INTERVIEW WITH PAUL
TAYLOR
(part 2)
go
back to
Q & A
Q:
Did you have a particular a particular epiphany about the role you played
particularly in the Gary Hart saga. What happened? I mean was it the Gary
Hart incident?
TAYLOR: No, no, it was not. I mean not
that in particular. The '88 Presidential campaign was the last one I covered
full-time, and it was a pretty good case study in kind of everything going
wrong and in not being... You know, H.G. Wells said that elections ought to
be the feast of democracy, and instead it seems to me we've gotten junk food.
We got a campaign in which Willie Horton was the memorable icon. And I, you
know, it troubled me that I felt as part of the honorable craft of journalism,
I was in some ways a co-conspirator in this. I didn't have the wit, the intelligence,
the imagination, the courage to write my way around that. I sort of did my
job and applied probably a somewhat overly cynical filter into the world as
I saw it. I wrote an awful lot about the consultants. Back then, it was Lee
Atwater and Roger Ailes were the sort of the bad boys of the Bush campaign
and there's a fascination of political journalists in the bad boys of the
campaign. The more I wrote about that, I said to myself, "For better or worse,
these are the people making the important tactical decisions. They're putting
on the ads that are moving the votes. How can you not write about it?" on
one level and on a second level saying to myself, "But the more I write about
it, the more I am simply accepting and enforcing the reality that this is
the most important thing that happens in the campaign." It got to be a frustration
for me.
Q: Did you have a particular mea culpa
about the Gary Hart story in particular?
TAYLOR: No, no, I mean, it's almost ten
years, it's more than ten years now. No, I felt in those particular circumstances,
the question I was infamous for asking, the "Have you ever committed adultery?"
question to Gary Hart that prompted him to, I guess one of several things
that prompted him to get out of the race. I thought it was the right question
to ask at the right time. It's not a question I hope to ever have to ask again,
in public or in private, and I understand that there is a lot of discomfort
in the culture and in the journalism craft about that this was now... A wall
had come tumbling down, that shouldn't come tumbling down. I believe that
the wall ought to exist. I believe that politicians are owed, own a privacy,
and that ought to be the general presumption. But that there are certain extraordinary
circumstances where, you know, you got to ask the obvious question, and I
felt that was such a circumstance.
Q: So what now? Give me the game plan
for the Alliance for Better Campaigns. What do you think can be accomplished
in 1998?
TAYLOR: I don't know, and merely setting
forth on the journey, I think, is gratifying. The design of this project is
to try to create pilot projects in ten states, and you pick big states and
little states and states that we think might be more receptive because they
have a culture. Minnesota, for example, seems more conducive to this and a
state like California. And it's an effort to recruit people from the worlds
of politics and academia and civic groups who all share these frustrations.
The one thing is you're not going to get a disagreement from the average citizen,
from the scholar, from the political activist. Something is wrong with the
system. If you then talk about "Okay well how are we going to start fixing
it," there is going to be a general rolling of the eyes: "You're never going
to fix it. This is the way it is, this is the way it's always been, and you're
on a fool's errand." Frankly, I understand where that skepticism comes from,
and some mornings I wake up and feel some of it myself. On the other hand,
I take solace in the notion that this is a country that adapts, and fixes
things that are broken.
Q: What do you think is now happening
in California?
TAYLOR: In California, which in the primary,
was criticized around the country for being a race that was all ads and no
coverage, I think it was a reaction to that immediately after the primary
candidates have agreed to do five debates, and that will be a lot. And the
hope is that the broadcasters will cover all five of these debates. In several
other states, Oregon, Minnesota, and some others, the hope is that there are
going to be more debates.
We are trying to encourage more of what we're calling mini-debates, shorter
formatted encounters that could be embedded in the nightly news program. And
maybe give you five minutes of a sharp exchange between candidates. Is this
going to get past spin doctoring, the lack of spontaneity that a lot of people
complain about? I don't know. But the notion is, let's try anything. I don't
know what's going to work but let's try to engage both the culture, the media
culture and the political culture which sort of wants to keep things limited
to attack ads and sound bites. Attack ads and sound bites give us a turn outs
of 16%, which is what we had in the primary this year. Let's see if we can't
do better.
