Q: I want to return to this question of polling just a bit more. To what extent, are commercials more about us, more about the viewer, than they are about the candidate?

SQUIER: Well, in their best form, I think spots about both the candidate and the viewer. You'll find people in my business tend to use this word "viewer" and "voter" almost interchangeably. But I think that's true because what you want to do is be talking to voters about something they really care about.

If you ask them what's the issue they care about most, any issue, and they come back and say as they did in the 70s, "Jobs," and you say, "Okay, I understand that." And if I'd asked you that in our dialogue, you know, "What do you care about?" and you said, "Jobs," I would come back and say, "Well, let me tell you a little about porkbellies," you'd think I was nuts. That's an exaggeration, but that's how this transaction works. If you care about jobs and I care about being in public office, then I better be talking about jobs. And I better be talking about it in a way that makes sense to you, that's innovative, that looks like something I can actually bring off.


Q: But, viewed somewhat more cynically, couldn't you also make the argument that when not at their best, spots are more about polling than they are about the candidates' own views and own principles.

SQUIER: I think if you get spots produced that are more about polling than they are about the candidate, people see through that kind of advertising and it doesn't work very well. We've had some examples in the recent past, I think, of exactly that.


Q: Such as?

SQUIER: Well, I think what's happened in California is a good example. I think that candidate who spent all that money might have spent half as much money and found a way to say more things about himself and be better off in the end. It's hard to criticize, you don't know where the problems come from in a campaign. Maybe the candidate was his own worst enemy, you never know. But I think what voters are looking for first is what kind of person you are because they are going to put this power in your hands. They want to make sure they put the power in the right hands. Once they begin to make their mind up about that or as they're making their mind up about that, they also want to know the kinds of things that you're interested in doing, or what you want to bring up. No, I think that you could do very elegant ads that came directly from polls, a lot of people do it. They would be very unsuccessful if you, at the same time, do not transmit through this incredibly powerful medium what kind of person the candidate was.


Q: You used comparitive ads particularly effectively in '96: Clinton's for increasing the minimum wage, Bob Dole isn't; Clinton is for Medicare, Bob Dole isn't. I'm grossly over-simplifying, tell me a little about why you chose that approach?

SQUIER: I think one of the things voters are looking for in a campaign are differences: "Are these two candidates alike in their views? If they are, then I just got to pick the person I think is the strongest person." But if the candidates are really apart in their views, then voters are interested in that, and they'll use it to make voting decisions. I think in the case of Dole, he would like to have been more of the person he thought of himself as and less of the person he became in the primaries as he had to go further and further to the right in order to win his nomination. And the problem for him was that he began to say things in the primaries and the stages leading up to the primaries to set himself up to basically go back to his right-wing base in the Republican Party. That just sounded very strange to the ears of most Americans.

In the end, an election, at least the Presidential election is going to get fought out in the center someplace. It's going to get fought out among a couple of target groups that are people that are pretty moderate in their thinking. The problem for Dole was that he ended up running against himself in a way. He was running against the Dole that ran in the primaries. Clinton did not have to do that. Clinton was running as the person he had run as in '92, even more than he was as pictured in '94. Back by '95, '96, he was exactly on the track of the Clinton who had been Governor Clinton, who had been the candidate in '92, and who was the candidate headed, headed to his re-election.

What's odd about the two of them is that I think that Dole would, in a sense, like to have been a candidate of the ideas that Bill Clinton was espousing, but he couldn't be because he was the candidate of the Republican Party. You have to be in order to win the nomination.


Q: Walk me through, if you would, what you specifically did in a piece, in a spot like the one that compares their stands on minimum wage or Medicare.

SQUIER: Well, I should get my partner Bill Knapp to do that because he's the guy that was doing that most. First, you have to know more than anybody else about the subject. You really have to have the subject squared away, so you deal with all of the policy people you can find that really understand what's going on, so that when you're making a case, you're telling the truth. So that you don't get caught up in some television box later.


