Yes, today is September 29th. Uh 2011. I'm David Berman, Professor
Emeritus of Political Science at A SU. Today, we're interviewing Robby
Sherwood who is district director for Harry Mitchell. Uh He is offices in
Scottsdale. Uh This is part of a collection that we're doing for the Harry
Mitchell papers at A SU I know that you were uh born in Springerville.
You're a native born Arizonan and you were educated at a SU to catch B A
and MA there and communications and creative writing. And that you uh I
used to an adjunct professor there too in the W uh Cronkite School for I
did, I did for 11 project. Uh And yeah, and it did very well, won a lot of
awards and so I've just been resting on my Laurels since then. So I just
did it once. Yeah, you were a reporter for 17 years starting off in NASA
and he fairly tribute and with the Arizona Republic. And I think most of
us remember you pretty much, I, I do remember the authors of, of journal
of articles and papers. And uh of course, I remember you as many people do
as a member of the Horizon panel for many years. And Michael Grant, uh
every Friday, we could talk about the issues and happenings in Arizona
politics and you're award winning journalist. And uh you had a great
career there. And then 2006, was it? She decided to go to public relations
firm and uh spent a year there. And then uh in November of 2007, you wound
up on working for Harry me, got a phone call. What was your first contact
with her? Did you know him when you were a reporter? I had occasional
contact with him even in the Tribune because he was mayor of Tempe at the
time and then was elected to the legislature. So of course, I knew who he
was and I would occasionally pull shifts in our Tempe bureau.
So you got to meet him a couple of times, but I didn't really have
extended interaction with the Mattel after 1999 near the end of 1999. And
into the 2000 legislative session, I was tabbed to, to join the Republic's
Capital Press Corps team. And so I was moved down there to the Capitol
press room and began covering the legislature on a day to day basis. And
Harry was there in the Democratic caucus and in leadership there and was
someone who, while he was in leadership, he was never the leader. And so
the people you get the quotes from, you know, for an official story would
be the leader, but Harry was a place where Harry's office was a place
where you could find out what was going on. It was a scene there,
it was a good atmosphere. There would always be a good collection of
lobbyists or lawmakers or people who knew what was happening. So you could
, if you knew you were smart enough to in his office, you could get a very
good lay of the land. So I just began interacting with him on a regular
basis.
Absolutely. I say this a lot about Harry, that he is the most unassuming
important person that I've ever met. And you understand what I mean by
that, he's clearly been an elected official member of Congress, a very
high level important person, but he is the most down to earth
conversational
congenial person makes you feel welcome. He's really, you've become a
member of his family and I've come to see him sort of almost like a father
figure because he's given me a lot of wise and very sage advice about
things. My father died when I was 15. And so I just naturally gravitated
to him in that manner.
There was not so much then because there was a wall, I was a journalist,
they were careful, they knew that if they said something outrageous or
something like that, I was bound to put it in the paper. But I was growing
to like him and admire him as a person as I got to know him. But where I
really
got to, where I really, really admired him and saw him as a father figure
was when I was working for him, you got the job, you're telling me as
being recommended by someone else that Harry knew there was a vacancy.
There was
some of the DC staffers who were there probably have given you the how it
all went down. But when Harry was elected,
no one really expected him to win at least of all himself or his campaign
staff. And so suddenly you end up and you're there in Washington DC and
you can't even find the bathroom. So a lot of very inexperienced people
who had to quickly get up to speed. And so he hired a chief of staff who
was a Hill veteran, Gene. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting his name, but
he kind of came out of semi retirement to get the office up and running
and he stayed in that position for a year until all the babies could walk.
And then he went ahead and took his retirement and they promoted Alexis
Tamron to go to Washington DC from district director. So that created a
vacancy and they were looking around for someone who they felt could fill
the job who had a good handle of local politics, knew a lot of people and
could deal with the local media. I wasn't the press secretary, but they
were looking for someone who could have relationships with local media and
Elizabeth Higgins, who was Harry's assistant in the Senate. And then I was
also his scheduler and threw my name in it out, I guess. And they was like
, I wonder if he would do it? And they called it a very good time because
I think I had been 11 months in public relations and long enough to know
that I didn't really like it if there was a possible ability to do
something else. I mean, I was ok at it. I thought I was successful at it
but I, I was, uh, looking to be something, you know, for something with a
little more significance and meaning and, and this just fell in my lap.
