 Our next two speakers might take issue with that. I think if a candidate asserts that he or she loves his or her family, opposition researchers are more than happy to put those claims to the test. So we're going to now segue to Michael Rajabian and Alan Huffman, who are the archaeologists, if you will, in terms of coming up with some of the raw data, the dirt that gets dug up that goes into these commercials. And one of the things that I learned in reading their fantastic book, which is entitled, I'm bearing the lead here, they're the authors of We're With Nobody, Two Insiders Reveal the Dark Side of American Politics. And one of the things that I learned in reading the book was that oftentimes a lot of the due diligence and research that they do is for their own candidates. It's sort of a preemptive scrubbing, I suppose. Michael and Alan just published this book, and they are, they have been the beneficiaries of the highest, the most august stamp of approval in Washington these days, which is to have been on John Stewart's daily show this week. So congratulations. They have both spent 20 years working as oppoman for Democratic candidates running state and national campaigns. They are partners in a research firm, aptly named Huffman and Rajabian, that focuses on such opposition work. Allen has worked as a journalist in Texas and Mississippi, a director of communications and political advisor for the office of mayor of the city of Jackson, and he's been a political advisor to the attorney general of Mississippi. Allen has worked as a farmer, that's in the bio here, and that often comes up at Washington think tank events. People are often, so that's interesting, a farmer, a newspaper reporter and an aide to Mississippi Attorney General and a Mississippi governor. We're really pleased to have you both. Allen Allen are going to give a short presentation and then we're going to continue the conversation. Thanks a lot. Well, first, thanks for having us today. We are those guys that are out there, I guess for lack of a better phrase, digging up the dirt on these candidates, but you know, having done this for 18 years, just in a nutshell, because we don't have a long time, to tell you what we do is when you start a campaign, we're the guys that you hire to go out and tell you everything you need to know about the person you're running against, but equally as important to tell you everything you need to know about you. And so, we don't win a lot of popularity contests, as you can imagine, because sometimes the things that we find in our candidate are, is damaging or worse than the guy we're running against. So, we're going to show you a couple of ads and kind of explain those, how the stuff you see in these ads get there. You know, you all are watching these things today, and probably with a different eye than we do, and we're looking at these ads, you know, we're not looking at all the great music and the images and the voices. We're looking at the sites, we're looking at to see where this information came from and if these campaigns gave you that information. So I'm going to show you two first on a campaign we just got through with in November and then kind of talk about that for a second. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide about health care as it should. As Attorney General, I'm using our courts to lock up criminals. What Steve Simpson been up to, bought a yacht the same year he failed to pay his property taxes. They even put a lien on his house. Simpson spent $74,000 using the state plane, including 22 trips home, took a state-owned RV meant for disaster relief, to a NASCAR race, and then wrecked it. Steve Simpson, living it up at our expense. This is Steve Simpson. This is his yacht. The same year he bought his yacht, Simpson failed to pay his property taxes. His taxes were so late, they put a lien on his house. Simpson said paying his taxes was not in the budget, but buying a yacht was, and as Public Safety Commissioner, Simpson took a pay raise to $138,000 while cutting the state highway declared budget. Steve Simpson, living it up at our expense. Okay, obviously this has a lot of negativity in it, as you can see. In 18 years of doing this, the reason I want to show this for a couple of reasons, we have never had an opponent that had this many negatives on him. I've never seen this. It was like going into the campaign office every day and opening up a folder and saying, okay, what do we want to use today? It just kept going. What happens is these commercials were based on information that we had put together at the beginning of the campaign. They were sent to the pollster, which politics, if you know, is a very defined process ideally. Our information goes to a pollster. They do their questions. They test it. They see what resonates best with voters and then it goes to the media guys and they put their scripts together. I don't know if any of you guys know Bill Knapp or Jay Marlin, but they're the ones who did these ads. During that process, the poll questions will come back to us to look at and we'll check those and make sure they're accurate and they kind of jive of what we gave them in the report. Also, the scripts will come back to us too one last time before they're produced to make sure that those are accurate. What you're doing is you're taking a 200 page research report and distilling it into a 30 or 60 second spot, which is always amazing to me because every word in those spots is a story into itself and you have to be so careful with those things to make sure that it's not getting distorted and it's not somehow lost in translation. These things that were on these two ads, we