Q: Perhaps this fall then that's particularly relevant because you don't want to fight the last war, you don't want to slash and burn if this is a year where people don't want to slash and burn.

GREENFIELD: Exactly, so...But as to consultants being overrated, my feeling, the line I had said to David Garth which I said should have put in bronze over our office door, is one of the last lines from Little Big Man, where the old Indian Chief Dan George lies down to be taken into heaven and the next level, and he puts on all the traditional garb and he says the magic words, then he just lies there for a second, and nothing happens. And he gets up and he says, "Well, you know, sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't." And I think that's a slogan every consultant should use.

It is fundamentally: "The candidate is the message." And in fact, candidates who say to a consultant "You design my message for me" are really asking for trouble. There's an innate way that voters have of picking that out. I don't mean that voters always make the right decision, but they generally are going for something that at the core of a campaign is real.


Q: David Broder made the comment recently that one of the problems with modern campaigns is that politics is no longer about who would govern best, it's just about winning. And that's what consultants foster. Do you share that opinion?

GREENFIELD: I think it's true. I think that's been true for a very long time. It's something that's been said about American politics for a long time. The skills required to be elected are not the skills required to govern.

Now I would only dissent from brother Broder for whom I have enormous respect, in that sometimes, in this modern age, they're not necessarily in contradiction. The skills that made Ronald Reagan a very successful politician may have, for the most of his presidency at a time when people had thought the presidency had ceased to be a workable office, made him a pretty effective president.

If you're judging by the effectiveness of how he got done what he wanted to do, Ronald Reagan was a pretty effective president. And it was in part, because of what he brought to the campaign which was not simply a good smile and an effective communication skill, but a very strong set of fundamental, ideological beliefs. And it always helps, it seems to me, in governing in office, that you have them. They may not be required, but they help. So with that caveat, it is true that campaigns today are much less about governing.

They are also much less about governing because they are not party-based. Every candidate for Senate and House and governorship and even the presidency now is a free agent. You just define yourself, you don't define yourself in the context of a party program that you are going to help get enacted. So that's always been true. That's always been a difference in American and European politics but boy now, it's big time.


Q: On the other hand though does how someone campaigns still tell you something about who they are and how they would govern even if they might require somewhat separate skills? Can you learn something by the ads they run?

GREENFIELD: Well, I believe that even in this day and age of extremely tightly run campaigns you can learn something about them. You can learn how much respect they have for you. I realize I have perhaps an oddball way of looking at this but I think a candidate who acknowledges complexity even in the context of a campaign, if not the thirty second ad, tells me something. I think the candidate who acknowledges a mistake is telling me something. I think a candidate who is speaking in nothing but cliches and manufactured words is telling me something.

The ones that I have a lot of respect for are the ones who you just know are their own person and therefore will not do what the consultants say. That's part of that media literacy, I think.


Q: So, in the end do you feel that ads don't really turn people off so much as this sense that politics and government in general is perhaps less crucial?

GREENFIELD: There is less interest in politics than there has been in a long time. Voter turnout in '96 was the lowest since 1924. We'll probably have the lowest Congressional turnout this fall, maybe ever. It has much more to do with the broader political landscape than with the presence of ads. It has much more to do with the fact that the great stirring issues that have been around, really from the rise of Hitler on, maybe before that, do not seem to be present. There doesn't seem to be among most people a passionate yearning for politicians to do something.

There's another factor which is those folks who you could argue are most in need of government resources, that is the least affluent among us, the poorest, have just dropped out of the political process. I don't mean totally, but to a startling degree.

If you want to know why politicians don't give a rat's hindquarters about poor people, it's that the poor people don't contribute to campaigns is that they don't vote.


Q: And they're not going to aim ads towards them?

GREENFIELD: Assuming you have something to say to them, how do you turn around that decades-long pattern of less and less voting on the parts of those who are the least well-off.
I would add that both the way the politicians talk and the way the journalists cover them has not suggested to a lot of people that there is much at stake.


Q: So, in the end should ads not be vilified?

GREENFIELD: There's an old song "She's More to Be Pitied than Censured." I would amend that and say with political ads, they are more to be studied than censured.


Q: And if we study them, what do we learn?

GREENFIELD: What I mean is that dishonest speech is not the product of 30-second commercials. Dishonest speech can be five-hour speeches in the town plaza, it can be statements at Congressional hearings, it can be press releases and spin, it can be phony policy proposals. Ads are part of that broader culture.

