 James just written a great article in The New Yorker about Larry McCarthy, who was the sort of ultimate bad boy of negative advertising. And of course, was someone who did the, as you pointed out, the Willie Horton ad in 1988. He's had a few in this cycle. Is there one particularly? Maybe is he exploding suitcases? Well, you showed one, the exploding suitcases one. I mean, the themes that he's been hammering on are baggage for Newt Gingrich, and that both Gingrich and Santorum are Washington insiders who can't fix the problems the way an outsider like Romney can. So I mean, when you look at the continuum of these ads, you begin to think, oh, God, nothing ever changes in American politics. It's unbelievable how the arguments are exactly the same. But in a way, I think when I looked at those ads of the Daisy ad, in particular, and some of those early ones, they were in some ways more inventive then. I mean, one of the things about McCarthy's ad, though he's vaunted as a negative ad maker, is there are, I think, relatively predictable kinds of narratives, basically. The imagery is not that exciting, not that funny. It's just basically a bar brawl. It's a one big black right to the jaw. And not subtle. In your article, you also, I was very interested, because McCarthy's kind of just a normal guy. He doesn't seem to have, you know, tell us a little bit more about him. Well, yeah, I mean, I was expecting, you never know what you're gonna find when you start to do a profile of someone. And I was expecting kind of Dr. Evil and a hater and somebody who just reveled in anger. And people kept telling me, I'd call them up and I'd say, so what's he like? And I'd say, oh, he's just a great guy. He's so funny and, you know, really delightful company you'd never know. And I said, but he's making millions, right? Does he live, you know, I was waiting to hear that he lived like a, you know, Pasha someplace. Nah, he lives in the suburbs. And, you know, it's kind of a nice family. He actually likes to, you know, coach his girls in soccer and stuff like that. I mean, it was really, you know, not sort of ordered up the way one might expect. But it was more interesting that way, in a way. You know, I mean, and the point of being a reporter is to try to figure out what the truth is and not make it up in advance. So, I mean, it was interesting because it really, what came across to me was that he was somebody for whom the ends justified any means. And it's not a moral issue for him to hit really hard and sometimes quite below the belt. And one of the ads that you showed actually today is false. It has a fact in there saying that Gingrich funded the brutal, China's brutal one-child policy. And he didn't. And that was just completely inaccurate. And there's sort of no penalty, especially right now. I mean, and the other thing that I learned about Larry McCarthy was he has made a career specifically of doing ads, not for campaign, it's not right for the candidate, but for these outside independent expenditure groups. And they are inevitably the dirtiest ads because the candidate doesn't have to say, I paid for this and I approved this. It doesn't speak, candidate doesn't speak in his own voice, someone's out there who's not accountable and they tend to just for that reason be unaccountable and not held responsible. I was going to ask Ron about that. Because of the explosion in Super PAC ads, do we see a different kind of characteristic or quality to those ads this year than we'd seen before and went before they didn't exist? Can you kind of draw a distinction between what a candidate will do and what his supposedly uncoordinated committees or committees in the case of most of these candidates have? Yeah, I think that's absolutely the case. The Super PAC ads tend to be much more negative than the ones coming from the candidates themselves. And it went to being very convenient for the candidate because then he can be out there, for example, Mitt Romney, with a sort of positive generic message about his presidential qualities and introducing himself as a personality. And then meanwhile, there's the Super PAC that's just hammering Newt Gingrich, for example, in Iowa, and that I think really certainly damaged him there and that Gingrich just didn't fight back against very much in Iowa. And it took him until South Carolina to really have his own Super PAC fighting back. And then it made a difference. And absolutely made a difference for him, too. But it is sort of interesting because the Super PACs in some way, I mean, if Gingrich just had to rely on his own fundraising abilities, I don't think he would have lost as long as he has. And so the Super PACs have in some ways equalized the field for some of these more minor candidates also. I think they've definitely extended the race and fight. But I would take, you know, Ken, you were talking about how it's not a worry so long as there's equal money. And the thing is, we tend to focus on the presidential race where there does tend to be equal money, or at least enough on both sides so that they can bury each