This is the first in a series of interviews with exiting presidential candidates.

© National Journal Group Inc.
Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007

“[Running for president] lets you understand the country better, understand people and their plights in different places better, and broadens your perspective when you're looking at the issues nationwide.” — Sam Brownback

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback (R) entered the presidential race in January 2007 with a strong pro-life record that would have seemingly made him the perfect candidate for the social conservatives who were so influential in both the 2000 and 2004 elections. But his candidacy never caught fire among the party's base, and amid fundraising woes, he withdrew in October.

In the first interview of an ongoing series with former presidential candidates, Brownback sat down with NationalJournal.com's Jessica Taylor to talk about his time on the trail, why he decided to endorse Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his plans for the Senate and beyond. Edited excerpts follow.

Brownback: My wife and I and my family spent a lot of time talking about it, and at the end of the day we really felt like I had a message to put forward, that I was well-positioned, uniquely positioned, we thought, to put forward that message, and it'd be wrong not to. It was a message really about rebuilding the family and renewing the country. These are issues I'd worked on a lot, issues I believed in, issues I felt salient to the future of the nation and that's what ultimately pushed us on over.

Q: Do you think you were successful in steering the debate toward pro-life and pro-family issues?

Brownback: I do, although that's so hard to measure and to really know. It's a big, noisy democracy that we have. Running for president is a great platform to speak into that. But [Abraham] Lincoln believed that you move the nation by establishing a common thought. And the establishment of common thought frequently comes through the discussion of it.

So I think we helped, although I don't think there's any way you can measure that. I'm gratified that others have picked up some of our issue ideas -- the optional flat tax I talked about a lot on the trail, and the other candidates are pushing that at this point in time. Pro-life issues, we obviously pushed a great deal. We've had several other of the issues that we've put forward out there -- the base-closing commission for the rest of federal spending, and other candidates are pushing that concept. You don't know if they got it here or somewhere else, but I'm happy that the ideas are still being discussed.

Q: So were fundraising issues the main reason why you eventually had to end your candidacy?

Brownback: Yeah, at the end there we ran out of money. We got third in the Ames, Iowa straw poll, and that's normally a qualifier. Most people would say top three of that is what qualifies you and moves you on forward. And initially for the first month after that, everything went fine. Fundraising continued, people said, "Yeah, all right, it looks pretty good." And then, the [Mike] Huckabee jump really started to grab ahold and people said, "We have room for one candidate like this, not two." And our fundraising really started tailing off at that point in time, so we just weren't able to continue.

Q: Huckabee's support seems to be coalescing around the socially conservative base that was your key constituency. Does it make you wish you were still able to be in the race?

Brownback: Well, we saw this play all along. We thought this play was out there to be had and done. And now that it's happened, people that we'd worked with said, "This is the play I was talking about; this play exists," to be able to make it happen. But, I think, too, there was room for one of us to make it and not two. We were both fishing out of the same pond.

I wish him all the best. I'm delighted to see the strength of that set of issues and group that's moving forward and coalescing. Yeah, I do wish I was still out there, but I think it would dissipate primarily from him and probably from the issues, and at the end of the day, there really was only room for one to run that kind of candidacy.

Q: Looking back, is there anything you wish you'd done differently?

Brownback: Been funnier -- would have been helpful. They're mostly minor issues. I wish we hadn't had the immigration debate during most of my candidacy. Immigration was the lead issue on the floor three separate times while we were running late last year, middle-late last year, when things were really getting kind of geared up. And then it was brought up twice this year on the Senate floor. And it just was a difficult issue for me.

You look back on some of the debates and I wish I'd been playing more on offense instead of defense, but I don't think it was a deal breaker.

Q: What are some of your favorite memories from the campaign trail?

Brownback: One of my favorite ones is right before the first debate in Simi Valley, the Reagan Library. There are media trucks all around, big buildup to this being the first debate. Nancy Reagan's there, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's a gorgeous setting.

I'm a first-time presidential candidate, and this is the first debate. It's kind of a jittery season, although I didn't have that, and I was very thankful I didn't. And just ahead of the debate, they cleared the room out. It was just my wife and I there. I remember looking over at her and seeing her as my young bride -- we've been married 25 years -- but I saw her as my young bride, and both of us looking at each other: "Can you believe we're here?"

And yet, it didn't seem all that strange. The God we serve does great things, so that somebody that's the son of a farmer can run for president of the United States. It's just not that extraordinary. But you think about it, and it really is an extraordinary thing -- that anybody in this country can aspire to run for president and be president and actually do it.