What makes ads more egregious is, first of all, we all see them. They literally come into our homes unbidden. And the length they are--30 seconds--they're more susceptible to being really blatantly manipulative and dishonest.

But I think to point the finger at ads, paid television ads as the source of whatever discontent we have with politics is missing the point.


Q: Kathleen Hall Jamieson argues that you actually can learn more from ads from the news. If she had to choose, she'd rather have people watch ads.

GREENFIELD: Part of that is a measure of how badly television covers politics. Given the choice between non-existent coverage of politics on news and a series of political ads that sort of define a debate, you probably do pick up more. That's also a message to broadcast journalists and Cable-TV news journalists that maybe we ought to pick the pace of what we do.


Q: And what would that entail?

GREENFIELD: Basically what any good journalism is. Trying to figure out, even in this time, what difference it makes who's elected, what these people bring to the campaigns, how serious they are as policy-makers.


Q: Would you argue that it still does matter despite the lack of great burning issues?

GREENFIELD: Sure. It matters for two reasons. One, these are still the folks that decide basic public policy. And second, you don't ever know when it's going to matter a whole lot, so for precautionary reasons it would be good to have more sensible and thoughtful folks running things than blathering idiots.


Q: A big burning issue just might rear its head?

GREENFIELD: You just don't know. When I say that there's not much on the horizon now, this is not a prediction. If I'd been sitting here in 1927, assuming we had this device, I'd probably be making the same point.

The biggest social issues then would've been Prohibition and immigration, instead of gay rights and abortion and affirmative action. But would I have had the wit to see what was going bubbling under the stock market? Winston Churchill said, "We need to humble about what we know because we have much to be humble about."


Q: What would you like to not see in ads? What scenes could you do without?

GREENFIELD: Oh, God, we don't have the time. I don't want to see a guy tousling the hair of his son or her son. I don't want to see a dog bounding into the family room on cue unless the dog inflicts grievous bodily injury on one of the people in the ad. I don't want to see a candidate and spouse soulfully walking by the riverfront. There's a case where I think any viewer, particularly over the age of four and under the age of ninety so that they're used to television, will know full well that this is a stupid, staged, phony ad.

I have no problem with a candidate for office sitting down, either talking to people and letting me see that conversation going on or looking into that camera and saying to me "Folks, here's what I plan to do."

I don't have a problem with biography ads which tell me something about where this candidate is coming from. But every time I see one of those ads with the loving family--show me a picture of the kids and then stop--enough, you know. The kid doesn't want to be there anyway, and the dog was probably rented. I would like to see them just stop that.


Q: And what would you like to see but may not?

GREENFIELD: I would honestly, this may sound odd to you, I think Ross Perot's 1992 ads were the most encouraging ads that I've seen in the last twenty years. He bought 30 minutes. He said, "If you really care about the deficit, how we fund this government, you're going to listen to me." He used the most low-tech devices imaginable, you know those plastic pie charts like if you were selling plumbing supplies to a local educational district in LaCrosse, and he talked to us!

That's what I want to see whether it's five-minute chunks or thirty chunks, I want to see somebody say, "Folks, here's what this is about." I happen to think that talking heads are some of the most impressive television around. I don't want to see, here's something else, I don't want to see prison doors slammed shut with the audio laid in, that "Chung!" that I think Nelson Rockefeller started back in 1970. I mean, you know, it's not enough that this poor slob is going to jail, we have to see possibly the candidate himself slamming the cell door shut with that, with that Dolby sound, metallic, forever, "You're dead" thing. I'd like not to see that.

I'd like to hear a politician talk about some of the complexities of about making a decision. "You want to hear from me that I'm going to reduce class size. Well, are you willing to pay a higher property tax for me to do that, or are you willing to pay a higher state income tax? Should we reduce your class size and not the class size of some kid in the inner city where there's 38 kids in a room and the paint's peeling. What's fair here? That's how I have to decide."


Q: So the "how," not just the platform.

GREENFIELD: And also then, say, "Here's some things I believe that you may not," and just lay it out. "Here's what I think about abortion, but you know what, this is a phony issue, you want to know why? Because the Supreme Court ain't changing its mind on Roe vs. Wade. And anybody running for office that tells you that they're going to be the one who either protects or ends the right to an abortion--they're kidding you." I'd love to hear an ad like that.


Q: Will you?

GREENFIELD: I ain't holding my breath.