Q: Describe for me the ad you'd really like to see.

TAYLOR: Well, I would like to see us move to a norm where 30 seconds is not the coin of the realm. Where it's longer, where a norm is the candidate is a part of the ad, talking about what he or she believes in, talking about specific policy proposals. And to the extent that that candidate has a sharp difference of opinion with the opponent, say so and explain why. An ad that basically says that government and politics are actually pretty important things in our country and pretty honorable things. And we have differences, that's why we're in the pit, that's why we want to influence public policy in a different way. But that the take-away at the end of a whole series of these, day after day, week after week, of the kind we get in an election season, the take- away from the audience is okay, there's an interesting choice out there. And I'm going for this guy rather than that guy and I know why.


Q: Explain your motto to me, saving politics from itself.

TAYLOR: Well, the notion is that our political system is the product of what the market place has given us. The product of how the journalists feel they have to behave. It didn't happen by accident. Thirty seconds spots didn't come out of nowhere. They come out of the real world, in part from people making self-interested calculations. It's somewhat akin to the notion of the tragedy of the commons where everybody behaves rationally but the result is that the commons is depleted.

Saving politics from itself is actually meant to both assert rather high falutin' aspirations, and so doing, in some ways, mocks its own aspirations. None of the improvements that the Alliance for Better Campaigns have have the heft and the umph to save politics from itself. It will only be politics in the end that saves itself from itself. But in that spirit the notion is... "Let's see if we can't give it a try anyway, kick the tires a little bit."


Q: Towards the end of having thirty second candidacies or thirty second candidates?

TAYLOR: I'm not sure we will ever completely eliminate that. And whether or not that's a realistic goal. There's been sloganeering, there have been pamphleteering. The notion of getting messages out in very short efficient ways has been a part of politics throughout the history of politics. But the notion is, shouldn't we also try to build a structure that can survive in that world, that can deliver to a mass audience, more nourishing content, and a more nourishing message about the intrinsic value and importance of the whole exercise to begin with.


Q: Because in the end, it matters.

TAYLOR: In the end it matters. Those people who say that the public has walked away because they're smart enough to know it doesn't matter to them, I don't think that's quite right. The public is smart enough to know politics does matter to them. And it's merely about their pocketbook, their future, their retirement, their security in the world. All the things that they care deeply about. What doesn't matter to them is the process of politics. They care about the output, the end product. They don't like, in fact actively dislike, the process.

I've used this metaphor: It is the candidates, the consultants and the journalists who are in effect, the co-producers of this show called politics. The show doesn't work anymore. The show, by the end of the show the theater is half, two-thirds, three-quarters empty. Let's make it a better show. It's of course, more than a show. But you can't be less than a show. And at the moment it is less than a show. And the market has told people that. I mean, if this were any other industry, politics is spending four times more on itself in real dollars than it did a generation ago. And it has fewer and fewer customers. If this was any other industry, it would be completely out of business. But this is not an industry, it's integral to the way we conduct our society. Let's start, let's start searching for better ways of doing it.


Q: What would you like to not see any more in political commercials? What scenes would you really like to not see?

TAYLOR: I could live without morphing. Morphing actually, I was oversees for three years from '92 to '95 and the morphing technology obviously got perfected around then. So by the time I got back, it seemed like every other candidate was turning into either Clinton or Gingrich or whatever. You know, it's visually stimulating and arresting but I'm not sure it takes us to the place where we want to go.


Q: I want to ask you a question about how messages are developed because in some ways you could say that ads are more about polling than they are about a candidate. So, in other words, that they're more about us than they are about the candidate?

TAYLOR:Well, to the extent that that is a feature of American politics where we have leaders who have to run real fast to stay ahead of the pack, and spend all their time with their ears to the ground, I'm not sure that it's the advertising that drives that. I think that is driven more by the peculiar nature of the political culture we have, where the truth of the matter is our, political candidates are more exposed. We have more elections and there's no other country in the world that has primary elections, for example. We have primary elections.