Did you, did you have any qualms about getting involved in partisan
politics after having been a journalist for so many years? You know, uh,
maybe just a little, but I was out of journalism and I didn't see myself
necessarily going back. I really enjoyed that career. It was maybe the
most fun I've ever had at work covering politics, but I had moved on and I
wasn't ashamed of my party affiliation. I'm a lifelong, a democrat from
rural Arizona. Uh, which means that you have a fair amount of conservative
lean. So, like, you know, my family are probably the most well armed
democrats. You'll, you'll find, you know, we grew up on a ranch and, and,
and II, I felt that the, the, that Harry was representing a district in
which was very kind of moderate leaning centrist district that was not
aligned with how I grew up. And so ultimately, it was just a minor concern
and not one that I really worried about journalists have gone into
politics, political positions and, and it's a very common thing because if
you're good at, as a journalist or a media specialist, you're very
valuable to the congress person or the group of people that are hiring you.
Right. Yeah. If, yeah, there, there's, you can be for sure. And, and, uh
, it's a little controversial, I think that, uh, and I kind of draw a line
where, you know, it's, it's fair to raise questions if you're covering a
politician one day and then you turn around and take a job from them the
next day. I always felt that that was a fair game to criticize you pulling
punches as a reporter. And I covered Harry in the legislature, but I
didn't cover his congressional race. I covered Kyle and Peterson. So I
sort of just watched this whole thing with JD Hayworth from a distance and
, uh, and then I laundered myself for 11 months in public relations. So,
yeah, I felt like that, uh, that I could make that transition in good
conscience, you know. Yeah, it was, I guess there was some flack that came
down as I remember going back to the paper, some of the Tribune wrote a
front page story about it. Iiii I thought so.
I looked at, I was like, well, I won't always be in this job and I'll
probably have to go back and be a consultant some day. And so as long as I
spelled my name, right, I guess I was all right.
All those years you covered politics. Did you have an idea of what you
were getting into? Did you have a vision of what the world would be like,
the political world would be? Like, once you become
part of my language, I have honestly fallen ass backwards through my whole
career. I have every job I've, I've, I've wanted really bad and try to get
, you know, or, or, or, or sought after just didn't really work out or I,
I didn't get it, you know, it's, it's more these sort of opportunities
that, that, that just sort of appear and you sort of step through them and
, and, and covering politics was the same thing. I was a general
assignment reporter and crime and general assignment reporter at the
Tribune. And I wrote mostly big stories of the day. Sometimes it was
politics, sometimes it could be anything. And I like that, it appealed to
my short attention span. But at some point, the Tribune in those days was
like playing for a AAA ball club and you were hoping to get noticed by the
major league team, which is the Republic. And eventually I got lucky
enough I did and, and, but they are going to offer you a job that's more
or less at the lowest level of their totem pole. Front page of the Tribune
equals covering city of Chandler for the Republic. You know, which was my
first job and I just took it because I wanted to be at the Republic. I
didn't know about local politics like that. I never covered a city or a
meeting or, you know, a board meeting or anything like that. And I just
sort of fake it till you make it type of attitude. And over time my beats
progressed, I started covering the city of Mesa. And then ultimately the
legislature, I think the work I did covering the city of Mesa, maybe got
enough attention to someone to give me a try at the legislature. And I
just slowly fell in love with the political process in politics in general
and just learned on the go. It wasn't something that I grew up or always
knew that I wanted to do. It just evolved, seeing it through the eyes of a
reporter and then all of a sudden being the one that other reporters are
looking at now you're in it rather than just, is it, is it, is it what you
expected it to be or was it more combative? Did you, did you, do you think
you could change the world or was it an inspiration? You know, when I was
, when, I mean, when I was a reporter? Yeah. Um, I mean, I, I had a fair
amount of idealism as, as a reporter and, and, and there were stories that
literally did change people's lives, you know, for the better, or
sometimes for the worse, you know. Uh, uh, when you, when you hooked up
with Harry, do you think? Well, this is gonna be my chance to do something
good or to do
something with meaning something that's important to the country?