had already tested so we knew what we were going to use, but anybody who understands campaigns know that they're incredibly fluid. They're changing by the day. Most of our work was done when these ads were produced, but in July, like I said, this campaign we just got through with in November. In July, there was a newspaper article, kind of an obscure newspaper article from the Mississippi Gulf Coast about a priest who had been murdered and so we looked at that and said, you know, our guy used to be a judge on the coast. Let's just out of, you know, just check it out and see if there's any connection there with this guy. Maybe he'd been arrested before. So we go down there and we start looking at the records and it turns out that our judge, Mr. Simpson, had previously seen an individual who individually killed a priest. He had come before his court on a child molestation charge. He could have given him 14 years. That was the maximum sentence. He gave him one. So he gets out of jail. Because he was out of jail, he had the opportunity to kill the Catholic priest. This happened right in the middle of the campaign. So, you know, you hate to say this is like Christmas, but you don't get these things very often. I mean, you don't get those Willie Hortons very often. So we had that. And to just continue this story, we weren't going to use it because we had so much already and our candidate was afraid of the blowback of using this because we were talking about a murder and we did have a lot of information already on this guy that we could use. Two factors change that just so you guys know how these things go on and how they get on TV and it's not just some kind of willy-nilly process. Two factors change that. Number one, our candidate was and still is the only statewide Democrat left in Mississippi. And this election year, we were going through a lot of change. Republicans were mounting an incredible campaign to take both houses. We were worried about that because we didn't understand what the impact on our race was going to be even though our guy, the incumbent, was very popular. Most times with a popular incumbent, you don't have to do much negative advertising. You can just run on your record, but we were worried about that. So that was one thing and we had considered that. And then two weeks out from the election, I remember we got a call from a newspaper reporter asking us to respond to this incredibly outlandish charge against our candidate about misappropriating, misspending money that had absolutely no basis in fact to it. And I remember sitting in that campaign meeting and talking to everybody about it and finally the decision was made, you know what, let's just do this. And let's just make sure this is just over with. So two weeks out, I don't have that ad to show you, but we did produce an ad talking about the Catholic priest and our judge. And we won with 62% of the vote and we also had 30% of the Republican vote, which is pretty unheard of in a Republican state like Mississippi. So the work we do ends up on TV without us, we travel the country, we work on mainly congressional campaigns, we've worked on races and research projects from presidential appointments all the way down to local school boards. So without the things that we do, you wouldn't have, you could still have, but you would have less documented factual information to go with. And the way we operate, we don't give anything to a campaign that can't be documented. If we can't chase a piece of paper down and give it to them, it's useless to us. We talked to many people, many of them who you would consider just like out there and somebody you wouldn't take seriously, some of them have good information. But even though they give us that information, if we can't go somewhere and support that with documentation, then you're not doing anybody a service and the blowback from that can be worse than it would have been. So you have to be very careful on that. I'm going to turn it over to Alan because I know you all, most people have a lot of questions about the kind of crazy things we do, so I want to leave some time for that. We've got another one that has a segue to the current presidential campaign. Yeah, when I'm listening to everybody talking about whether or not negative ads are a good or a bad thing, I realize we're kind of outside the margin, in the margin I guess, in that sense because our basic premise is that no one is fit to rule unless proven otherwise. That's sort of like what we do for a living. So we're kind of negative by nature. I mean, Michael gets on my nerves big times when we're traveling together and the feeling is mutual. This is just the way we roll. And so we go out there and we're looking for what's wrong. That's just what we do. And if any of you saw us on The Daily Show, the last question John Stewart asked us was who was beneath us in the political hierarchy of negative campaigning? And we were like, hmm, well, there were a couple of guys in a pickup truck that were harassing us, followed us for two days. But we didn't bring that up in that case because the truth is, we're pretty much the bottom level in that regard. That's what we do. So we're out there gathering this information. And so if you're running for office, we're just trying to see, yeah, we want to know your strengths, sure, but we really want to know your weaknesses because if you've got someone leading you, their strengths are great, but their weaknesses can be devastating. And so we always look at everyone that way. We look at what have you done wrong? Like Michael said, we look at our own candidates the same way. We don't win any popularity contest because