We have our national legislature that stands for reelection every two years-- very unusual around the world. We don't have the party cover that most political candidates have. They don't really run that much as individuals, they run as part of one party or another. All of these things have enforced this. It seems to me to be a very risk averse political culture where you can't afford to say what you believe in principle, so you put your ear to the ground, you take your poll, and you figure out what the public wants to hear. And then you package it in the thirty second spot. But I'm not sure it's the thirty second spot that drives that, I think it's the nature of our culture that drives that.


Q: What's the challenge that you would most like to see political journalists take up during the end of this '98 campaign? What ought your former colleagues do?

TAYLOR:Well I would direct this--and I do this with some trepidation because there is a little bit of a schism between print journalism and broadcast journalism and I was only a print journalist--but I think the broadcast journalists stand more implicated in drifting away from advocating just the basic core of responsibility of covering the campaign. State campaign, local campaign, where that local tv news station is a crucial, is the most important conduit of information. And their ratings are telling them politics is a downer, people won't watch, so they're doing an awful lot of reporting about the weather, and they're doing an awful lot of reporting about health tips, and a lot of things that the consultant is telling them people will watch. I think, I think they're being too easy on themselves. It is not difficult as, it seems to me, some journalists imagine to make politics interesting. Politics, you've got plot, you've got drama, you've got a defined end point. Someone's going to win, someone's going to lose. You've got issues being contested that really do matter to the public.


Q: And it's a show, it's a story, it's a drama in the way you were describing.

TAYLOR: It's a story. There are often big personalities involved. Sometimes the personalities are not as interesting as you would wish. But the point is, I think, with some creativity, broadcast journalists could turn the story of campaigns into compelling television. And I would fault, in particular broadcast journalists, for not bringing that creativity to the job.


Q: One of the consequences of television advertising is, of course, that candidates have to spend so much time dialing for dollars.

TAYLOR: Yeah, and it's one of the reasons why I think free air time is a sensible component of a comprehensive campaign finance reform package. It won't eliminate the money chase. It will reduce the money chase because, certainly in competitive races, the dominant reason they're on the phone all the time is they have to raise money to get on the air.

There's always going to be money in politics and it will always be an irritant in our system because fundamental values come into, come into collision with, with money and politics in this country and there's no pure, perfect fix out there. And there are those who say even if you gave people, the folks the free air time, they'd find other ways to need to spend the money. Because it's the nature of the political animal and it's a highly competitive arena and someone's always going to want to spend more money to win. And our political culture is not willing to impose the kinds of limits that would tend to reduce that money chase. So I fear that this is something we're stuck with. I think we can put some better boundaries around it than currently exist.

We now have a system that's more loophole than law. We ought to be able to fix that up to some degree but we're not going to ever solve the problem.


Q: But is it fair to say that one of the consequences of political advertising is that candidates have to spend a disproportionate amount of time raising money as opposed to doing other kinds of communication.

TAYLOR: I think that's correct. And it's also one of the reasons, one of the reasons that people have drifted away from politics. I mean, David Broder is very eloquent on the subject, he's been covering political campaigns for thirty or forty years. He makes an obvious observation that really is a very important observation. It used to be campaign headquarters were store fronts, you know, in the middle of towns, or suburban neighborhoods or whatever where people could have access to them. Now campaign headquarters are on the sixteenth floor of office buildings because all they do is spend their time taking polls and raising money. They don't need volunteers. Volunteers will just get in the way. So it's become a very closed business.

You've got to have the campaign consultant, you've got to have the pollster, you've got to raise the money to get the ad on. And that's all you need. And there's no particular room for real people. And we saw this in California in the primaries where the candidates felt no incentive to go out and meet in communities with groups doing the normal things we all associate candidates to do. What's the point? Yeah we may meet and talk in a coffee klatch with fifty or eighty people, but my goodness, this is a state of 33 million people. If no cameras show up to cover this event. Then it's a waste of our time. We're better off spending the two hours back on the telephone dialing for dollars to get the thirty second spots on. So this, it really is a vicious cycle. And everything, all the bad habits reenforce each other. Somewhere you've got to snip the vicious cycle and hope you can get to a better place.


Q: And that's it. That's where you're starting, with a snip or two.

TAYLOR: Exactly right. In the hope that bigger things flow from that.