Q: Why don't we start with just a few observations about what you've seen so far in Campaign '98? Are there lessons in terms of political advertising that you're beginning to see that are interesting trends this year?

TAYLOR: Well, I think the most interesting political trend so far this year is the absence of anger at incumbents, and that is reflected, I don't pretend that I've seen a whole lot of political ads, but I've read articles about people who've looked at the political ads and that's the dominant thing that comes out. That it's okay to be an incumbent these days. You saw that in California. You saw that in races around the country.

The second interesting thing is the absence of a unifying issue. It's a very, very diffuse issue agenda, and the Washington scandals which have certainly dominated the headlines in Washington political coverage for six months now are not playing in political advertising. It's the dog that is not barking. Other than that, there is a question in my mind.

The other interesting fact about 1998 so far is been the very low turnout. Very low in the primaries, likely to be extremely low in the fall. What impact is that going to have? And a very benign economic environment. It seems to me that will tend to push the advertising, the tone of the advertising, in a separate direction. The benign economic environment, the absence of anger at Washington incumbents suggest the hard-edged ad may not work. On the other hand, if you're dealing with a very, very small electorate, the people missing from that electorate are the broad middle of the population. You have these hard partisans on either side, and tactically, the drill is to make sure your base shows up. And over time, history tells you that the best way to do that is to go for confrontational advertising, confrontational messages. So that's the tactical tableau.


Q: There was a piece that I read and maybe you read too that Doug Bailey wrote. He sat down and looked at 120 some spots or whatever, and he made the point that, that same thing, that people may go for the edges more. And for the first time he saw commercials where people said, you know, "I'm a businessman and I'm a Christian."

TAYLOR: I mean that particular kind of ad you're more likely to see in a primary, and particularly in a Republican primary, but it is possible. If we're looking at turnouts, some people are projecting that turnouts will be below one third of the age-eligible electorate. You know, that doesn't take much. To get half of that, you're talking about 16-18%, so activating the base is a way to go. I would think this is why political consultants make their money. They have to figure out how to get this right.


Q: The California example has been cited a lot, not just that it's okay to be an incumbent, but it's okay to be a politician. That the sort of technocrat that Gray Davis represented, just sort of someone who's going to kind of make things okay, but not have big ideas and big changes is what people think they want.

TAYLOR: You know there are other times when that particular package has been attractive at the national level. 1988, ten years ago, you had ten years of Reagan and then an open-seat presidential race, and it seemed like a lot, still, on the country's mind coming out of the Reagan era, either reacting to it or not. The Cold War, we didn't realize how soon it was to be over, but it was still on, and yet you wound up in Dukakis and Bush two rather bland technocrats. Sometimes the country is ready for that, sometime it isn't.


Q: What do you make this year of outside groups doing independent expenditure ads, whether that's the term limits folks or on either side of abortion. What strikes you as being significant about that?

TAYLOR: Well, their track record, you know they exploded on to the scene in 1996. This seems to me the most important change in the dynamics of campaign communication that we've seen in a decade or more. The groups which until '96, maybe a little bit in '94, thought that the way they played in political campaigns was to give money to candidates or some instances to parties and let the candidates or the parties do the advertising, they discovered "Hey, why don't we eliminate the middleman? We can do it ourselves. In a sense we can get a two-fer: we can either support or oppose the candidate we're interested in seeing either in or out, but we can also promote our own issue." So it works all sorts of ways. I think there is going to be a continuation of that in 1998. I think that the batting average, the track record was mixed in '96, and is likely to be mixed again in '98. That's been the experience in some of the skirmishes so far. Although some of the groups that do it, electing or defeating, a candidate is only one of many objectives, so that there's a lot that's attractive about this. On the other hand, if they really decide that what they want to do is to defeat a particular incumbent, or elect a particular challenger, they may conclude-- some of these groups, particularly large membership groups--may conclude, "We're not spending our money as effectively by going on the air and appealing presumably to 100% of all the citizens of the given Congressional district or whatever, maybe it's better for us to activate our own base. Do more internal kinds of communications; literature, mailouts, and that sort of thing."