other alive. But I think, and you're more of an expert on this than I am, but I went down to North Carolina earlier to do a piece that was about what happened in 2010. And I think after Citizens United, we're beginning to see unequal money, particularly in smaller races, where you can really see people defined by secret groups who are putting up negative ads that are sort of hiding behind organizations where you can't really identify who they are. And they sometimes in local races, there's really not inequality in money. What do you think? I mean, that's what it looked like to me. What are you saying? Yeah, I disagree. I mean, I think if you look at 2010, the top 10 Senate races, I should have a little pretty picture that showed this, is, you know, you do the 50% bar, there's almost even advertising on each side, each of the top ones. Wisconsin was one exception. Fine Gold didn't want or permit outside groups to come in on his behalf. But there's a couple where the Democrats have a little advantage, there's a couple where the Republicans have a little advantage, but nothing particularly significant. And then when you look at all the top house races, and what was obviously interesting about 2010 is, we're usually talking about 20 or 30 competitive races, and we suddenly had a hundred races in play. Democratic candidates and Democratic Party outspent Republicans, but the Republican groups evened that out. So when you looked at it overall, it was pretty even in terms of television advertising spending in those places. That's only television advertising, there's obviously other sorts of spending that goes on in the campaign. And there's certainly some districts where there was a little bit of an imbalance, but overall Republicans maybe outspent Democrats by a very slight amount in house races in 2010. I think what's interesting, watching the original ads from Eisenhower is of course the rhetoric's the same. In so many cases, watching the more recent ones, Bob, have you seen anything this year that really represents a distinctive leap forward in overall nastiness? That's an official term, by the way, overall nastiness, very technical term. So far this year, are we really just in the same glide path of just, you know. No, I mean, this is anecdotal, not as scientific as what Ken has done, but I don't think so. I mean, I think that certainly it's, we haven't seen anything revolutionary in the sense of the kind of creative, sort of negative attacks that Sid and his colleagues created. And I think you said earlier, I think that the real problem with political advertising is how unimaginative and how formulaic it is. I mean, these guys and women who produce these spots, they often are working for a dozen or more clients and you look and go from state to state to state and you see the same spot over and over and over again with just different names of different people in them. And I think political advertising is sort of ready for another revolution of creativity. I think it's very much in need of it. And with the fractured media environment. So Daisy Girl aired one time, they spent $25,000 on the spot. They got 15 million people who watch it. The three television networks aired it later that week. So probably about the end of the week, 100 million people saw that spot in a very small amount of incredible market penetration. And now it's very hard to do that. And I think that advertisers, instead of running it one time, they run it 20 times. They buy 1,500 gross rating points a week and they just drill it into your consciousness. And I think there's a chance to do advertising that actually captures people's imagination. And I think a lot of what we see now is just very boring formulaic. I think two things. American elections are always gonna be formulaic because you're either for change or you're against change. That's, you can have all the creative wizardry you want, but that's really what the essential choice is. But I think you make a really crucial point that, criticizing my own career, I made a career out of counting bombs, right? The number of ads that were aired and how many gross ratings points, the quality of the ad really matters. And especially now when there's so much advertising, having a signal that gets through that noise makes that creative stuff even more important. So, we showed a couple ads from this cycle. People can think what they thought was the most effective one. But I think what we're gonna see in this cycle are things like the NBC will be angry if I call it the Tom Brokaw ad. But it was, and I think we're gonna see more ads like that or more ads of candidates speaking in their own words. Not as so much the creative wizardry or cool graphics or those sorts of things, but what we saw in the Virginia race six years ago, the Makaka moment. There is, and we have all these cameras here, right? But there is not a, as short a time ago as 2000, presidential candidates were doing events which were not recorded, which there was no video there. There is now no House candidate, Senate candidate, presidential candidate