given one previously held by a staffer who had left earlier in the day to work the next state. I finally start to fall asleep around 2:00 a.m. looking at a 6:00 a.m. wake-up call. There are two beds in the room. I hear the door open and as I’m waking up, I realize that the staffer hasn’t actually left and he has returned to his room, not knowing it had been given to someone else. Which would have been fine except he’s not alone and is with someone he apparently had met in a bar. It’s dark and they don’t know I’m in the room. They fall into the other bed. I lie in the dark wondering why the universe hates me.

JVL: You wrote the single best essay about PEDs, ever, in Outside magazine, in which you took an assortment of PEDs for a year while under the direction of a physician. I came away from it wishing that I could be on the juice. Or at least the parts of the juice that you started with early in your regime.

Besides economics, is there a reason everyone shouldn’t be taking anti-aging meds? In other words, if Medicare covered HGH and some of the stuff you took, would there a philosophical (or medical) reason not to take them?

SS: The entire issue of PED’s seems simple if you think about them for 5 minutes (they’re bad) and a lot more complicated if you think about it for 20. Why is it acceptable to compete with an entire new body part like an artificial knee or hip or surgically modified eyes but unethical to take cold medicine? I’m a fervent anti-doper in sports but let’s accept that in a world when kids are having Tommy John surgery just to strengthen their arms and increase chances for a college scholarship—all considered acceptable, if expensive—there are no easy answers.

Whatever the opposite of a Christian Scientist is, that’s me. I’m all for pretty much anything that can improve quality of life, whatever life you lead. If you are a fanatical runner, recovering faster from an injury is a big deal in your life and there are various PED’s that would likely help. If you are a male and your testosterone levels have plunged—which happens to some guys for various reasons—then go see a doctor about supplements.

The reality is that many, many people take some form of drugs that could be classified as “anti-aging” and performance enhancing. We consider beta blockers acceptable (as we should) but they are certainly anti-aging and enhance “performance.” Same for Lipitor. Athletes in a drug screening program would likely be banned for these drugs but millions of regular folks take them every day.

So, yes, if you aren’t competing in a sport with drug testing or doing serious amateur athletics where PED’s give you an unfair advantage, I support looking at them as possible “normal” answers for health/enhancement issues. It’s not like these drugs were concocted in some Breaking Bad lab. The medical world developed and produces these drugs. Talk to your doctor.

JVL: You’re a huge Ole Miss guy. I grew up outside of Philly and have never understood the allure of college football. For you, why is the college football better than the NFL?

SS: Look, if I had grown up having to watch some sad team like Temple—which managed to get kicked out of the Big East Conference for lack of commitment to football—I’d probably be deep into some foreign sport like cricket. Or soccer. But in the South where I grew up, college football was/is basically life and all those other sports are variations on race walking or rhythmic dance. I’m fascinated by the role college football has played in the South, both changing race relations and being changed by race relations. Much more than the NFL, college football reflects the regional cultures of America and has a greater impact on more people. There aren’t many pro football teams and there are a zillion college and junior college teams who play their guts out every Saturday.

The brilliant filmmaker Greg Whitely—who made the film Mitt—has captured it all in Netflick’s Last Chance U. In the tiny town of Scooba, Mississippi—and I once dated a girl from Scooba who now lives in Manhattan and let me assure you she has no plans to return—Greg has captured much of the essence of American life and that could never be done with a pro team.

You fall in love with college football, you fall in love with America.