of that. Sometimes we see that our candidate is the worst of the two. It's very disconcerting when the best thing you find in a campaign is that the guy threw a pipe bomb at a homecoming float when he was in high school and he's your guy and has happened to us. So anyway, we roam around the country looking for these things to put out there. And the reason we decided to write the book, it was really two reasons. One was we have this vantage point that no one else has exactly. These two guys roaming around the country in a rented Hyundai looking for trouble, for political trouble. And we go everywhere. And we're in some little courthouse in Kansas one day and then we're in Washington the next. And so we felt like we had a lot of really good stories to tell, really, was why we started talking about writing a book just over, you can imagine, over 18 years wandering around the country just behind the scenes and politics. And the other reason was that we feel that there's, when we look at these ads, someone made the statement earlier that it's not really our role to question or the media's role to question whether there was any truthfulness to these ads. And that's one of the things that bothers us is, you know, it's fine to be negative, but you need to know when you watch that ad, is there anything underlying it? And often there isn't. And that really distresses us because the ads are so much, especially now, are so much slicker and impressive, you know, when we were on Fox News last week, they showed some ads and had us kind of critique them. And the one that stuck with me was, it was just, I don't know what it was about, say, the truth. It was really impressive, though. And I was like against the guy when it was over because it had these great graphics and really cool music. And it was really an impressive ad, but I looked at it, I had no idea if there was any underlying documentation. And so one of the things we wanted to do with the book was sort of show people that it is still possible to try to know what the truth is. And we're not trying to be lofty and put ourselves out there as, you know, the finders of the truth, but, well, that is what we do, really. And we want everybody to do it. We want everybody to question whether what they're being told has any factual documentation. So the ad that we're going to show in just a second is actually an old ad. It was from 2004. And we don't generally name names in the book because we didn't really think it was crucial. You know, if it was like some candidate for Congress in 1998 got a DUI, do you really need to know his name? The point for us was just to tell these stories about how the system works. And we didn't want to get into the position of trying to break it down to personalities because I think that just wasn't our role. We gathered the information we give to the campaign and they go out with it. But in this case, the guy was, he was tied to some notoriously racist groups that had donated money to his campaign and they had done some really weird things and it was pretty strong stuff. And so they ran the ad and it was in Kansas and they ran the ad and so even though you could figure it out, which is what happened in the book, we never named him outright. Well then a reader, actually a couple of people figured out who he was and we hadn't really followed him lately. We tend to just go and do these things and we immerse ourselves in these campaigns for a period and then we move on to the next kill. That's just the nature of the job for us. So we didn't realize that this guy from 2004 is now the Secretary of State in Kansas and is Mitt Romney's immigration advisor. So when that came up, we were talking to a reporter at Politico and we were like, you know, I think we should just tell somebody this because even though we didn't make a point of naming this guy in the race, it kind of matters who he is now. And so we put it out there and Politico did an article about it and the guy had an opportunity to respond. Anyway, this is what this ad is about that ran in 2004, if y'all can go ahead with it. Why are Kansans turning from Chris Kobach? Look who's supporting him. People and groups tied to white supremacists gave Kobach thousands, one even hired Kobach. It's true, an extremist group hired Kobach to file a frivolous lawsuit against the state of Kansas costing taxpayers thousands. Now Kobach's campaign won't return the contributions, says absolutely we're going to keep it. Chris Kobach, wrong for mainstream Kansans. I'm Dennis Moore and I approve this message. I have to say I do love seeing the taglines at the end because now when you don't see them, it kind of bothers me a little bit because, you know, all bets are off about what's going to happen with the super PACs. And so that's pretty much our, I'd really rather open it for questions now. Has there been candidates that you have looked into and you report back saying this guy or this woman is totally clean? There were two, I think. We remember that we remember, you know, everybody makes mistakes and the higher you go in elected office, the more opportunities you have to make mistakes and the more scrutiny you're going to come under. So it's not unusual that we find things on people, especially in congressional races. But every now and then you do find someone that there's really nothing there and, you know, even though we're very negative by nature, we're always thrilled by that. It kind of restored, because, you know, we kind of dwell in all this negativity and it's nice to find somebody who's really just there to make the world a better place, but it doesn't happen very often. And when we hear about