INTERVIEW WITH BOB
SQUIER
(part 1)
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Q & A
Q:
I'm curious as to your sense of the '98 campaign so far and what you've seen
in political advertising that you find especially significant.
SQUIER: I don't think we've seen much
new in the '98 campaign, but it's still early.
Q: Everyone wants to draw quick lessons
from the California experience, in particular in the fall of Al Checchi. What
conclusions do you draw from that?
SQUIER: Well there are no generalizations
to be drawn from almost any campaigns. I think the overuse of media in that
campaign probably was one of the things you could, you could look at it. They
would put a spot on the air and leave it on for two or three weeks, and I
think wear out its welcome.
So the sense of sometimes you get in a situation where once you've made your
point, to continue making it over and over and over again eventually wears
out your welcome. It's almost as if the person is proposing to a woman and
he says, you know, "You're wonderful, you're beautiful, I want to marry you,"
and she says, "Well that's very interesting," you know, "what else have you
got to say?" And he says "You're wonderful, you're beautiful, I wanna," well
after he said that about ten times, she's ready to call the police.
In media, often, especially in political media, there's a tendency to overwhelm
the audience with a single spot rather than unfold a story by continuing to
tell the different bits and pieces of the story you have to tell through different
advertising.
Q: In Al Checchi's case, though, would
it be almost more akin to someone trying to divorce people all the time given
the sort of negative spots that he ran?
SQUIER: Well, I think he had problems
early on with his positive media. I think once he got to the engagement part
of the campaign, I think he had a failed strategy. He thought that he could
attack one opponent and that somehow the votes would either go into "Undecided"
or would come back to him. I think most people in that same circumstance would
say, "Well, what about Grey Davis? He's a perfectly acceptable recipient of
the votes," and of course, that's exactly what turned out to be the case.
Q: A fair number of people have made the
point, including a piece that was in the New York Times yesterday, that this,
part of what we're seeing is that this may be the year it's okay to be a politician.
That for the first time in a while, government isn't necessarily a four-letter
word. Do you share that assessment?
SQUIER: Well '98 it seems to me is a year,
it seems to me, where people are very happy with their lives. The president
is in excellent shape in terms of his numbers, and that's usually a good sign
for everybody else in his party. But it's also a time when, I think, people
are pretty pleased by this transaction they're having with government, and
when you see the amount of cynicism around in news coverage, television coverage,
and the exchange between campaigns in terms of negative advertising, for instance,
it's pretty remarkable that so many people are happy with so many politicians.
Q: Jeff Greenfield makes the point that
this is also a time when there are not necessarily huge issues that are riling
up people or where there's lots of anger, so the sense of maybe having a competent,
almost technocratic figure like a Grey Davis is perfectly satisfactory.
SQUIER: I think we learned in the presidential
election that you can break down the large issues into their component parts
and then talk and advertise about those, and voters are smart enough to put
that all back together again.
I remember, during the campaign, Republicans had a lot of reporters saying,
"You know, what Clinton and Gore are talking about are such tiny little things
that they're of no matter." Well, what they weren't seeing was that they fit
a pattern, and the pattern was "Help to the American Family"--everything fit
that pattern. And the voters were seeing what it was all about. They were
understanding this transaction they were having, but I think it was only until
after the election that others began to see what was going on.
So I think it's a pretty logical thing to happen in political change, especially
since there aren't issues, there aren't the grand issues of war and peace
that some elections have been played out in.
Q: Do you view a commercial as, in a sense,
a kind of transaction, a sort of proposal, to use that metaphor again?
SQUIER: Well if you, you gotta look at
the whole exchange. One of the reasons that we do so much opinion/attitude
research is that we are listening to voters. We're trying to find out what's
on their mind, what are they talking about, what do they care about. So when
we talk to them, we're in a sense communicating back and forth. And once you
make that communication through a spot and through the rest of your campaign,
you know, you listen to find out: "Did you hear me? Did you like what you
heard? Is that something you care about? Is that something that you really
think is something you want to happen?" And so you get this kind of dialogue
going on, in an elegant campaign, a dialogue going on between the candidate
and the voters.
Now, of course, there's also a dialogue going on between the two candidates,
and the voter sort of watches that as they would watch a tennis match for
instance. But the initial part of the campaign, the part we're in in the primary
season is certainly this exchange between voters and candidates.
Q: Give me an example of that from your
Clinton-Gore campaign.
SQUIER: Well, the beginning of the campaign
was almost all to do with what was going on in the legislative process. I
think he had come through a tough two years. He had gotten through a lot of
things that he had wanted, but I don't think they had been really properly
explained to the American people. And now he's headed into a new legislative
season, this time without the Democratic majorities that he'd had in the past.
And I think in a sense, the use of television was a kind of picking up a new
kind of armor to make that connection with the voter and to make sure that
people who were observing this process in Washington between the President
and this new Republican Congress understood the point of view that he was
making with that Congress. I think if you can, if you can fault Republicans
it was that they really didn't understand that they were in that kind of dialogue
at that time and waited till much later before they really began to engage.
