Transcription – John Geer Interview

Q: You know, you always hear — I’m thinking now, again, about the Swift Boat ad, Willie Horton ad. There was another wonderfully appealing positive ad that some pro-Bush group put out in ’04, the Ashley (overlapping dialogue; inaudible).

GEER: Oh yes. Right, yeah, yeah. Right near the end of the campaign.

Q: Campaigns themselves always say, “Well, we had no idea what these groups were going to do. And honestly, they just complicate our lives. Because we don’t know what they’re going to do.” Should we believe that? Are independent groups on your side really that kind of wildcard, that they’re operating on their own?

GEER: I mean, I suspect that the campaigns would like to have all that money, and they could control it. [00:57:00] That, I’m sure, is true. Do they complicate them? Sometimes they do things that go too far. Sometimes your own party does. I mean, here in the state of Tennessee, we had the Harold Ford campaign where the Republicans aired the “Call me” ad, which, you know, Bob Corker claimed he didn’t want any part of. Now, I’m not sure that’s true or not, but, you know, even sometimes members of your own party are doing it. These things are rarely truly independent, these ad groups, because they’re usually made up of partisans of one side. And they may not have direct contact, but they know the kind of themes that are going to be raised. But sometimes they don’t necessarily raise them as effectively as they could, and they can be counterproductive. But it’s a little bit — it doesn’t have a lot of credibility to suggest these things are totally independent. But I’m sure from a legal point of view, they’ve taken the steps so that they wouldn’t be slapped on the wrist, or become an issue in the campaign itself. But, you know, you take the Super PAC groups, I mean, they tend to be all former advisors of the candidates that they’re, you know, backing one way or the other. And so there’s plenty of implicit coordination.

Q: [00:58:00] I was thinking too that, you know, the Bush campaign truly never would have run the Swift Boat ad. That would have been so risky. But an outside group could do it. And if it worked, fine, from the Bush campaign’s standpoint. If it didn’t work, they could disown it.

GEER: That’s the — I mean, I think part of the arguments that are made in this book — there’s probably another important caveat — and it’s not a caveat — is that the ads that I’m looking at are ads that have been sponsored by the candidates themselves. So “I’m John Geer, and I paid for this message.” So I’m accountable, and I’m on the ballot. But these third-party groups, as you just suggested, aren’t on the ballot, so they can say whatever they want because no one can hold them accountable. And that’s a real problem. And so some of the dynamics that I see that, between the merits of positive or the merits of negative ads– really need to be limited to the candidate-sponsored ads, that the third-party ads do have the opportunity because they’re not on the ballot to push the envelope in ways that are probably illegitimate. [00:59:00] But then the news media need to be responsible enough not to give them the airtime that make them more powerful. And I think that’s where the Swift Boat ad is a classic example of it being, you know, a problem. And so the — accountability is an important thing. And these third-party groups don’t have any accountability. And I’m not ever bothered by money being spent on a political campaign, but I am bothered when people can spend it and there is no accountability. And that’s a real problem. And I think the current era of Super PACs is a problem. Not again because of the sheer amount of money being spent, but these people can kind of do what they want. Now, it may muck up some of the, you know, undertakings of the candidate they’re supposed to be supporting, but at the end of the day, they can kind of make pretty outrageous claims under the guise of the First Amendment and get away with it.

Q: I don’t know if you — I’m sorry. I don’t know if you’ve been able to look at this, but do the ads run by “independent groups,” quote unquote, tend to be more negative [01:00:00] than the ads run by campaigns themselves?

GEER: Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, dramatically so. I mean, 90% of the third-party ads tend to be negative. That was certainly true in ’12, and certainly true in ’08 — ’04. And there were some 527s in ’08. There’s early patterns in ’14 right now that suggest that some of the Super PACs are becoming more positive. They’re not positive by any standard, but they seem to be trying to do more positive message. Partly because I think they wasted a huge amount of money in ’12, and they’re now trying to change their campaign tactics.

Q: Wasted money in ’12 how?

GEER: Because they just — they were going after, you know, Obama, hammer and tong, and it didn’t make much difference. I mean, millions upon millions of dollars were spent without changing the dynamics of that race. And I have a lot of hypotheses and not any data yet that back it up. But I have some data, but not enough that — there was no inspi– you know, when you do an oral history and let’s say we get together in six years and we decide to talk about the [01:01:00] great ads of American politics, I don’t think we’ll ever talk about anything that was there in 2012. There was no interesting, memorable ads from 2012. But we’ll talk about Swift Boat, we’ll talk about Willie Horton, we talk about the Daisy spot. We could talk about the tank ad. I mean, there’s a tremendous number of ads that we could talk about. Nothing came out of 2012. They ran an uninspired campaign, collectively, across the board, for reasons that — I think because the speed with which they have to produce the ads, they can’t think about them enough. And as a result, the quality has kind of gone down. But, you know, remember Karl Rove on election night, you know, getting the phone call? And we don’t know exactly what transpired there, but it’s basically someone saying, “You know, we spent all this money, and Obama’s winning the — going to be reelected.” And, you know, and he thought that all these ads would make a difference. It didn’t change anything. But I think that’s partly because it’s hard to move — you know, people knew what they thought about Obama, and the ads aren’t going to change things. So Super PAC ads, you know, will learn, and they’ll be different in 2014, they’ll be different in 2016. I think in the end, [01:02:00] the one lesson about ads that people need to keep in mind is that, you know, V.O. Key, which we often quote, a famous political scientist of years gone by, when he made the comment that, you know, voters aren’t fools. And I think that’s right. The American public are not fools. And so they just don’t fall prey to claims by consultants that the consultants have to tap into something that’s real and genuine, whether it’s negative or positive.