political, you know, opposition research, I think people tend to think of guys sifting through the trash of some candidate as opposed to the public record. But I'm sure it's, I know it's a mix, but sort of how do you, what percentage of y'all's time was spent, you know, combing through the record when you say mistakes, maybe the mistake is supporting a program that maybe cost some taxpayer money to arguably be wasted, is that, but then maybe the mistake was, you know, something more in your personal life. What's the kind of balance there? You know, we both paid pretty well, but not a lot actually, don't see somebody's garbage. You know, I don't want to get in there. Most of our days are spent, they're long and they can be boring, sitting in a courthouse going through minutes of some, or city council minutes and just looking for that one little tidbit of information. You know, it's not, it was discussed here earlier, it's not really most often the silver bullet to kill somebody, it's all this shrapnel that adds up. And that's really what you're looking for, you're looking for an arsenal. And so we'll be digging through records, but we'll also be talking to people. You know, Alan, I remember, was one night, found himself on the front porch of this guy's trailer on the North Carolina, South Carolina state line, and the guy had a shotgun across his lap because he was worried that somebody was going to kill him for talking to us. You know, we talked to ex-wives, or ex-anythings really, they make some pretty good sources. But it's a combination of those things. And again, even though you talk to somebody and have some good information, if we can't back it up with documentation, then we really don't have much. And at a certain point in the process, you mentioned that you hand off the information to a campaign and the advertising people, do you, do you feel that, do they come back to you? Do you have sort of the right to sort of sign off on the end product? Or are there occasions when you feel that something that you might have found got sort of exaggerated or blown out of proportion in the ultimate advertising that you see on the air? It varies. You know, sometimes when we finish and turn the report, they're done with us and we just move on. Sometimes they will keep us close by, and like Michael mentioned earlier, where they'll poll, you know, they'll run the poll question, buy us, and, but it's rare that anyone says, shows us the ad and says, is this truthful or whatever. By that point, we really have usually moved on, or they've, you know, but hopefully it's based on it. We have seen a couple of cases where something is coming up, but you know, we're print journalists by training. And so to us, when everything has to be distilled to 15 or 30 second soundbites, we always cringe because it's like there's so much more that needs to be told to put it into context. So that's probably why they don't ask us about the ads. I can relate to that. Let's take a question or two from the audience. Here in the front row. Elizabeth Brownstein, retired historian, writer. I've spent a lot of my life researching for accuracy. Do you people have a staff? Do you have a morgue? Do you use the internet? How many candidates do you work on at once? I'm just intrigued that the two of you might be doing all of this stuff. It seems incredible. We do, man. We do it ourselves, and we've enjoyed doing that because it allows us to go to these places where these people are from. But in general, we start off like everybody else does on the internet, and we build a foundation, and it gives us a roadmap. But as you know, the internet is notoriously unreliable. So we have to go to where these people are from, and we go into their towns and we get the information we need, and we're out before anybody really even knows we're there. However, the name of the book is Where Was Nobody, and that came from two different reasons. One is every time we go into a courthouse, we are raising red flags with a clerk or somebody who, we're going to ask for the tax records on an incumbent congressman. Well, that's raising a red flag right there. So the first question we always get is, who are you with? And our answer is, really not with anybody, we're with us. The second reason is because when we're doing this, we have to be extremely objective. We can't get caught up in the passion that most people get caught up in politics because we have to research our guy with the same vigor we're doing his opponent or her opponent. So if we're not objective, and if we don't look at him with the same scrutiny, then we end up with a stilted report, and it doesn't do our campaign any good. We'll do as many as 10 or 12 campaigns in a season, go to these places and work with them. But we're in and out pretty quick, and if we haven't done it for 18 years, you get it down to kind of a science, and you know what you're looking for, and you know how to do it. But it changes. It's fluid. Like everything. What are people upset about in an current environment? That's what we also look for those things. A few years ago it was World Common Enron, so we're looking at campaign contributions from those groups. We're looking at whether an incumbent had passed legislation to help giant corporations. So really a lot of it depends on what people are upset about at the moment. Jobs now, obviously. So yeah. In the back. Hi. My name is Jonathan. I'm independent. I'm curious. You mentioned that you two are pretty, oh not, you deal in the muck of the issue and you mentioned that you are both pretty, not bitter, but, you look at the dark side of everybody's past and you look at kind of the underbelly of