By that time I think the President had made his case very well.
Q: If you can, think back to a specific
spot that illustrates an example of what you're talking about where you sort
of listened to the public and then crafted that into a particular message.
SQUIER: Well, I don't think you can isolate
just one spot. I think what's interesting about an advertising campaign in
politics is that you're in constant dialogue that's changing and moving just
as a normal conversation would change and move. I think one of the things
that distinguishes traditional product advertising, toothpaste advertising,
if you will, with political advertising, good political advertising is that
you're really in a constant dialogue.
So the process is always what I was interested in, you know, "Are we engaged
in this conversation" and not "Are we having a particular exchange between
one spot and one response to a spot?" But everything met that standard, everything
that we did was talking about the legislative agenda that was going on a couple
of blocks from here, and the intention of the Democratic Party as a whole
to win the argument even if we didn't win these specific votes. We were out-voted
in the Congress, but we, I think, maybe out-argued them in public.
Q: What's Bill Clinton like as a client?
SQUIER: He's a very interesting man. An
incredibly charming individual, very personable, very, very smart. And I think
that he has such a winning personality that sometimes people don't quite understand,
underneath that personality, how smart the man is.
He is his own best expert on everything that goes on in government. You sit
there in awe of him in meetings because he will just lay out what is happening;
how a piece of legislation is working, if you did this, then you couldn't
do that, somebody might buy that but you could push them this way, you could
get that, in terms of legislation.
He's also one of the hardest workers I've ever seen. He is just constantly,
constantly, constantly working on it, never really satisfied until he has
won that objective and then moves on to the next one.
Q: What is he like as a client, how demanding
is he?
SQUIER: He's great as a client in the
sense that he put before a small group of us a very big task and backed us
up as long as we were able to deliver for him, but he is not meddling. He
doesn't get involved in the minutiae. I mean I've worked with clients, you
know, who you're sitting there, well, George Mitchell is a classic example,
you don't write scripts in your office with George Mithell, you write them
in George's office. And half the time you're taking dictation and you're arguing
lines and you're back and forth--that's not Bill Clinton.
Clinton laid out what he considered to be where he wanted to be in terms of
strategy. In other words, how this dialogue ought to take place. It was our
job to figure out how to do it and present him with solutions we thought would
be the solutions that worked. As that process went on, he was a very good
client. I don't think he changed--this is almost heresy to say on camera--I
don't think he changed ten things in the material that we presented to him
after we got to the final product of the advertising.
Q: It would seem from what you're saying...
SQUIER: Maybe I should say "I want all
clients to be that way."
Q: It would sound like from you're description
of this sort of transactional dialogue idea, that that's pure Clinton. I mean,
isn't that exactly what he would sort of feed off of?
SQUIER: Well that's pure, really first-rate
political candidate. The great candidates, the really great leaders, I think,
are people who have a really great touch for the public voice, and understand
the public voice and feel very comfortable in that exchange. The ones that
don't are the one that I think get into a lot of trouble.
People will say to you as a consultant, "Wouldn't it be great if you had somebody
who would just let you do whatever you wanted to do?" No, of course not. I
mean that would be the most awful, boring thing in the world. If I wanted
to do that, I would run for office myself. What's fun is to work with somebody
like Clinton or Gore--they're both very much this way--who are really caught
up in the ideas of the government and are very interested in how you can best
craft your message so that people understand those ideas. And they understand
what you're trying to do for them.
Q: And yet you're also saying that ads
are very much a product of polling and what people are thinking, not just
what the candidate is thinking.
SQUIER: Right. Well, a spot, it seems
to me, is only that half of the transaction where you're talking to voters
who have already talked to you. At it's best, when you're using polling, what
you're doing is finding out what people are interesrested in and how they
feel about the ideas that you're interested in, and the ideas that you want
to pursue. In the most elegant circumstances, this takes place at a very high
level. The voters tend to learn a lot more than they knew before and candidates
begin to learn a lot more about voters.
But there's one thing that's very important in talking about all of this and
that is the difference between political media in a presidential election
and in every other kind of election. People usually forget this. In a statewide
election or in a Congressional race or in a mayor's race, paid advertising,
in other words the 30-second spots that go on the air, according to three
or four polls over the years that go back fifteen years now, represent more
than 90% of what people take away. In other words, they get most of their
information, over 90%, from the political ads. That is not true in the Presidential
election. In the Presidential election, the spots float in this huge sea of
other informaation, and as a consequence they do different things. They have
to be much more pointed. They have to find their place in the rest of the
campaign. They have to fit the rest of the campaign. They can't produce a
dissonance with everything else that's going on in a campaign. So in a way,
it's a more complicated job because they are not as powerful drivers on of
the ideas in a campaign as they would be in a statewide race.
continue (Squier interview part 2)