Transcription – John Geer Interview

Q: And so why was the Bush campaign, by your reckoning in the book, so much more negative on balance than the Kerry campaign?

GEER: Right. Well, I think that’s — I mean, I’ve talked to a variety of different people, and Alex Castellanos, who was heavily involved in the Bush campaign– is that they found in their own research that the positive ads that they might wanted to have aired, and did in some cases, for President Bush, didn’t move the dials. But because Kerry was relatively undefined, they found that their negative ads had more effect. So I think they planned to run a more positive campaign, but realized that they were getting no bang for the buck out of the positive ad, and started increasingly go negative because they could define[00:34:00] Kerry in a way that put them at an advantage. And so it wasn’t part of a plan, it just was what ended up working.

Q: And how did Kerry — what was it that provided — how is it that Kerry provided the raw material, in a sense, for a negative campaign?

GEER: Well, Kerry had done, you know, a couple things. First of all, he wanted to tout his Vietnam experience without talking about when he came back and became very antiwar, and testified in Congress. And some people might not like that. Even though I think, frankly, a lot of Americans would have understood it, because the Iraq War at that very moment was unpopular. But he chose not to do that. He also — voting in the Senate is a problem, because you have cast so many votes in so many different complicated ways, that inevitably, it makes you look like a flip-flopper. And so they were able to paint that picture of him. And then Kerry had made the statement — I don’t have it verbatim — but they were talking about the Iraq War, you know, and funding for it, that he was for it, and then against it, [00:35:00] and for it again.

Q: Voted for the 87 billion, before I voted against.

GEER: Right. And he said that. I mean, it wasn’t that — Bush people didn’t have to make that up. And that gets back to the earlier point about negative ads. And so then they have the very famous “windsurfer” ad, which again, why would you, as a presidential candidate, allow yourself to be put on a windsurfer? I understand you may enjoy it, but you go bowling, or, you know, you go to a baseball game and have a hotdog. You don’t windsurf in front of what looks like a big yacht, reinforcing all of these images of wealth and lack of touch with the American public. And then talk about ability, because windsurfers, you have to flip back and forth all the time. (laughter) It was a wonderful ad, that I’m sure Secretary Kerry probably didn’t like. But, you know, it was of his own making.

Q: Well, in ’04, Bush didn’t face any challenge for re-nomination. But Kerry had to fight for the nomination. And you draw attention to his earliest major opponent, Howard Dean. [00:36:00] And the nature of the Dean campaign in the summer of 2003, and what made that campaign valuable to the public discourse. Could you talk about that?

GEER: Yeah. I mean, you know, Dean captured the anger of Americans that specifically Democrats, liberals had about the Iraq War. And he captured that. And he had been against the war from the beginning, something that Kerry, you know — Kerry signed on to the war in the famous vote in 2003. Dean was able to tie into that anger. His campaign eventually floundered, but he was able to speak to that, and it also provided, you know, a roadmap forward of how you might actually win this campaign. Not that Howard Dean was going to be able to win the general election, but that if you could tap into that anger in a way that would allow you that there was real concern — and the Bush people were rightly worried about, you know, what might happen. Because, you know, the Iraq War had not been going the way they had anticipated.

Q: [00:37:00] In general — and I guess in 2004 in particular– are intra-party campaigns for the nomination as negative as general election campaigns between a Republican and a Democrat?

GEER: Usually, primary campaigns are much less negative. They don’t have as many negative ads, and tend to be only positive. And I actually have a data set from 1980 to 2000 which shows that. I’ve never used it very much, [ inaudible] negativity, there wasn’t much negativity. That pattern seems to have changed, at least in the 2012 campaign. The Republican primary battle between people like Santorum and Romney, Gingrich and others, was very negative, and set all kinds of records for the amount of negative ads that were in there. Whether that’s part of a new trend — you know, the Republicans seem intent at this point in time to kind of be consuming each other, and battling each other in ways that aren’t necessarily productive. So you may see it again in ’16, but on average, those campaigns are much more positive. Partly because, you know, the difference between two Democrats — there’s not much difference. [00:38:00]

Q: On the issues?

GEER: On the issues. And so there isn’t as much attack, you know, basis for attacks, because you basically are coming down on the same issue. So you shouldn’t expect as much.

Q: You know, a point that came out in some earlier interviews for this project, is that especially early in the campaign, when there were a number of candidates in Iowa, for example, that for one candidate to attack another was almost like a mutual death pact, because Dean attacks Gephardt, or Gephardt attacks Dean, they both suffer, and Kerry is the beneficiary. I wonder if there’s a strategic consideration there, too, at least when you’ve still got a multi-candidate field.

GEER: Oh, that is definitely the case. I mean, it’s among the reasons why in Europe you don’t see as often as many negative campaigns, because you’ve got the multiple parties, and it doesn’t work as well. With the one on one, it works. So yeah, absolutely, that’s part of the tale. Though the nomination process, that might explain Iowa, But by the time those to get over, as you get into it, you tend to [00:39:00] get down to two candidates. But even under those conditions, you tend not to see as much negative ads, as compared to the general election, at least.