Absolutely. Yes. And compared to a no knock on what I was doing right
before. But compared to trying to get people to show up at a press
conference or a shopping mall or something like that, you know, it was no
comparison
and particularly in the district office, which is, I think if you're just
one small office in the house on Capitol Hill, your relative
insignificance probably shows a lot more than you'd like. But in a
district office you have people coming in every day for help. They're
seeking, they're caught in some sort of bureaucratic mess or red tape and
through casework or they have an issue that they want to get in front of
the congressman that maybe you can't fix with a law. You're limited in
your ability to do that, but you might fix with a phone call to the right
person and get this person out of a jam. People like that walked in all
day, every day and, and you did feel a sense of, of accomplishment when
you help people like that. How was the, what was the relationship between
the Washington office in the district office? Did you? I know you, you
were the eyes and ears of the, of the, of Harry in the district. So it was
sort of a two way flow of communication there, I suppose. But in terms of
staff supervision, where did, were you relatively autonomous? Or I think I
had a fair amount of autonomy,
the way it's structured is the chief of staff is below a member of
Congress. And then the legislative director and the press secretary is
relatively anonymous, but doesn't have direct supervision. And then the
district director are below the chief of staff. So I was the ranking staff
member in the district. I had day to day responsibilities for those staff
members and could direct them and was free to come up with our own ideas
about how we wanted to do things. But I think the essence of your question
is the relationship between DC and the district office. And I would say
that it's probably the same story in every congressional office that they
, you don't always see eye to eye. You ultimately create a very productive
relationship or you don't. But I think ours was quite productive. But
there's a natural
feeling if you're in DC, everything is seen through a very political lens
, through a very DC lens. It's very policy orientated in the district.
You're, you're talking to your constituents and it's more of kind of a
gut feeling of how your member is doing and how things are going and
there's going to be times where, what DC wants to do and what the district
thinks they got to do are not going to mesh on any particular issue. So,
yeah, I think that,
well, I think ultimately we're all on the same page for
health care, but I think that there might have been some folks who thought
that because of the makeup of the district that the congressman should
have voted. No. And, uh, my advice was to, you know, vote your conscience
, vote for what you think is right. And, and the political consequences
just be what they are. And that's a risky thing to do because some people
might say that the issue that maybe sunk us was, was health care. I
disagree. I think the way was so large that we could have voted against
health care. They just would have said we voted for it and they would
believe
that the district was sort of divided in health care and that's one of the
problems that you had a district that was not one way.
I think if you pulled the district it was probably maybe, you know, 5050
but the newspaper had decided they didn't like the, they pulled their
endorsement of Harry basically on one issue, the Republic did because he
agreed with them on every other stance and then, but they turned their
back on him and went with Schweer in the last election and it was about
the health of the editorial, they changed their endorsement but they
changed it. There was only one issue of any substance that Harry disagreed
with that. Uh, uh, there's other, some, some of the finance reform and
banking, uh, uh, you know, I think there was a worry that, uh,
in Scottsdale with the banks and the relative income in there that if you
went too hard on the banks that it would be unpopular in the district. I
don't think I agreed with that. I felt that they needed more oversight.
And, uh, so we went, we went back and forth on issues like that. Um, how
was Harry's style leadership? Was he a hands on manager or did he just
sort of set the tone and, and let you do your own thing or, uh, uh, yeah,
hands on. Wouldn't be accurate. I think, I think he's, he's, uh, more of a
, uh, an issue that presents itself, he might say in general what he
thinks of it, but he also wants the staff to analyze it, put in your two
cents, have a conversation about it. It's better if there is a consensus
among the staff, like everybody feels that this is the right direction and
here's our detailed reasons why if there is disagreement, he wants to hear
, like, replay your argument for me. You give me your views and you give
me yours and then he sort of just soaks it all in and ultimately he goes
like, well, here's what I think I'm going to do on this. Here's what I'm
doing, but he'll want to hear all the various sides of the argument. He's
not someone who wants to just hear what you think he wants to hear. He
wants a warts and all. And then ultimately, he will come to a decision on
that.
Alexis was saying that he liked to think of himself as the mayor of the
district.
He was sort of a mayor at heart and he looked at this is his new city
district five. And I think that was an effective approach. I wouldn't have
counseled him to do anything different. And being a mayor, I think that
Harry Hotel himself was the job that he is most nostalgic about and enjoy
the most. It's a job in which, you know, someone will come to you with a
problem and it might be a pothole or something like that and you can make
one phone call and that afternoon somebody will have fixed that problem.