Q: So you have to know the specifics?

SQUIER: First you have to know your issue cold, so that you are telling the truth and the absolute truth in the commercial. You also have to know your opponents position or positions, and that's often where the most interesting part of the project takes place. It's like the part that nobody sees in which you are going back and just carefully, carefully, documenting what the candidate's position is on that issue. And often you will find that a candidate or an opponent has taken two or three positions or has begun to shade a position. And that was the case with Dole in the '96 race. He was out talking to some very right wing groups. Bragging about, you know, things like killing Medicare in committee. A program that is off the charts in terms of how most Americans feel about it. Why would he, why would he do that? Because he was trying to impress the people on the right side of his party.

It reminds me very much of what we Democrats did to ourselves in the 70s. Exactly the same thing. Instead of taking your focus to the American people, we lost our focus way over to the left of our party. And all our dialogues were about things the American people either didn't care about or thought were very strange. The Republicans I think are at that spot now, Dole was the unfortunate recipient of that, that situation.


Q: When I talked to Kathleen Hall Jamieson she said that if she had to choose between people watching the news and watching ads, there's more information in ads than there is in the news. Is that particularly true of those kinds of ads?

SQUIER: Yeah. Well, we do our homework. And we have to, because there isn't anybody coming along the next day saying that story was wrong for the following reasons. I think anyone who has worked in politics, who really understands an issue, or an event, or something that is being covered in the news, will think about how it is decribed in the news and think "Oh my god, how did they get away with knowing so little about what they are writing about?" Well, when you do a political ad that's thirty seconds long, you have to know everything there is to know about it. And it goes through an incredible editing process. Because once we, once we get to script, or to the final stage, hundreds and hundreds of people are seeing it. And people are always talking about the mistakes that are made in political ads. I'm always amazed at how few mistakes really happen in political ads, considering how high the content level is.

I think one of the bad raps on political advertising is "it's all negative." I think if you look at a lot political advertising done by responsible people for say statewide office and above, that you'll find that the information is very accurate, that it's fair, and that it's persuasive. For obvious reasons that you have to meet those three standards in order to actually collect votes for your candidate.


Q: So you would argue that you can learn a lot through advertising?

SQUIER: I think you can learn a lot through advertising, especially if you're willing to take a step back. And to try to ask yourself "What are they trying to get me to think with this ad?" I think if you can go through that intellectual process alone, that you'll learn a lot from advertising. You'll also learn a lot from advertising if, when responsible gate keepers like newspapers, do television boxes that compare the ads. Now the problem with boxes, is we need people who are politically more astute to do them. If I took you through just twelve at random from last season, I probably could find two or three mistakes in every one of those boxes in which the person who was analyzing those spots did not have the kind of information they needed in order to make a responsible judgment that they would pass on to the viewer. So that's one area I think where newspapers, magazines and especially television could really do a great public service and one that I think people would be interested in.

I made the case for these TV boxes years and years and years ago at a private retreat of the Washington Post. And the argument I made to the editors of the Washington Post was spots are speech. If a candidate in a statewide race is going to spend 75% of their budget doing advertising that they are going to put on the air then it seems that those thirty second spots should be analyzed very, very carefully for truth and for every other standard you can apply to it. Because that's really what the candidate is saying his campaign is really all about. That was a tough sell. I mean, we finally sold the idea but it was a tough sell.

The most interesting thing about this dialogue between candidates using advertising is that there is a place for journalism in this exchange through the, what we now call ad-watches. And ad-watches really give voters/viewers an opportunity to check the content of what they are seeing every night on television. And I've always made the argument that if the campaign is spending 70% of it's budget on political ads, then it's the job of journalism to spend maybe not 70% of its budget but a good portion of its budget, really analyzing what's in those spots and why those spots are running and what they're trying to say about each other. And what's the truth in this exchange of advertising. That's why the ad-watches are valuable.

