Transcription – John Geer Interview

Q: And I think one of the points you make in the book is that [inaudible], almost always, the explicit appeals in an ad align with the visual, the implicit. So you’re confessing to an error that I don’t think is really a serious error in your overall data set.

GEER: No, yeah, I don’t know that it’s an error. I think it’s just a reality. All data have its, you know, plusses and minuses, and one just needs to be honest about it. But that’s right, the visuals do play consistent with the explicit appeal. So if you’re talking about education, you usually have kids or a schoolroom, or something like that in the visuals. You don’t have a tank. [00:14:00] And so mostly, not always, but mostly I coded just the spoken word or the written word in the ad. There are some ads — the very famous “Daisy” ad — which I struggled with trying to code, because there wasn’t a lot of written material in the ads, or spoken material. It was very much a visual type of ad. And I tried to code that different ways, and tried to get reliability on it, and I played with the data set to see if how you code it change the results, and it didn’t. So I was trying to be at least careful. But there are some ads that are very much visual only. But not very much, because people want to get a certain message out, and they’re pretty explicit about it.

Q: Well, and what is it that characterizes negative ads, compared with positive ads, in terms of the number of appeals, the subjects of those appeals, the specificity of those appeals?

GEER: Yeah, the main — broadly,[00:15:00] negative ads are more substantive than positive ads. Now what do I mean by substantive? Well, first of all, they tend to be more specific, because let’s again go back to if I’m attacking Mike Nelson, I can’t say that you’re against children, because that’s not true. But I have to say why you’re against children. But when I go positive — let’s say I’m running a campaign on your behalf — I can just say that you’re for children, and leave it at that. So they tend to be more specific. They also tend to be much more documented, and this is really an important part of negative ads that I don’t think people appreciate enough. And let’s get outside of politics. Imagine that I go into your dean at Rhodes College, and I say, you know, “Mike just won this big award for the book on the ’68 election.” Well, he or she would be happy, they’d be fine with it. But let’s say I instead go in there and say, “You know, the book that Mike just wrote, he made up some of the data for.” Well, that’s a pretty serious charge, and the dean is going to say, “Well, what’s your evidence?” And if I don’t have any evidence, I’m going to look like the idiot, [00:16:00] because I’ve just made a very serious charge without any evidence. But on the positive side, I didn’t need to have the letter documenting that you’d won this award, it was just assumed. And so there’s this dynamic between you need to have some documentation to make the negative work. And if, again, 80% of negative ads have some sort of documentation, then about 20% of positive ads do. It’s a huge difference, and people say, “Oh, well, it’s misleading.” All campaign information is misleading. It’s called propaganda for a reason, and it’s true on the negative side and the positive side. I’d love to use this example, but Michael Dukakis campaigned in 1988 as someone who balanced eight budgets in a row in the state of Massachusetts. Well, that’s true, but it’s also true that if you or I were governor, we too would have balanced eight budgets in a row because it was mandated by the constitution. He doesn’t bother to say that, so that’s an exaggeration. And that’s one of the things that people get really upset about the [00:17:00] negative exaggerations. But what about the positive stuff? You know? I list an article on my CV that’s been published in the British Journal of Political Science, which is a good journal. I don’t mention that it had been rejected at four other journals. I leave that little tidbit out. (laughter) You know, so our CVs are examples of that. I always tell my classes. I say, “You know, do you list, you know, the times you’ve been caught with a false ID (inaudible) summons for it?” You don’t put that on a CV, do you? But it’s part of your record. Well, why? Because it’s, again, you’re putting the best foot forward. It’s among the reasons why letters of recommendation have to be treated with some — you know, you have to do some care, because you usually can find three people to say something nice about you. (laughter)

Q: Beyond the evidence that charges have evidence accompanying them, as compared with bragging, what about the relative focus between negative and positive [00:18:00] ads on character traits? Because at any given moment, the presidency and the president are coterminous. So it really matters a lot what kind of person, what kind of credentials, what kind of character, etc. How do negative ads show up in compared with positive ads in terms of bringing out what voters really benefit from knowing about, you know, candidates as individuals?

GEER: Yeah. Well, again, getting back to the earlier comment that negative ads need some sort of documentation, there tends to be not a lot of negative ads on attacking someone for being a bad leader, because it’s kind of hard to document. Instead, you talk about them flip-flopping, because that, you can actually have evidence of, if you’ve changed your position on taxes or abortion or whatever. It tends to focus on inexperience. Again, something you can document. Barack Obama didn’t have much experience in 2008, and becomes a basis for it. So you tend to focus on those traits that have documentation to them. You tend not to talk too often about people not caring. Though again, in the 2012 campaign, that did come up, [00:19:00] because Romney had given some grist to the attack mill by the 47% comment, by some of the actions of Bain. And so some traits are easier to attack on, because there’s just evidence for it. You just can’t make it up. There tends to be — you know, you sometimes may try to go after someone based on maybe education levels or how informed they are, how engaged they are. But again, you have to have evidence for it. Whereas the positive ads, again, they just tend to wax eloquently about what a great parent somebody is, and all of those kinds of traits. Which can matter, but it isn’t — they tend not to be attacked. I’ve never seen an ad attacking, at least at the presidential level, someone for not being a good parent. But it’s certainly part and parcel of some of the Bush ads from 41, and some of the earlier ads as well, indicating someone’s a good family person. But family’s off limits, for example. You know, you just don’t see — you know, you don’t attack someone’s spouse, you don’t attack someone’s kids, [00:20:00] and —

Q: Maybe a brother.

GEER: Maybe a brother. Yes, that’s true. (laughter) That has happened from time to time.