So there's a sense of satisfaction. There's a sense of being very close to
your constituents. He would run into people at Costco or his usual haunts
and see his constituents all the time. And he wanted to do that as much as
possible as a congressman. There's 700,000 people in our district. And so
it's much more of a challenge, but it was something that was a priority
for him. And it became a part of my job in the district as the eyes and
ears to
even down to little things like scanning the obituaries every day because
there is more than once. The member has to spend five days a week in
Washington DC during the session and come back every weekend. But, you
know, there were colleagues of his or old teachers or professors or people
who were in his life who passed on. And more than once I had to, I see
somebody from Tempe says, Harry, did you know this person? Oh my goodness
. I had heard that and he literally in Washington DC. When you're there,
you're scheduled almost five minute increments. So he's not going to have
time to sit down and write a letter of condolence. And you know, I don't
want you hope I find somebody that might have got a letter of condolence
from Harry Mitchell that was originally drafted by me, but that became a
part of something that I would do to try to write a very well done, very,
very hairy letter of condolence and then he would approve it or make a
couple of changes or I wouldn't say this or that. But he was, you know,
you have to save a member of Congress time like that. And then a lot of
different things like looking through newspaper articles to find, uh you
know, as a mayor, if somebody had had a significant academic achievement
or something like that, as a newspaper, he dashed off a letter to him. He
still wanted that done because that was his style. So there's a lot of
kids out there that would get a personal,
I always wrote things. So I imagine that this would be in a frame for
somebody from the member and there's obvious political benefit to doing
that. But I don't think it was done. He wanted it done because this person
might vote for me. That was just his style from going back decades. A
casework would be important too, helping them out with something they
wanted from the federal government. Or, you know, Harry was very proud of
the, of the, of the case work we did in our office. And I think you're
gonna interview Elizabeth Higgins who was one of our case workers. And,
and it could be any number of things people get stuck in the system. The
federal government is so huge and the bureaucracies can be very dense and
somebody might just lose your piece of paper in your file that proved you
were in Vietnam and got dosed with Agent Orange and suddenly you're not
getting benefits,
things like that. So this is a sad commentary on the bureaucracy. But
sometimes those folks working, there are not going to prioritize that
person even though they've called a million times until a member of
Congress calls them. And then suddenly the light of the fire gets lit and
they try to find this piece of paper that they're missing and they're
messing over this person. Were the people who asked you for help, largely
Democrats or no, they were from across the spectrum there. It was not,
there is not a political aspect to casework. I think that your
expectations should be as a constituent of a member of congress that if
you have an issue that requires groups, casework that the level of service
you get should not vary from office to office, depending on the member's
party or your party. I don't know if that's always true, but that was our
attitude of it. You know, we never asked, we never knew, you know, it was
more about like whether or not we have the ability to help you. And if we
did, we did, we started shaping your image and how people perceived their
congressman, right? This is, I guess they expected this people who seem to
service. Sure. Yeah, they did. So sometimes we were their last resort
though. And so they were very cynical about whether or not they might be
able to be helped. So it was always very satisfactory to finally get some
help from them. Some you tried everything you could and there was still
nothing you could do. And those people, you know, through some very
understandable anger might lash out. Or there's one instance I can think
of, of a gentleman who
thought he owned, he wasn't really the owner of a cabin way out in the
very northern end of our district. It was actually on forest service land.
The forest service was going to repossess the cabin because of a variety
of reasons on which it is safe to say they were on very solid legal ground.
It still doesn't mean this guy wasn't getting kind of, you know, what end
of the stick, but there was nothing we could do. And we tried and he
wasn't even a constituent of ours, but he was very politically active and
had a lot of friends in politics and would consistently threaten to hurt
Harry politically if he didn't get his way. And at the end of the day when
we couldn't help him, even though we have tried and tried and tried, he
cut a campaign video for David Schweiker, you know, and it was a youtube
video and, you know, I don't think it helped David at all. But, but, you
know, he was, he was, you know, he didn't get his way. And so he, you know
, I'm going to try to help you get unelected, you know, he wasn't
satisfied with what we did. So so sometimes it doesn't, you know, it's not
all,
sometimes we fight your best. You had a, it was a, as a journalist, a lot
of contacts with the people in the community, uh businessmen and community
leaders. And I assume this was something that was a positive part of your
meet up when you were hired that, that you had this contact. Yeah, I think
that that was, it was very helpful that those contacts transfer from a
journalistic context to a political context very easily. I found it was
very helpful. So if you were needed to call somebody to maybe
host a town hall or something like that, maybe it was somebody you knew
from having known either me or the congressman, but having some level of
contact with them in the past was always very helpful
groups that did you regularly see? I mean, mayors would come in. I was
thinking of some of Harry's clientele to groups that he knew maybe
environmental union people. We get, we get visits from, from, from labor
organizations. We from environmental organizations. City leaders would
typically, you know, meet one on one like coffee with every once in a
while. He formed a very good relationship with Scott Smith from me.