Now, I'm afraid, we need somebody to watch the watchers. I would be much happier if editors assigned to that job some people who had a little more academic training, so that when they make an assertion about what is in an ad that we can count on the fact that they were right. And in a lot of cases, you find, that they think one thing and something else is actually the truth.


Q: Do you welcome being ad watched?

SQUIER: I actually proposed being ad watched. I think I was the first person to propose it to the editors of the Washington Post on one of their retreats, years and years and years ago. I got a lot of heat from the editors when I did it. I think they thought that I was somehow trying to draw attention to our profession or something, which is not something anybody in a field like this would want to do.


Q: Some consultants now do, or some candidates and campaigns will release their spots, first almost, to newspapers saying here's what we're doing, go ahead and critique them.

SQUIER: I think we started the practice of actually making a rationale for your ad that we would release it at the time the spot was released. In other words do a documentation of every single assertion in the ad so that reporters could see it. And we did that mainly, so that as we got into this ad-watch period, if we thought there was going to be a problem with a fact that a reporter might get wrong, we would make our documentation. We would basically throw down our gauntlet saying, you know, "If you're going to say this is wrong in the spot, here's where we get the information, your argument is not with us it's with them."


Q: I wanted to ask you a little bit about the role of interest groups this year and independent expenditures which have played a big role, and are also not ad-watched as much. People in journalism tend to ad-watch candidate spots instead of interest groups. What do you make of that phenomenon this year which has gotten a fair amount of attention especially in the early special elections?

SQUIER: Well, the First Amendment's a great thing. Not many countries have it and it makes political advertising in this country a whole lot easier. We've worked in those countries and you're always looking for that missing ingredient, and it's always the First Amendment. That gives people who are outsiders the right to basically bomb into a campaign and to try to affect the outcome, when sometimes neither of the candidates in the race would welcome them being there. But I think it's just part of our process.

I think if you want to take all of the advantages of the First Amendment you're going to have to take the disadvantages as well. And remember voters are pretty good at figuring these claims out. But again, it's the job of journalism to blow the whistle on this kind of activity and to let people know the reason this outside group is advocating this particular candidate or this particular issue in a campaign is for their own self interest, certainly not for the voters' interest. At least when you got a couple of candidates in the race and two or three outside groups in the race, the chances are that the two candidates have the voters' interest at heart more than the outside groups do.


Q: Critique your profession for me. Some people say that consultants too often tfollow a cookie cutter approach and that you don't want. You might think you want a big name consultant like Bob Squier but if he has too many clients he's not going to pay enough attention to you, you're going to be the twelfth guy on the list, not the first, are consultants too guilty of that?

SQUIER: That's a piece of conventional wisdom that I'd love to explode for you. The bigger firms take too few clients, and I think they do them very well. It's the small firms that are struggling--and we've been both in our thirty years--that have the tendency to take that extra client. That extra client because they're not sure that in the next season they are going to get that many clients. We have a big professional staff here and we take maybe four or five statewide races. Almost all of the consultants in this business that you would put in the small range, would have that many or more, or more candidates.

The reason is very simple, we want to make sure that we do campaigns that fit the candidate and fit the situation of the election that the candidate is working in. Sure, there are a lot of people that think they have the silver bullet. Most of those people die by their own silver bullet as they go through the mill. And you could make a list of all of the political consultants that were really hot five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, who have just fallen by the wayside because they thought they had the formula. The formula that works is to make sure that you look at each election as a new and different experience. That every candidate is different. That the state is different even if you've worked there two years, four years ago. And that what you're looking for is something unique and unusual as a way of winning the election. Not to reach back in a sorry bag of old tricks and try to find something that worked for somebody else that won't for the candidate you're working for.


Q: Is that a common problem, the old fighting the last war?

SQUIER: I think it's a problem for people who are not experienced. But the problem is how do you talk about these people as one. I think, when I first started working in this business there were ten political consultants and I fear that there are ten thousand now. So it's impossible to say these people all think this and think that. If that were true they'd all win every election they were involved in.