INTERVIEW WITH BOB
SQUIER
(part 3)
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Q & A
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.
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(Squier interview part 2)