They'll be glad to tell you about that. I, I was really impressed with
Scott Smith because he reached out to Harry
knowing that Harry had supported his opponent because they were just
really long time friends. But I think Mayor Smith was admired the way that
Harry had run Tempe and just wanted to pick his brain about a couple of
things. So they scheduled a coffee and I was staffing Harry that day. So I
got to sit in on it and they just sort of instantly bonded and he became a
good friend. He's doing town halls with our opponent now. But that's ok.
I'll forgive. Well, that's, uh, yeah, I think so, a brotherhood of mayor.
So that, uh, yeah, I really respected him for, for wanting to reach out
and, and, and he was asking just very, uh, you know, mayoral stuff, you
know, like nuts and bolts, things of what you should do once you get the
office. You know, now I've won this thing. Now what, you know, and Harry
was glad to tell him it's just a personal thing, but the mayors are
interested in what Washington do, aren't they? They were, of course cities
need federal funding for a lot of things. They do, transit, transportation
, parking. And so we had very strong relationships with the cities that
were seeking help from us to secure funding. There is any number of
interest groups in business, just business organizations or business CEO
types who would come into the district to try to schedule time with Harry
if they couldn't get back to DC. So keeping your ear to the ground, you
talk to a lot of people, you went to obituaries
do polling too. No, not from the official side. No, I mean, it wasn't
something that we would do. It's hardly empirical polling. But when we
would send out mailers or frank mail pieces, there would typically be a
little questionnaire that one or two questions on there to get a sense of
the district and how we would read what people wrote on there. Sometimes
there was not a health issue. That was more of a concern you had from the
position of the paper from various elites. And in the context of August
2009, you saw a huge tea party presidents who they were making a lot of
noise. Were they representative of what the district was? It was hard to
tell, but they were outside our office all the time or camping out in our
foyer there,
phone calling and saying very rude things to staff members and interns all
day long. So you knew that that was an extremely contentious issue one way
or the other.
There wasn't a good political move on that. No, Harry's base, the
democrats would have been, their disappointment, would have been palpable.
Plus he wouldn't have agreed. It's not what he wanted to do and
it was the right thing to do. I was very proud of him, proud to have
supported that. And I honestly think that when it's fully online, a lot of
the people who were screaming about it will be the first ones to take
advantage of it. But I, I had a very emotional personal uh, reason that,
that I was going through at the time. Um, it wasn't when the house passed
health care, but when the Senate finally got closer. So you knew that it
was going to pass my son. He was six at the time. He's eight now and had
gotten sick and he was a disease called Kawasaki's Disease. It's a rare
lymphatic
disorder. They don't really know how, how it comes about, but he was
hospitalized for nine days. And so when they took that culture vote, I was
in the hospital with him and I was researching Kawasaki's disease and he
would, he would be tagged with a pre existing condition for the rest of
his life with this disease, even though he's recovered and he has no after
effects. The fact that he had it would give him a pre existing condition
and it really burned me that an insurance company, some actuary or some
bureaucrat in an insurance company could decide for my son the course of
his life, what kind of career he could have, what kind of, what he could
do as an adult when he's six years old, he didn't do anything wrong. And
so I had a really strong emotional reaction to that to this day. We, yeah
, we my sleeve them fight anybody that thinks it was the wrong thing to do.