the system. I'm wondering if you see, is there a connection between kind of the increase in kind of looking, the negative advertising and people's perception of government being, perception of government not working for them and kind of you have this 9% congressional approval rating. Do you see those two as connected or do you think that kind of connecting the two kind of skips a whole nother thing that's separate? Well, Michael may have something to say about that too, but my answer would be there's certainly a connection, but is the connection, is it only between negative advertising and voter dissatisfaction or is it just increasing knowledge about elected officials, whether it's from advertising or news reports or whatever. I mean, you know, we just know everything about everybody now and that's never pretty. And so, you know, I don't think you can blame negative advertising alone for people's dissatisfaction with government. I think we just know a lot more and, you know, the old adage that, you know, you never eat sausage if you could see it being made, well, everybody sees it being made now. And so I think that's part of the reason that everybody's a little disenchanted. Let's take one last question for the segment in the middle, the two questions, the lady and the lady, the two of you. I have a question for Mike and for Alan. You can answer them at your own choosing. Mike, you said that when you were in the midst of that campaign and you had a candidate that you were working for, you were working for him, and he came up with this terrible thing against him and you had a choice, you said, you sat in on the campaign meetings. You could have responded by denying what was said against him and proving that it was wrong, but you said, well, pull out the dead priest thing instead. So I wonder how that comes to be, that you don't care about discrediting what was said, and instead you pull out something even dirtier and worse, and Alan, what concerns me the most about, I admire that you try to find truth behind what you do put out to your clients because that's so important, but I'm concerned like in this Newt Gingrich thing that they said that he supported the one child policy in China, which today Jane said was totally untrue. Is there no legislation? Is there no board that has to be passed before these things come out? No retraction necessary to make such a broad sweeping and damning statement as that and let it sit, and how come Newt Gingrich doesn't try to say something against it? I'll try to explain the realities of the political world here real very quickly. We did challenge it and we did get, there was a story in the newspaper, but two things happen there. Number one, the story is in the newspaper, okay? So it's the guy sitting on a witness stand and the attorney says, you know, did you ever rape your wife or something, even though it's not true, it's still out there. So we still have this story in the newspaper. Second thing is, as people who are in this business know, you're not going to get a fraction of the coverage in free media as you are on a television commercial, you're just not going to. And so our fear again was the unknown, what was going to happen with this Republican onslaught that was on its way. And at the end of the day, yeah, we did lose the House and the Senate, the Democrats did. So we could have been in a lot of trouble if we didn't really, and we didn't know what was happening. So, you know, in a campaign, you want to leave all your cards on the table. You don't want to come back at the end of the day and get beat and say, man, if we'd only done that, just do it. You know, that's the way, and do it if it's true. Do it if you can back it up. And everything we had, we could back up, so we feel good about it. And to answer the other question, you know, I thought this might come up in the discussion about, or maybe we've still got that ahead, I'm not sure, but that discussion of commercial advertising versus political advertising, because they are two completely different animals. And there really is no mechanism for calling an elected official to task or campaign to task for uttering an untruth, essentially. You know, I mean, there's no, there's freedom of speech. And so, you can't, whereas you would get sued for false advertising if you did it commercially, you're protected in many, many ways to much greater level in politics. This is frustrating to us also, because to us, you know, we want everybody to rely on the truth, but it doesn't always happen. And it's rare. The media is, or the other campaigns are the most likely to call them to task for being untrue. There's nothing else to prevent it. And the last question. In terms of saying that you're with nobody, if you're researching for the opposition, aren't you really with somebody? Well, we are. Where our reports go, and our reports go to Democrats. So we do work for Democrats. And we have worked for some Republicans in elections primaries when there was no Democrat, because we won't do that. Go ahead. No, I was just going to ask. And how do you wind up with this candidate versus that? Are they choosing you? Are they searching you? Yeah, the political universe is very small. And so you tend to work with the same people over and over again. Work with the same pollsters. You work with the same media guys. Same campaign managers, which for the most part are very itinerant. They go from campaign to campaign until they reach a certain age and decide they want to do something different. So yeah, we end up, it's a lot of word of mouth and working with the same people. Great. Well, thank you, Michael and Allen. Thank you very much.