Q: Do good ads have to fit the times, as opposed to, fighting the last war?

SQUIER: Good ads have to fit everything around them. They have to fit the candidate first of all. They have to fit what voters are interested in. They have to look as if they are of the times they are running. In other words, the best political ads are ads that are designed specifically for that moment and that purpose and that candidate.

The other thing about cookie cutters is there are people that do that, and you run across them occasionally on the other side. They have their formula and they just roll it out every time. Those are the campaigns that you love. I mean, it's like, those that say shooting fish in a barrel is not a sport, I say you've never shot fish in a barrel. You've never done a campaign against somebody on the other side that had a cookie cutter approach. You know what's coming, you've seen their campaigns before. They never change them, they just change the name of the candidate, and then they just roll on.

Those are the ones you like to work against. The ones you hate to work against are the ones where people are trying to figure out what's going on, trying to figure out their candidate, as you are.


Q: Walk me through, if you would, the Bob Dole ad, or the Clinton ad that was basically Bob Dole where he sort of questioned whether or not there even ought to be a president. What were you doing with that ad?

SQUIER: The questioning comes at the end of the ad and it seemed to us a very natural expression of the circumstance that he found himself in. That he was, he was kind of confused about running for President. He was very clear about wanting to be the nominee, but seemed very confused about running for President. He changed people all the time, fired media people one after the other. And that was almost as if he had suddenly spoken the truth. He just said it. Not many people had seen it. And we thought it was worthy of more exposure. So we basically put it at the end of a spot that talked almost exclusively about his issues.

We've also found something else that's true. Often you're in that circumstance and you need to tell some hard truths, the very best way to do it is to have it come out of the mouth of the candidate that is your opponent.


Q: David Broder makes the point that one of the problems with contemporary campaigns is they're about winning as opposed to who would be best at governing. How do you respond to that?

SQUIER: Well, the voter's job is to figure out who would be best at governing. And they do it by watching a pair of candidates or more than one, more than a pair of candidates try to win. And there is probably nothing more American, other than apple pie, in the American psyche, than to go out in a competition and to try to win it.

The campaign is not the place for, it seems to me, working out the intricacies of governance. The campaign is for laying out the broad strokes of what you would do, the kind of person you are, the way you think through a problem, the way you approach issues. And let voters see that process coming out of you and judge you against your opponent. Sometimes you help them make that decision by making a judgment in front of them in terms of a comparative ad. But in the end, the campaign should be about those big issues. It should not be about the sort of bits and pieces that are done at midnight here in the capital.


Q: But how then how does a viewer then try to extract from a commercial who would be best to govern?

SQUIER: Well, one of the ways they do it is to judge a person in terms of their response to other people. A lot of the advertising we do is advertising in which people are talking about our candidate. A famous spot my partner Bill Knapp did with Brady, was a wonderful spot about the President's character and it was very powerful to see a Republican Press Secretary on camera talking, as he did at the Democratic convention, about the character of this President. It was a very powerful, moving experience. It was unexpected, it told you a lot about Bill Clinton. It also told you a lot about him. That he is a man who puts the issues he cares about way above, you know, simple political practice.


Q: Conversely, can you learn something, though, about who the candidate is, and how he or she might govern by the way in which they conduct a campaign, by the way in which they construct their advertising?

SQUIER: Sure. Everything that a candidate does speaks to the voters about their qualifications. And certainly, especially in a statewide race, where 60, 70% of their budget is going to television, they should be judged by the kind of television they put in front of the voters. And I think a lot of people make decisions to vote against candidates based on what they've seen of the television that they offer to the voter. They take a look at it and they say "That's not fair, that's not in good taste, that's inappropriate, that's something I'm not interested in, it's too harsh."

You know, they can make a lot of judgments about advertising that would be basically a judgment that I don't like that person because I don't like what they are offering me on camera.


Q: So, in other words, rather than sort of rail against it, whether we're journalist or viewers, we actually can learn quite a lot, if we watch with the right amount of literacy.

SQUIER: Voters are very good at looking at political advertising and they tend to take a lot out of it. They will take information they didn't know and check it through other sources. They'll learn about the character of the candidates from it. They'll learn about the kind of person the candidate is by the quality of the material they put on the air. Is it too harsh, does it seem unfair? Voters are very perceptive about using political media. And in fact, in many cases, I think, more perceptive sometimes, than journalists are.

Journalists tend to look at it in kind of a surface fashion, one spot at a time. Where voters, I think, are very good at looking into a spot, and into the strategy that is behind the spot. And look over time at the kind of exchanges that take place between ads and campaigns and then they reach very good conclusions on their own.


Q: During the special election between Lois Capps and Tom Bordonaro, there was also a lot of interest group advertising. We did a bunch of person on the street interviews about what people thought--anecdotal, nothing of scientific value--what was interesting was how sophisticated some people were at looking at ads. And they even knew some of the techniques that you and many other people use. Like one older woman said to me, I don't like it when they sort of do that black and white thing because I know what they're trying to say.

