LESLEY: I have a friend who thinks that Tiger Woods has had an impact on the campaign.

GAIL: Well, you know, I was talking to somebody else the other day who thought that Tiger Woods was a really important marker. As a non-golf person, I’m not sure that I can go very far on that one.

LESLEY: Well, I will tell you this: If Tiger Woods is not playing, then the television ratings for golf just don’t exist. And if he is playing, they get a nice rating.

GAIL: I’ve never understood why there are any television ratings for golf to begin with. Can’t help you on that one.

LESLEY: This is out of your area of expertise.

GAIL: Totally.

LESLEY: Let’s talk about you. You’ve been a reporter, a columnist and then you ran the editorial page at the The New York Times. Did you like managing? Or do you prefer writing and expressing your opinions?

GAIL: I once did the great, great, great, great distant beyond –- I ran a news service that I started in Connecticut. But other than that, I’d never been a manager in my entire life and I had never actually thought much about it when the possibility of running the editorial page came up when Howell Raines left. And it was just the kind of job you would have to be a complete, utter maniac not to want to take. And frankly, if you’re going to have to manage, it’s the best place in the world.

LESLEY: Why do you say that –- you’d be an idiot not to take it?

GAIL: Oh, gosh, I mean, first of all it’s … it’s just this sort of ideal place in many ways. I mean, it’s a fairly small … it’s a big staff compared to any other opinion place, almost in the world.

LESLEY: How many did you have?

GAIL: I had about 65 or 70.

LESLEY: Really?

GAIL: Yeah. And that’s compared to Bill Keller, you know, has a thousand-odd people downstairs working on the news —

LESLEY: He’s running the —

GAIL: The news side of the —

LESLEY: The news side. Sixty-five people on the editorial staff?

GAIL: Yeah. There’s a good sized op-ed staff that handles the outside contributors. There’s the letters-to-the-editor staff who handle -– I think they get about 500 to 1000 letters a day, from which they choose, you know, some to put in the paper. And the editorial board which is, I think, about 18 full and part-time people who write the editorials. And then there’s a news staff that does all the web work, which is becoming a bigger thing. And then there are the columnists. And we used to have the IHT -– the International Herald Tribune’s editorial page, too, which we —

LESLEY: And you were over all of that?

GAIL: Yeah. So it —

LESLEY: Why would you be an idiot not to want the job?

GAIL: Oh, it’s so fascinating. And it’s, frankly, for a thing to manage, it’s a fairly small staff. And for a thing that has that many fun things to do. And the people you work with are so incredibly smart. And it’s also interestingly a place in which … the people who come there in many, many, many cases are coming there for the kind of the culminating part of their careers. And you have little of the kind of politics and jockeying for position stuff that you have in any normal organization. And the people – they are so wicked smart, all of them, that they’re just pleasures to work with. And the stuff that you do is so interesting.