Yeah. Yeah, that Harry had that kind of commitment too. Some of the
issues that may have been popular in his district, like the veterans stand
, which I think he sort of adopted once he got out there, he sort of, it
wasn't something he campaigned on that. It was something that, you know, I
didn't time you were there. He had already established, right. He had been
appointed to the Veterans Committee. He asked to be on it because of the
heavy veterans presence in the district was not a military veteran, but he
became very passionate about that issue. And it was a good, it was a good
issue too for the district. Sure. There's 65,000 veterans in district five
and a lot of them are retirees or young people, a good mix of people. And
yeah, so it was, it was quite a good issue and Harry was very committed to
it and you could see that through his sponsorship and passage of the G I
Bill, which I think is going to be transformative for veterans and for the
economy. If we can help dig ourselves out of this, the G I Bill is going
to transform a lot of people's lives, people who join the army, probably
with no prospects of seeing themselves in a higher education environment
or in a professional environment. And they come out of that and they take
that maturity and military experience and maybe some serious technical
skills that they picked up in the military add to that, a degree or
technical training, something like that. That person is much more able to
cope with the new economy than just a veteran who didn't get an education.
And well, he got on. But then you had the health care and then he had the
, uh, well, uh, congressional pay raises was another good shot, I would
think in the district. Yeah. Yeah, it was very, feel good issue, uh, to,
you know, and, and it was an easy one for Harry because Harry was retired
when he got the job, you know. So, you know, it, it was nice. It was a
nice to, uh, to be making a congressional salary. There's never anything
he banked on or prepared for, you know, and, and I think there might be
some members who are, like, what are you doing, Mitchell? I got you, I got
three kids, you know. But, but it is hard though. It was a, it was a very
good issue in that you had to be, it was good to be, I guess, to play down
the fact that you're a democrat or at least play up the fact that you, a
blue dog, democrat or an independent democrat. It was a populist issue. It
was one, he, he felt pretty strongly about, you know, and, and, uh, and,
and it was helpful in 2008, you know, uh, in 2010 there, there was no help
to be had. But being a, but if you looked around the district, what would
you, what would you say for the ideal candidate? He had been a fiscal
conservative.
You can afford to be pro choice because I think Scott still is like a
nature preserve for the rare moderate republicans are increasingly rare.
So, you know, there's pro choice women were always very supportive of
Harry. But you couldn't be a, a spendaholic type of person. You had to be
very fiscally frugal, fiscally conservative.
You had to be pro education. We have a university, we have high tech
businesses. So you couldn't be perceived as business friendly and he
really wasn't because he was a mayor. He had been a part of huge economic
development pushes as a mayor came very naturally to him. So it wasn't, it
wasn't like he had to like, well, I wish I could be against, you know,
what are the issues that you would have as apr guy trying to most
difficult, trying to handle that. Like the health care was 1
70 70 was, was, was tough because, you know, Harry's immigration where he
was on immigration, there was very little daylight between him and in most
Republicans, he was for a very strong presence at the border and helped
support. There wasn't anything that came before Congress that added
resources to the border that he voted against, but 1070 became a litmus
test. And if you weren't absolutely for it. And think it was the best idea
in the world then you were defined as soft on immigration, despite
whatever your record was. And Harry had a pretty nuanced stance about it
where it was essentially like, I wasn't in the legislature. I didn't pass
it if it's, now it's the law, I suppose that if it will help light a fire
under the federal government to do its job because it really is the
federal government's job, then it's a good thing and people are like, well
then it's against it.
They heard whatever they wanted to hear that and it was never good. Either
side to be delicate in the way you phrased it too. So very careful. But,
but, you know, either both sides, both sides managed to hear what they uh
what they want, most disliked about it. Because after that, uh you know,
he, he gave that statement is, this is the way I feel about it. You know,
we're gonna have to live with it. Maybe it will get the federal government
to do it. So it's not, it's not a bad thing. And we were at a uh we were
speaking, he was speaking at a, at an event with uh Latino high school
kids who were here on campus at risk, kids who had potential when they
were being shown in a university environment. Their keynote speaker at the
end of this process was going to be Harry and Ed pastor and we're standing
outside and Ed pastor rolls up on a golf cart. It's like Mitchell let my
people go. You know. So he had heard the exact opposite of somebody else
and, you know, he looked in that same statement and I was like, you know,
like what happened, you know. No, you didn't draft that statement, did you
? I did not, I don't think, I don't, you know, I probably played around
with it some, but no, I think that that was more, uh, uh, I probably came
out of DC but I, you know, I have to in, for a penny in, for a pound. I'm
not running from it. That's just where he was. Harry. Harry was, at the
time we met him was a seasoned politician who had, had an image and had a
style and, and, uh, was he a pretty good guy to handle? He didn't make a
lot of mistakes, did he or did you have to follow up on misstatements or
policy? I, I never had to make a phone call. Like I used to get as a
reporter with, uh, like Governor Hall where, you know, Franci noise calls
up and says, yeah, what the governor meant to say. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Right. Yeah, I know. He, he, he was, he was always on message and knew
what he wanted to say and he handled himself well, but he's
that sort of down to earth quality. He's a terrific one on one
communicator. So if you sit down and over a beer with Harry Mitchell, you
, you can't help but come away liking him and wanting to help him and
support him in any way in front of large crowds.