who is doing an event no matter how small, which is not being recorded by someone, whether it be on their iPhone or something else. And I think we're gonna start to see those things come into our advertising. I interviewed someone who was a younger Republican ad maker who said it used to be kind of against the rules to directly have the candidate attack his opponent by name and face in the ad. But they're getting much more using each other's words directly, I think, in confrontationally. And also, there were two instances I came across where they not only have trackers who are following the candidate, but there were two ambush interviews where the opposition did an ambush interview of the candidate they were trying to hurt. Showing up with a video camera, sticking at the guy's face and just asking a question that the candidate hadn't thought about at all and then using it. And that is, it's getting to be like candid camera only in a very much more negative sense, I think. I was gonna also say, we've talked a lot about how these ads are directed at other people, but it's also true that we've seen in this cycle of grunts that some ads, negative ads, positive ads can backfire on even the person who sponsors them. There's the famous, now famous, Rick Perry ad where he's walking across a field and talking about his views on social issues and that turned out to be a sort of, he heard himself with that ad and I think you wrote about that briefly. Yes, and Ms. Ada, you know, talking about the, what he was accusing the war on religion and it was directed towards Iowa conservatives, but I think because of social media now and the way that there's no way to restrict local ads to local audiences anymore. It immediately went viral the moment he put it on YouTube and then it became a subject for mockery. People were doing all these response videos. There was a tumbler. People did these gifts and put him in these funny situations. It became this whole thing online and so I think the internet is this very sort of chaotic forum where anybody who doesn't like something can find a clever way to mock it and if enough people do that it really winds up becoming a thing unto itself a collective response to an advertisement that really undermines the message and creates a counter narrative nationally so that Perry was trying to speak to Iowa conservatives but he wound up having a message that resonated quite poorly with a national audience. Can I make a point about that? That's a great example and another good example of that is the spot that Pete Hoekstra ran in Michigan against Debbie Stabenow and that spot pretty negative racist if you want, if you will, but the response to it was so furious that it may end up destroying the man's campaign and I think that that's a good argument for letting the market sort of regulate itself for everybody who's concerned about it. I tell my students who ask, how do you know when you've gone too far and you'll know. They'll let you know. The sort of long infomercial against Mitt Romney's time, the King of Bain infomercial that was picked up by the pro-Gingrich super PAC as well really I think did not have its intended effect. Kind of a boomerang. Yeah, a boomerang and it was just people picked it apart immediately. They tracked on the people in the ad, they asked them how they were interviewed, the people in the ad stepped away from it and said this is not what we meant to be talking about. We were not even trying to talk about him and this thing, Bain was good for us and so because of social media and how easy it is to find everybody nowadays as well. Do you think these ads are being picked apart much faster, examined much more thoroughly than they were even four years ago? Usually there's the ad that hits and then you can almost have a predictable reaction period to where it's literally sort of post-Vetit. That couldn't have happened before. No, there was no, I think YouTube has revolutionized that for sure. It's interesting, the little girl who was in the Daisy Girl spot, Monique Louise, now 50 years old, she didn't actually see the spot that she was in until the year 2000. Can you imagine today, she never saw herself in the spot and YouTube has just revolutionized the ability to disseminate this. What would the audience have been for Daisy Girl if YouTube had been around? Well, I was thinking about Daisy but then Jane wrote in her story about Ashley which was an ad that came I think in 2004 by the Bush campaign against, I guess it would have been... Kerry. Kerry, just talk a little bit about that and answer this question. Was that a negative ad? Well, it's been debated both ways. I mean, Larry McCarthy again made that ad and he considered it a positive ad. It's very, he's very good at finding the emotional storyline and distilling it into sort of 30 seconds. And this was an ad that showed a girl whose I think mother had been killed in 9-11 and Bush and she met on a rope line or something and he was just wonderful in kind of putting his arms around her and telling her that how hard it must have been and how