INTERVIEW WITH JEFF
GREENFIELD
(part 1)
go
back to
Q & A
Q:
There's a lot of talk after the California Democratic primary race for Governor
that maybe this isn't the year of the negative ad and maybe it's the year
when government is okay--that this is the year when "politicians" are not
a dirty word and that's why we we're seeing that played out.
GREENFIELD: I think compared to the last
decade or more there's less politician-bashing than there was before. It reached
a high point for me in 1996, when during his acceptance speech, Robert Dole
never mentioned the fact that he served 36 years in the national legislature.
You would've thought that at other times that would have been a fairly impressive
point, but they felt that the country, and particularly the Republican Party,
was so anti-government that he just kind of went from being a World War II
veteran to running for President.
It's a combination of the fact that the electorate is more content or less
angry than it's been in a long time. Also that the party that traditionally
bashes the government--the Republican Party--is running the Congressional
operation. And it seems a little odd for them to be bashing the legislative
branch of the government they now control.
I think that it's a throwback to the old days when you see candidates walking
down, especially the Capitol, with their sportcoats over their shoulder.
Q: Is it also a year when being rich isn't
necessarily a plus?
GREENFIELD: Well, the issue of a candidate's
money is a really complicated one. I think you can set a general rule down,
that is, the expenditure of large sums of your own money rarely hurts. It
has to be linked to something else. For instance, Michael Huffington's case,
it was linked to the absolute lack of credentials. He just seemed to be a
real lightweight who was just going to spend his way into, into office--and
almost succeeded.
I think in Checchi's case, it was the sudden negative turn of his campaign
when he began to lose. Checchi was the frontrunner having spent a lot of money.
Then, another wealthy candidate entered the race, Jane Harman and promptly
surged to the lead and he immediately began to attack her.
I think at that point the public made two judgments: "Okay, maybe Jane Harman
isn't the one we want, but here's a guy with unlimited resources who seems
to be spending it attacking someone else."
Much the same thing happened to Steve Forbes back in '96 when his campaign
commercials hurt Bob Dole and then wound up hurting himself because people
said, "Now that you have all this money, what are you telling us?"
Q: So, if you have a lot of money, spend
it carefully?
GREENFIELD: Well, I thought one of the
really interesting examples that is almost ignored now, six years ago, is
what Ross Perot did with his unlimited checkbook. I mean having fallen out
of the race and widely painted as an odd, loopy guy, when he decided, in fact,
to run, he took a lot of money and spent it on 30-minute substance-filled
commercials, un-gimmicky, face-to-camera, here's-what-I'm-going-to-do, and
he wound up with 20% of the vote which, except for Teddy Roosevelt, is the
best third party record in this century.
So, I think that's exactly it. It's not so much having your own money that
will hurt, it's what you do with it. Candidates who attack their opponents
for spending a lot of money almost never succeed because the comeback is always:
"Well, you know where my money comes from, where does your money come from?"
When John Heinz ran against Bill Green in a Senate race in Pennsylvania some
years ago, Bill Green's campaign said "Every day, John Heinz is spending $30,000
of his money to get elected." They immediately returned fire with "Every day,
Bill Green is spending $25,000 of somebody's money to get elected."
So, it is true that rich candidates seem to carry with them an aura of invulnerability
to the normal suspicion about where politicians get their money.
Q: How much are ads a reflection of the
times? This is the year when it's okay to be a politician, that wouldn't be
true four years ago.
GREENFIELD: I think in some sense, all
communication, political communication, media communication, regular advertising
reflects something of the times of the zeitgeist. It's not an accident that
in the late sixties, every advertisement tried to appeal to young people using
peace symbols, "Freedom Now"--that whole attempt to commodify dissent to coin
a phrase. Not only the message, but the style of commercials reflects the
time.
I thought for some time that these over-produced commercials are missing the
point that people have had it up to here with them. Not just for politicians,
but for anything, and probably the most sensible kind of political advertising
you could do now, one that would give you the biggest bang for the buck is
a very quiet, maybe longer than 30-second, maybe try to buy a 5-minute ad,
and say to people, "You know, we need to talk about this."
Yeah, I don't think you can create through, no matter how much money you have,
an appetite, a resonance that isn't there in the first place. I think it's
Tony Schwarz who wrote a book called The Responsive Chord in which he argued
that advertising essentially doesn't create an emotion but finds an emotion
and then tries to say something that resonates, and I think that's true for
political advertising too.
Q: Doug Bailey wrote in the National Journal
after having screened 120 some ads this spring that what was fascinating to
him is that only three out of the 125 commercials he screened contained Bill
Clinton. So it is okay to be a politician this year, but you have to still
be careful you stand next to?
GREENFIELD: If you're asking why very
few people are using Bill Clinton, the first reason is that he's not the demon
he was 1994. But all sorts of Republicans are trying to morph their Democratic
opponent into Bill Clinton, kind of Terminator 2, he's riding record high
of approval ratings, whatever that means, but that means he's an obvious figure
to hit.