Q: Talk to me a little bit about the specific
component of this that relates to advertising. Whether that's the Stand by
your Ad notion, or the Minnesota compact idea, what do you particularly want
to accomplish within that venue?
TAYLOR: What we want to accomplish is
more accountability. I mean, it ought to be an expectation that is standard.
That candidates appear for a substantial portion of time, perhaps all the
time, in their own ad. Why? Because it seems to me just by that sort of full
facial, frontal accountability, this means my ad is more likely... We have
research to show that the ads are going to be substantive, that they will
be well supported by fact. That they won't be low blows. We don't want to
wipe out attacks from politics. Attacks and sharp exchange are part of what
campaigns ought to be about. But the more you get the candidates to take responsibility...
I think Christine Todd Whitman has a good line, "If you throw the mud carry
your own bucket."
Q: So just by having the candidate's own
face on camera, you're less likely to do things that are inaccurate, and negative?
TAYLOR: Yes. And in the free presidential
spots that came about in 1996, there were about two dozen of them, for both
Clinton and Dole-- Kathleen Hall Jamieson did a very substantial analysis
of the discourse there and she found that this was better discourse in the
classic way that scholars look at it. It was better substantiated, it was
more issue oriented. It was more likely to be positive. And indeed we, we
polled citizens and they said, you know, they found this extremely useful.
Better than the ads, better than the news coverage, in some ways it's better
than even the debates. So on those scales it showed up very well. On other
scales it didn't show up very well. The broadcast journalists who ran them
in the news programs thought they were just broccoli tv. They were boring,
there's nothing more boring than a candidate looking into the camera for 90
seconds or two minutes. And while Clinton actually liked doing it, I don't
know if Squiers and Dole... Squiers and Castellanos said something very amusing
on the subject. Clinton said he loved doing it and Castellanos reports that
Dole, it was like taking him to the dentist. But my own sense is that, that
frankly there is a filter when a citizen in this day and age where there's
such a wall of cynicism towards politicians, when a citizen sees a candidate
looking into the camera talking for 30 seconds, a minute, 90 seconds, there
is a filter of skepticism that is very difficult to get through. And in some
ways, maybe the notion of Nightline or Crossfire style encounter, where what
you see before you is two candidates--and they're going to test there ideas
against each other perhaps with a journalist directing the conversation--may
be a more efficient package. I don't pretend to know the answers to these
questions. I think actually both models are appealing and they're an improvement
over what we now have. And again the hope is let's start trying to seed these
ideas out there and see what takes and what doesn't.
Q: What other codes do you think people
ought to be able to expect as a minimum, particularly as it relates to advertising?
TAYLOR: Well I think this whole phenomenon
of issue advocacy advertising, which is becoming a bigger and bigger deal
in campaigns, that there ought to be more of accountability and disclosure.
I mean, a lot of these groups, some of these groups have very identifiable
names. We know who the AFL-CIO is, we know who the Sierra Club is or the Chamber
of Commerce. But some of these groups are Citizens for a Better America, Citizens
for a Better Minnesota. You know, you don't know who they are. They have purposely
chosen very bland names. And when they do that little disclaimer at the bottom,
you're not really getting much information.
So there ought to be, it seems to me, an expectation that there be accountability
as to who the sources of funding are of these groups and who they really represent.
Everybody has a right to communicate during campaigns but the public also
has a right to know who is communicating to it. Particularly if these ads,
although they skirt the law, these ads clearly have an intent to affect the
outcome of the campaign.
Q: And those ads are less likely, as I
understand it, to be ad-watched.
TAYLOR: Absolutely. And that's one of
the things that we are promoting and Kathleen Hall Jamieson is in some ways
the academic mother of ad-watching. And for a decade now she has been encouraging
ad-watching of candidate ads. And we are now encouraging ad-watching of issue
advocacy ads. And I think that will, to the extent that these become a more
and more important part of the election season, journalists will naturally
pick up on that through their scrutiny. What is certainly true is these ads
are more likely to be attack in nature and less likely to be backed up by
solid evidence. Because, again, if you're a group you don't have to worry
about the backlash against you on election day. You're sort of free to go
after who ever your target is. Now sometimes it actually backfires because
some of these groups do do it in an ham-handed way.
previous (Taylor interview part 1)
next
(Taylor interview part 3)