Doug Bailey, G.O.P. Political Consultant, Dies at 79 Doug Bailey, who helped define the expanding role of political consultants in the 1960s and "70s and later founded The Hotline, a digest of political news, distributed by fax, that became an indispensable tool of the political trade in the pre-Web 1980s and "90s, died on Monday at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 79. Mr. Bailey, who had health problems in recent years, was working at home on several projects when he died, apparently in his sleep, said his daughter, Kate Bailey. His consulting firm, Bailey Deardourff & Associates, which he started in 1967 with a fellow political hand, John Deardourff, worked mainly for moderate Republican candidates like Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York and Senator Charles H. Percy of Illinois. At one point in the late 1970s, the firm had 11 of the country's 19 Republican governors as clients. Its work on behalf of President Gerald R. Ford's campaign in 1976 against Jimmy Carter, then a former Georgia governor, was widely credited with helping to narrow Mr. Ford's deficit of much as 20 points in the polls - most of it attributed to his pardon of President Richard M. Nixon for his role in Watergate - to 2 points by Election Day. The firm made some commercials featuring ordinary Americans questioning Mr. Carter's lack of national experience, and others focused on Mr. Ford's likability and long government service, all to the tune of a campaign song, "I'm Feeling Good About America." "We said to ourselves, what the country knows about Gerald Ford is that he pardoned Nixon," Mr. Bailey told The New York Times. Let's tell them more, let's give them a view of Jerry Ford the man that's upbeat. Mr. Deardourff died in 2004 at 71. Mr. Bailey, who had grown dismayed by the polarization of national campaigns in the 1980s, started The Hotline in 1987 partly as an experiment in bipartisanship, he said. With the Democratic strategist Roger Craver as his partner, he sought to expose the professional political class to a broad range of issues across the ideological spectrum. Mr. Bailey told interviewers that in The Hotline's first year, potential subscribers asked three main questions: "You're going to do what?" You want me to pay you how much? And "What's a fax?" The Hotline's 500 or so paying subscribers - among them politicians, pundits, political operatives and Congressional staff members - received an exhaustive aggregation of information at 11:30 each morning, including news about state and local election campaigns and grass-roots trends like tax revolts, term-limit drives and environmental initiatives. It also offered a roundup of political jokes from the previous night's talk-show monologues. Before "The Daily Show," The Hotline was one of the most prodigious purveyors of political humor in the country. "That's part of political communication these days," Mr. Bailey said, presciently, in a 1991 interview with The Washington Post. As a practical matter, if you want to know where the people are, their views come from television, and more from programs that don't try to influence them directly, such as the late-night monologues. The Hotline, which was bought by The National Journal in 1996 and is part of its Web site, became a training ground for political reporters, including Chuck Todd of NBC and Norah O'Donnell of CBS. Its currency has been somewhat devalued in the past decade by free political sites like Politico and Talking Points Memo, whose creators acknowledge The Hotline in their lineage. Douglas Lansford Bailey was born on Oct. 5, 1933, in Cleveland to Walter and Marion Bailey. His father ran a manufacturing company. After receiving a bachelor's degree from Colgate University, Mr. Bailey received his master's and doctorate degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. Besides his daughter, Mr. Bailey is survived by his wife, Patricia, a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission from 1979 to 1988; his son, Ed; two brothers, Robert and Richard; and a grandson. In 1999, again with Mr. Craver, Mr. Bailey founded the Freedom Channel, which offers politically oriented video online on demand. In 2006, Mr. Bailey joined with the Democratic political consultants Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon in founding a political reform organization, Unity08. It suspended its activities in 2008 after a failed effort to draft Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York to run for president. "The two-party system has worked well for 200 years and can continue to do so," Mr. Bailey said at the time, "but only when elections are fought over the middle. Our goal is to jolt the two parties into recognizing this, by drawing them into a fight over the middle rather than allowing them to keep maximizing the appeal to their bases at the extremes. Asked in another interview about politics today, Mr. Bailey said, "Candidates listen too much to consultants because they're driven by winning and money."