SQUIER: Well, that just makes my point all the more. If you talk to voters as deeply as we do, because we do it through not only polls but we do it through focus groups, we do it through mall intercept interviews, you come away with a great respect for their ability to take a look at political media and use it for their own purposes. They turn it to their own ends. And that's why I think that we, for instance, are so careful about the way we make our case, and the way we make a case against an opponent. To make sure that we're not treading over a line to a place where, you might show the spot at headquarters some night and everybody'd cackle and have a good time with it, but you put it out there on television and let real people look at it, and they would think that it was not fair.

My standard is always the same, it must tell the truth and it must seem fair to the average voter. And it actually has to be fair of course, but it has to seem fair to the average voter.


Q: Tell me a little about what you're doing with Paul Taylor and Alex Castellanos and why you think that's so worthwhile.

SQUIER: One of the things that I think would be valuable for voters is to understand more about why people do certain things in political advertising and in politics in general. And this project seemed a perfect way to try and help voters penetrate the control room and penetrate the campaign manager's office to get a better understanding about how politics really works. Now at the same time, we're going to actually try to intrigue people with the idea of actually coming into the process and making a better use of the process.

There is a lot of cant spoken about why people don't vote. I think a lot of the reason is that people don't know how to vote. They're not, they're not registered, they don't feel like they have the tools. Sure they may feel turned off but they may just feel, you know, "Things are just fine, why do I have to fool around with it?" We're going to try to do some research that really looks into that question. It's the dark side of the moon. We all talk about the voters. Nobody talks about the non-voters. What we're going to try to do is to see if we can find a ways to intrigue non-voters with the process and to get them engaged.


Q: Hard?

SQUIER: Yeah, yeah, but, you know, it's very interesting. Winning an election is difficult, too. We do a lot of product advertising in this place and going from 12% of the market to 13% of the market is a whole lot easier than winning 51% every single time.


Q: And will you be able to intrigue people in politics in a thiry second spot? I mean, I can't imagine a harder task.

SQUIER: Well, we're going to do two or three things. We're going to do the thirty second spot to hopefully get them interested in this process itself. We're going to do some longer pieces for the internet. Working with AOL, who has been very generous in giving us time. And we're going to do some even longer pieces to use with Paul Taylor's grass roots groups so that people could come together in one place and take a look at a piece of video that would be longer than thirty seconds.

People always criticize the poor thirty second spot but it's all we've got, so you do your best. You do the best job you can. Which, by the way, is why you tell the story, and we talked about this earlier in the interview. Thirty second spots, by themselves, really are pretty dead. But if you tell a story through a series of fifteen or sixteen thirty second spots, that unfold over a period of eight or nine weeks, then you've done the equivalent of kind of an interrupted documentary, which is maybe where I feel most comfortable since I started as a documentary filmmaker.


Q: So in sense, as far as what you would advise viewers, is to look at the whole. And each spot as a kind of chapter in that story.

SQUIER: A campaign is really an organism. And it's a very interesting one because you don't know how it's going to turn out. You're seeing something that's sort of in evolution. And as a consequence, it's fascinating to look at, because you can really see the thing happening and changing as it evolves. But you can also affect it. Even as a voter you can affect it. Certainly it's affected by the participants in that election. And the outcome is not known. And you have, in a sense, in your hands, that outcome, if you exercise it.


Q: Last question, name some things for me that you wish you wouldn't see anymore in political spots. Doug Bailey wrote something in the National Journal that he didn't want to see anyone messing anyone's hair anymore.

SQUIER: Yeah, no more nuggies. It has been something I'm proud of that no candidate in any spot I've made in over thirty years, has his coat hooked over his finger and then hooked over his shoulder as they do in so many political ads. No stick tossed out into the water for the dog to go and swim after and then bring it back to master because I've rubbed hamburger on his hands and he's the logical person for that dog to bring it back to. Only maybe four or five flags per spot, you know, and after that, at least our flag. You know, those kinds of things.


Q: How about couples walking along the waterside by a sunset?

SQUIER: Well, we learned in California, that doesn't work, even in the greatest coastal state.


Q: And I guess conversely, what's a spot you'd really like to produce and what would it consist of? What would you like to see?

SQUIER: Oh, I've produced those spots. Maybe this is because I come out of the documentary tradition, but I remember a spot I did years ago for Bob Graham. We went to a daycare center, and at the daycare center he talked to some people, and got into some fascinating little dialogues. And at the end of the trip as we were taking down the lights in the daycare center and I was following him out into the daylight. I still had the camera on my shoulder and he stopped and talked to a woman and her two children. And he asked the children, whether they were, whether they were good to their mother. Whether they loved their mother because she had such a difficult job, you know, she was bringing her kids to daycare, he had some sense of what her life was like, and did they always tell the mother and the parents how much they really cared about them. And the kids had this wonderful response to it. And here was this moment where you really got a sense of what Bob Graham was all about. And he was actually advocating to these children that they be better to their parents and to be better kids to their parents because of all of the sacrifices those parents were making for those kids.

That's not an idea that would have come out of that word processor. That's an idea that came out of a genuine person who really cares about other people, who was thinking about the situation he was in. And it made phenomenally great television.


Q: And in the end that's the root of any good communication?

SQUIER: Yeah, it's using the media to allow people to express themselves as they are and then to express how they feel about the issues that voters really care about.