I'm not saying that he's a bad speaker. He's a good speaker, but he, he's
no Barack Obama. He's not someone who electrifies a large room. So I was
trying to write speeches for that and try to, because more and more people
wanted to see you had to speak in front of some very large crowds,
commencement and things like that. But for someone who was in elected
public office since 1974
I don't think his speaking child had really changed and wasn't going to
now just because I wanted him to know when you write a speech, did you try
to write something? You know, he would like to say, get that style down
and to mimic what his cadence would be and use his terms of phrase or to
leave a marker in there
because Harry is at his best as a speaker. When he's relaying in anecdotes
, he communicates and speaks in anecdotes stories that, that illustrate a
point from his life and all his experiences. And so sometimes you would
just queue up like your story about
being at the bottom of the Po Toto Pole as a school teacher. And at the
mayor after lunch would work here in the setting have to write a story for
him. I just had to tell that story and then he's communicating, looking at
the audience and he's just telling, memory is always better than anything
you could write as a speech when he was just speaking from the heart.
So he looks friendly open.
I don't know. It seems like a style like that goes pretty well in Arizona.
Oh, sure. People approach him all the time. You walk through Costco with
them and people would just come up and like Harry, you know, and people
maybe never met him. I just recognize him from a TV ad or something like
that. He's extremely gracious to people and loves just chatting with folks.
Was he media savvy too? Did he pick that up from you or did you work that
through for him? I don't think that he had too much to learn from me. I
think he was good speaking to TV, reporters and things like that. It was
just more of
maybe run them through a mock interview or have a sense of what this
reporter might be trying to get from the story based on any information
they gave me. But he was always pretty smooth, I thought, and the media
was fairly
polite, sensitive. He got along with the media pretty well. He did. There
were maybe a couple of exceptions to that and it was based on things that
, you know, something a reporter might have done years before my time, you
know, and I always counseling, I got to forgive and forget. You know, you
don't want a reporter to think that, you know, you don't want to deal with
them because, you know, that you, that you ever, that they ever got under
your skin in any way. So that was very few and far between mostly,
uh, who could work and deal with anybody. But you had never before you
joined the staff, a political campaign or part of a political campaign. I
guess it's a continuous political campaign. Once I had not, I had uh I had
criticized many of them from afar.
You come out even more cynical or critical. No, I came out with immense
respect for the people who do that. Everybody thinks that they can be a
political adviser and, you know, I just want to be a strategist on a
campaign. They have no idea what they're talking about. There are, there
are people who run congressional campaigns who really are political
scientists. They look at data and spreadsheets and voter models and they
will analyze this and find out where your path to victory is and which
voters you need to get and how to get them and how much marry with how
much money your campaign is bringing in and decide what kind of messages
you can put out there. I can never be that person. It is a skill that is
rare and it's a great commodity and people think that they can do it and
they can't. So we had some very good people on our campaign, Reid Adamson
and Seth Scott. In the first campaign, Alexis is like that. She's very
good at these things. It's not my, it's not my swim lane.
You're more into the speech writing and the message, you know. Yeah, the
back and forth between you had outreach groups that you were trying to get
to you in the district, right? People who are working with senior citizen
or with youth or you have targets that you tried to, I don't know that
they were defined the way you just said, but you absolutely had targeted
groups, whether it was seniors, whether it was geographic targets, we knew
in our district where our support was and where we needed to do a better
job. So in, in, on the official side, you know, which is not, you know, on
the campaign I only ever volunteered. I was always the district director
and I put in a day there and focused on that job. But you certainly uh
tried to have Harry Tempe may have felt neglected at times because we
didn't have a problem in Tempe. So when we were doing district events and
congress on your corners and things like that, we tried to put them in
areas where support was naturally soft or where we need people who didn't
know Harry Mitchell, he wasn't their mayor nor Scottsdale. Awai and Tempe
is, you're not helping things politically to just do stuff in Tempe
because it's very much a comfort zone for Harry had to take him out of his
comfort zone to the parts of the district that, that maybe didn't support
him. I don't know how well you were funded, but if you had more money
would you have done that? You didn't get to do enough of the, on the
campaign television ads? It's what it comes down to. I think up until the
last few weeks of the campaign was tied. We were inter polling, had him up
one or two points and then tied in the last four or five days of the game.