sorry he was and how much he would do to protect her. And then she speaks and I think her father speaks and it is an ad that really sort of goes right for the heart in one sense. But the negative part is that it also creates a sense of fear if it plays on 9-11 and basically according to the way it's been described it had a huge effect in delivering Ohio where Ashley lived to Bush and Ohio was a very important swing state for the election. So Bob Schwum claims that that ad made the difference in the election and he sees it as a negative thing that played reprehensibly on 9-11. So it's been debated both ways. Hope of fear. Hope of fear. You know it's somewhat in the eyes of the holder I think. So, you know, but I thought that one was one that was more memorable than what we're seeing right now. McCarthy said he was the proudest of that one which was an interesting comment. I mean there's an interesting story behind that. So I was working on a project with a friend of mine Craig Gilbert who works for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and that ad was actually made as a fundraising tool. So it was not a Bush campaign ad. It was actually an ad by a group and they were using it to raise money and then it raised a lot of money and they're like, wow, this is a very powerful ad. You know, I think it is a powerful ad but we also have to be really careful of over ascribing the effect of these ads. There was this one magic bullet that won the election. So, you know, the Daisy ad, fantastic, did not win the 1964 election. You know, the Willie Horton ad, powerful, did not lose the 1988 election for Mike Dukakis. In 2000 and 2004, you know, was it that one Swift Boat ad or the one Ashley ad that beat John Kerry? No, it's, you know, and I think if you talk to the people who run campaigns, they're working at the margin now. When you win a presidential election by 537 votes in Florida, the margin matters in American politics but I don't think it's, you know, these wits are sitting around a holiday in focus group and they find that perfect message to work and then you air that message and put a bunch of money behind it and it automatically wins the election. Has anyone seen any evidence that this is now trickling down below federal races? I was just looking around at news sites over the last couple of months through the last November's. They had some statewide, citywide elections around the country and you begin to see negative advertising appearing in city council races in places like Austin, Atlanta, Baltimore, Seattle. Have you, is anyone studying the presence of those as this goes to the local level? So we definitely noticed in tracking the lower level ones that there was a lot of negativity. This is a, I'm a too old professor but this is a terrific project for a graduate student or someone to write a dissertation on which looks at mayoral races, city council races, both what the tone is and the topic is and whether other sorts of strategies have percolated down. I mean, it makes sense, right, because before if you have to rely on television to put an ad on, it's an inefficient use of money to have to buy an ad that reaches a whole station area. But if you can now do something cheaply on YouTube or on the internet, you could do a local race, cable, whatever, I mean, there are a lot more cheap ways to communicate the negative now. And so- That goes to another point also about your, the target for a lot of these ads are you guys, the press and you know, it was always the case that campaigns would air an ad maybe once or twice and then try and get the press to write a bunch of articles on it. Swift Boat's a great, Daisy's the greatest example of that right here at once and it's probably the most memorable ad ever but the first Swift Boat ad that was aired, aired a couple hundred times in very small media markets in Ohio and West Virginia was very much not a national buy and then got huge attention from the free media. John Kerry didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to give it a bigger audience. Right. And I think actually- But he tried to control it. And I think the Bush campaign, I mean, you know, the Bush campaign at the time was equally scared of that ad. I mean, they didn't want to be talking about Vietnam War records. Was equally scared at the time and then it turned out to very, you know, benefit. Well, I didn't hear Dukakis about the Willie Horton thing and it was the same thing with John Kerry. Neither of them responded. They both thought that they didn't have to. And Dukakis all these years later, he's still, he's just beating up on himself about how, oh my God, the biggest mistake I ever made was not responding to that ad. You know, I mean- That was a very famous non-response at the debate then. If your wife was raped and murdered, would you support the death penalty? No, empirical evidence shows. Right, and so that, I mean, and the other thing that when you talk to experts about the ads, they'll say, and I think Tony Schwartz, who was sort of one of the original geniuses of political ads said, he