Q: You and Sen. Joseph Biden held a joint appearance in Iowa during the campaign to talk about the Iraq partition plan you both sponsored. Do you think this helped begin some of the talk about a bipartisan consensus on Iraq?

Brownback: I think it did, but I think it's also a guide to where the country wants to go. The country wants to see the government work for them. We have been in a particularly difficult and partisan season. I think that the country's hungry to see the government work for them. That event, I think, was a novelty, but it also was on a big topic. People are saying, "That's what I want to see taking place. People working together to get something done that's significant."

And I would think some of the other presidential candidates would look at that and say, that should tell them something about where the country is right now. You can find these zones of things people can work together on to get things done. And I think the candidate that can legitimately tap into that is going to have a leg up in the race.

Brownback: A little bit. I felt like the prettiest girl in school, and it was prom season. It was a little surprising.

Brownback: It was a very good meeting, a very engaging gentleman. I thought their campaign particularly played it well. I said I'll meet with anybody that wants to meet with me, and they were on it. And then I got a lot of pushback from people saying, "You're not going to endorse Rudy Giuliani, are you?" And I didn't, obviously.

But we had a very engaging meeting, and I ended the meeting with one of the press people saying, "Can you support and endorse a pro-choice candidate?" And I said "I don't know that Mayor Giuliani would describe himself as a pro-choice candidate." And I turned to the mayor, and he told me he was against federal funding of abortion, he would appoint strict constructionists to the judiciary -- a number of things that wouldn't be seen as a pro-choice position, particularly relative to Democrat pro-choice candidates. And he didn't say one way or another, but to me, that was one of the striking pieces of the conversation -- the number of issues we agreed upon on the narrow, specific issues surrounding the right-to-life issue.

Brownback: I looked and I thought about all the candidates a lot. I prayed about it, and for me it really came down to Mike Huckabee and John McCain. But I really felt that John was the one that could best compete and win ultimately in the fall of 2008.

I think he's the most qualified person running now, ready to be president. He's ready to be commander in chief. He has foreign policy experience. He's a budget hawk, has been for a long time. He has a 20-year pro-life voting record. And he can perform in swing states. He can win in Florida. He can win in Missouri. He can win in Ohio. And we've got to have somebody that can perform in those states. So that's why it came down to John for me.

Brownback: I've been traveling in Iowa for him. I've made a couple of trips to Iowa, spent a couple of days each time....

Primarily in Iowa, I'm just asking people to just give him a second look. I think a lot of people have heard of John and have just looked over him. This guy's a legitimate war hero, the most qualified person to be president. He's ideologically acceptable; he's electable. And I think those are the two doors our candidate has to get through.

Brownback: I think so, but that's not the reason I ran. But I think it will. It made me a better man, and I think a better person -- I think a better legislator, too. It lets you understand the country better, understand people and their plights in different places better, and broadens your perspective when you're looking at the issues nationwide. I recommend to my colleagues that everybody run for president at least once. It's a great experience.

Brownback: We've got several we're working on right now. Some of them are bills and some of them are just really getting dialogues started.

I want to get a dialogue going between faith and science -- a very high-level dialogue going. Because these are two pillar institutions in our culture and in the world today, and they're far too combative when there's far more commonality that's there. And they each ask different questions. Faith asks why, and science asks how. And they don't conflict. I'm paraphrasing, but I believe it was Galileo who said, they can't conflict because the author is the same -- for nature or for faith. God's the author. So we've started making contact with some key people in the science community and the faith community about starting this dialogue, and maybe we start it around the topic of the environment. We'll see where we can go, but that's one.

I really want to work on us engaging Africa as a continent. I think it's really a continent that's in play -- a huge amount of humanitarian suffering -- but there's also a huge influx of militant Islamists and a huge push coming into it by China. And we really need to get there and work with the best of intentions, the goodness of our heart, to head off what I think could be some huge problems if we don't get there and get really actively involved.

And I'm going to be working some on Middle East issues, again, that I have in the past, and talking about a two-state solution. But the second state is Jordan, not the Palestinian Authority, because they just have not shown an ability to govern. I know it's going to be contrary to some of Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice's pushes, but it just makes a lot more sense on a practical basis.

Brownback: I haven't given it much thought. I haven't ruled it out, but I just haven't decided. Right now I'm focused on what I can do here in serving the people of Kansas and what I can do in helping out in the presidential race.