On the Democrat side, quite apart from their concern that something may develop
at some point that may make him a far less attractive figure, presidential
coattails are almost a thing of the past.
The last president who had coattails was Ronald Reagan in 1980 when he brought
in a Republican Senate and 30 something more House members. Even in '84, Reagan
didn't have coattails, so that if you're not going to use him to beat up,
and you're not going to use him because you think he's your lead guide into
office, who's left to use him?
Q: What do you make of the phenomenon
of outside interest groups this year putting on ads to influence elections?
GREENFIELD: In the Santa Barbara special
Congressional election this year to fill Walter Capps' seat, both candidates
were exorcised by the fact that outside groups came in and dumped a lot of
money in these so-called independent expenditure ads, which are in all but
name political commercials and therefore kind of took the campaign away.
You're in this bizarre situation where thanks to a series of court rulings,
you can limit what a candidate raises, but interest groups are absolutely
unlimited--it's considered a first amendment right. So, a candidate can maybe
raise a million dollars, let's say, to say what he or she wants to say. Then
you're going to find that the National Winter Association or Citizens for
a Cleaner Environment or whoever it is are going to spend whatever they want
on that race and in effect, take it over. I don't, by the way, think there's
any solution to this as long as the court ruling stands because I don't know
how you can legislate it.
You know, this notion that there's an easy campaign finance reform mechanism
to limit soft money, whatever the Constitutional scholars say, flies in the
face of the fact that a substantial majority of the Supreme Court sees soft
money by independent expenditures as a Constitutional right. But the only
question is, when we get to this fall, with 435 Congressional seats and 34
Senate seats is whether these independent expenditure groups are going to
have that much money to spread around. It's one thing in a single district
where there's only one campaign on when you target it, but are the abortion
folks or the environmental folks or the teacher's union or the small business
people really going to spend this much money in every competitive Congressional
race--we'll see.
Q: Does it bother you that in a sense
they are pirating the campaign away from the candidates. Is that not a helpful
thing?
GREENFIELD: I have a general view that
I wish that the campaigns were more in the control of the parties and candidates.
I read the First Amendment, I guess, differently than the Supreme Court. In
the same sense that you can put restrictions on time, place, and manner restrictions
on speech and assembly: you know you can say what you want, but you can't
stand in front of someone's house at 2:30 in the morning and protest, you
can't electioneer in front of a voting booth, of a polling place on election
day.
My own feeling is that the Court's Constitutional view of the political process
is a little cock-eyed. That there ought to be a separation between advocacy
groups that want to come in and say what they want and political campaigns
that ought to be able to be subjected to some fairly stringent financial restrictions.
That's my view.
I do think that in a whole bunch of ways this process is distorted. I think
the fact that if I'm rich, I can run for the Senate and spend 30 million dollars,
but if my biggest desire is to have you be a senator, I can't give you the
30 million dollars. This is a strange view of how free speech works. Why isn't
it my free speech right to say "I want Iverson to be the next Senator instead
of Greenfield."
Now what they would say is that I can spend the money on my own as long as
I don't collude with you. But suppose what I really most desire is for you
to run an effective campaign. So if you're going to say it's okay to limit
campaign contributions, then I think this notion of "self-financed campaigns
is an exception" is crazy.
Similarly, this notion that these ads are not political ads is just a joke.
Call Congressman Greenfield, tell him to stop strangling health reform in
its crib--this is not a message to not vote for me?! You have to be really,
you have to be really divorced from reality to see that. And this idea that
it's okay as long as I don't call you up and say, "Okay, what do you want
me to say?" It's an irrational system in a lot of ways. In my own personal
views, I'd be in favor of a lot of limits on the financial aspect of a campaign,
provided that there were other things and other ways for these advocacy groups
to say what they want to say.
I do think that, by the way, the anti-reformers have a very strong point that
say that these limits are limited. A thousand dollar limit which was imposed
20 some years ago now has a real value of about 100 dollars. What this forces
candidates to do, of course, is spend more time fundraising, and every candidate
will tell you that.
Lamar Alexander goes on about it endlessly, and he's probably right about
that. My hunch is that if you're not going to be corrupted by a thousand dollars,
probably you're not going to be corrupted by ten, twenty, something where,
even given a limit, they ought to be more realistic in this day and age.
Q: Is that need for dollars largely because
of the need to run television ads?
GREENFIELD: Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely,
if I may anticipate, and this gets you to another point. I'm all for giving,
all for requiring broadcast licensees to give free TV time as a condition
of their license. I've been for that since I first, you know, saw what's going
on which is a long, long time ago.
The problem is you have an era when, this happened in July actually, more
people were watching cable than the broadcast offerings. And cable is not
licensed. Even if you require broadcast to give away tv time, what are you
going to do about cable? How are you going to do that constitutionally? You
know, I mean, if I'm watching ESPN, what happens to me, as somebody you want
to reach? So, while I'm for it, I'm not sure that would eliminate the problem.
continue (Greenfield interview part 2)