You saw huge amounts of money from people like the club for growth. These
corporate
citizens united type of organizations
that
are the ie that were spent on our behalf were not nearly as significant
and I know people was a saturation point, but the dominoes really tipped
in the last several days of the election where I think independents who
might have been sitting on the fence or Republicans who had supported
Harry in the past just decided like we need a change
and it all fell. We were right there in the game very far into this
election. I don't know if a lot of people know that, but we really were
our polls. We had great polling and it was a ball game.
They scored a couple touchdowns and it was over, he was the guy you beat
two years earlier. So that I think something changed and it probably was a
move in the country, or at least in the, it was the country. If we could
have made it a district race,
it was a nationalized race. It was a referendum on the Democrats and on
the president and on the economy. And that was the killer. I tell people
that as a strategist, if I could have thought of a strategy that would
have taken the national unemployment rate down to 7% I would have
suggested it and that would have helped. But I think that all those things
in Arizona, you also had immigration and other things like that that were
not helpful. It was going to be a wipe out reading somewhere that you said
when you got the job and I look forward to working for him for years to
come and I suspect that that's still true though. Remarks you're still
working. Yeah. Yeah. But I think you were thinking maybe this, maybe he
would be around, you get paid for years to come. But, uh, but no, but you
know, the worker for the, for the Mitchell family is a joker. That's a
little like the mob. You know, no one gets out alive.
There's no violence but
he's the type of person who you want to be friends with the rest of your
life. You want to help and who will help you, who will do anything for any
of us. And so I predict that this group of people I worked with in the
missile will be friends for the rest of my life. And what do you do? You
think that uh maybe you'll get back together again under another, another
candidate or Mark Mitchell from May? Perhaps
I can see that. I pretty sure that's gonna happen and I'm sure that, that
he will succeed. He's one of my former students that has that going for
him and he's got that. I don't know if that's a positive or not. But, uh,
uh, yes. So there is quite a, I get that same kind of sentiment from the
other people I've been talking to. Uh, is that what, what do you miss most
about the, the job now that it's gone? I think I miss my co workers seeing
them on a daily basis and having this challenge, what I really liked about
journalism for all those years was like I said, I had a short attention
span and you never knew what was going to come walking through the door.
You could plan for some things, but it was really just a reaction to what
was going on in the world. I liked that. It was an adrenaline rush. Well,
being a district director for a congressman in a district, like this is
not all that different. I found you, you are planning things out and you
have things in the head, but there's surprises to walk in every single day
of something that's going on in DC or something happens in the district
that you have to react to. And it was, it was a great test of your skills
all the time and, and you were constantly adding new skills because I
didn't, I had never supervised staff before. I've never been put in charge
of anything.
I had never organized large events. And so I was just always learning. So
it was a good mix of skills I already had and a constant learning process
and adding on things and finding out you could do things you didn't think
you could do. And so I really miss that being sure that that's what it's
going to be like every single day about Harry, I think his legacy is on
there. What was the accomplishments there? Well, I think the G I Bill is
something that's going to be significant. And Senator Webb and Harry
Mitchell were the quarterbacks of that. So I think he has a very
significant piece of legislation. I think that he was the best friend that
veterans in the Western United States had in Congress. They have not
forgotten. They remember Harry for a long time, I think that people
will look back with nostalgia on his style because politics is getting
very, very rough and very, very divided and very angry. And Harry never
got into politics because he had an ax to gore. He got in, out of a sense
of public service. His grandfather had been in the legislature.
He majored in political science, he wanted to serve his community. So he
didn't come in with an agenda. He just had a desire to help and he took
that all the way to Congress. And I think that he found that there are
very few other people who got there that way. So he was a little
disillusioned by some of the things he saw there and he would have to ask
him that. But, but I think he was from that sense, maybe an odd duck like
Mr Smith, you know, people joke about that and the critics of them want to
think that there is some cynicism to that, but there really wasn't.