INTERVIEW WITH PAUL
TAYLOR
(part 3)
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Q & A
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.
previous (Taylor interview part 2)