Again, you know, this is all tactical stuff. I think in the longer sweep of things, we're in a year now where candidates are in danger of becoming bit players in their own campaigns and where instead of just having a two-way contest, you suddenly have a cacophony of voices. It's very confusing. I think it's confusing for the voter in particular. I think it's somewhat scary, frankly, for the candidate. They worry not only about the opposition groups coming after them, you know, some of them worry about getting hit by friendly fire: the group that's really supporting their candidacy but does it in a ham-handed way ends up backfiring on the candidate.


Q: What troubles you, if presumably something does, about political advertising and its impact on campaigns and the larger participatory nature of politics in this country?

TAYLOR: I would say the worst thing about political advertising is that it doesn't nourish over time. These are very short, they're very engaging, they're designed to break through the clutter. They're designed in a very efficient package to deliver a targeted message, and a lot of that is to the good. We do live in a very complicated world, and people don't have a lot of time to devote to things. And we know product advertising works for those reasons. There's no reason why those same dynamics shouldn't be applied to political campaigns, except you hope that political campaigns will be something more than that, something more than just quick impressions, something more than impressions often formed not by reasoned arguments but by appeals to emotion. And by tools that are fairly conducive to the false inference and the half-truth and those sorts of things.

I think what's happened over time is that my generation of adult, most Americans have grown up with these things. That's what happens every other year when a campaign comes along, we see all these ads on television. We've been seeing them for thirty, forty years. We sort of know them by heart. The names change, the issues change, but the larger message they send, rather than "Elect Joe" or "Defeat Frank" or whatever, the larger message they send is "You shouldn't trust this system. It's all about the ropes and the pullies, it's all about shaping the message, the spin." And I think that's a rational response the public has made. It's not the only reason the public had disengaged from politics, but I think it's one of the reasons.


Q: The research as I understand it is sort of mixed though, isn't it, on whether or not negative advertising really turns people off? Some consultants would make the argument that negative advertising is good because it fires people up and politics ought to be contentious and the more the merrier.

TAYLOR: No, I think that is right. The research is mixed. There is one set of scholarship that says it actually sort of cuts the baby in half and says the people these negative ads fire up are the people at the polls, are the true believers left or right: "They're attacking my guy. They can't do this" or "Yeah, go get 'em!" And the broad middle, the 50, 60, 70% of the population that's not strongly identified with a party or ideology looks at this back and forth "So's your old lady, so's your old lady" and says to himself, "I'm out of here. I don't need this sort of childish, back and forth. I got more important things to do with my life." So it's possible that both things are true simultaneously.

There's no question turnout has been on a steep, steep decline. It's happened over third or forty years. That happens to be the same period where the paid political spot, the 30-second spot, has become the coin of the realm. Has one caused the other? You know, it's hard to know, and the scholarship is mixed on it. It seems to me that there is some connection somewhere.

Q: Even Kathleen Hall Jamieson though, I've heard her say that if she had a choice between having someone watch news or watch political commercials, she'd rather have them watch political commercials because you can actually learn more. There's more content in a 30-second spot than there is in the average TV news story.

TAYLOR: That is something that the scholarship does show that commercials are more likely to be issue-oriented, and I'm not sure what the scholarship shows on accuracy. That might be a little different. Frankly, one of the reasons why I chose to do what I'm doing now is there has been this exercise in finger-pointing for almost a generation now. Between the consultants who point at the candidates, who point at the journalists and say, "Do you know why the campaigns are so negative and the public is so turned off? It's your fault. You accentuate the negative. You only write about the horse race. You make us all look like fools. Your message to the public is 'Don't ever trust the candidate.'" And the journalists say to the consultants, "That's what you're doing. You know with your attack ads." And there is truth in both sets of accusations and we've been sort of locked in this deadly embrace. It seems to me covering political campaigns, as I used to do for the Washington Post, was a four-year cycle. You spent two years covering the Presidential campaign, then you spent two years going to symposium at the finest universities everywhere, after the fact, where you would flagellate yourself and accuse the consultants saying, "The reason it's so terrible is you. Yes it's my fault too" and back and forth. It really is a classic vicious cycle. And it seems to me that we're smart enough to lift ourselves out of it. I'm not exactly sure how, and I'm not sure that some of the interventions that we're promoting are equal to task. They do seem to, at least in theory, have the right values, they have the right aspirations, but the challenge is pretty large.