talked about how it has to play into what he called a responsive cord. Basic, at least, this is the argument and I haven't looked into every ad, but the thing about the Willie Horton ad is it resonated with a narrative about Dukakis as a wuss on crime and, you know, liberal. And it wasn't actually in a very important subject in the race, but it just, it resonated with voters and undercut them. And I don't know if you can do a negative ad and I'd be curious about someone that completely redefines them and get away with it. Maybe in some ways, that's what the John Kerry ad did because he was considered a hero in Vietnam and it turned him into a war criminal in Vietnam or something. You simply chose not to respond in the same way that Dukakis has, which I think had its own resonance. We've kind of been operating under the sort of unspoken assumption that negative ads are bad. I want to just challenge that for a little while here. I'm not acting under that assumption. It's very good for all the business that we're in here, but I, someone wrote in after the 2008 campaign about negative ads, he wrote, what would we glean about current candidates from watching only their positive ads? That Mitt Romney loves his photogenic family? That John McCain is a common sense conservative? That Mike Huckabee is unabashedly in favor of Christmas? That Rudy Giuliani will kill terrorists with his bare hands? Or that Barack Obama's serene wisdom would make Gandhi look like Bill O'Reilly? What's wrong with them? They work. As I interviewed someone in 1982, I asked him, why so many negative ads in 1982? He says, because they work. Is there any reason why they just aren't a useful information device for voters? Well, I think sometimes they are actually quite useful. I mean, I think, obviously there was one thing that was inaccurate in the Super PAC ads against Gingrich from Romney, but I feel otherwise they were probably giving people useful information that they needed to have about some parts of his background. I think, to me, the test for all these ads, are they true and is it important? Well, I mean, there's true and there's true. You know, Mark Twain talked about lies, damn lies and statistics, and there's a whole other category, which I think is political ads, which are kind of lies where something is, what Mike Murphy described as pejoratively true. Yes, it's true, but it's totally taken out of context. So without the context, it's very misleading. And so, you know, DeCoccus, yes, he was, that furlough program took place when he was governor, but it was invented by his Republican predecessor and 45 states had the same program. So was that cogent as an argument against him? Is that really fair? You know, I mean, without the context, it's very misleading. And I think that's what a lot of these ads are. I suppose, you know, I think some of them have great information too. I'm not against them categorically. I think that they tend on mass to maybe make the whole product category look pretty sorted, which is politics. With the dirty little secret, political consultants, media consultants, I think will tell you, if you give them a couple of beers, then they tell a lot more lies are told in positive ads than negative ads. I mean, you can't, I'm a family man. I love my country. I love puppies, I love Christmas. I mean, those are not sort of demonstrable statements that can be checked unless you can find someone torturing Santa Claus or something, you're not going to be able to disprove that. It's the facts are presented in these negative ads and occasionally, you know, maybe more often than not, you have people like John Kerry and Michael Dukakis who are incompetent when it comes to knowing how to respond in an effective way, but there are many candidates out there who are very effective in responding to those and using, marshaling the media and others to set the record straight. And that's why I agree with Ken that negative ads are not a bad thing. They're a good thing. They engage people in a way that positive ads, frankly, I don't think do. Again, I don't think any of us up here are being pollyantish. Are there serious problems in America? Yes. Are there lack of incentives for our political leaders to pay attention to long-term problems? Sure. Are statements taken out of context in political ads? Yeah. Are statements taken out of context in speeches or statements taken out of context in news reports or statements taken out of context a hundred years ago in yellow journalism? Absolutely. And, you know, I think the key thing isn't, you know, I grew up in Massachusetts and with a mother in democratic politics in Massachusetts, but I think we can pick on Massachusetts democratic politicians. Our system at some point demands someone responding. Dukakis had the money to respond, had the chance to respond, decided not to. Professional decision. John Kerry had the money, had the resources, had the access to the press to respond. They decided not to. Again, there are plenty of ads that I think personally are awful, that I think are clearly inaccurate. But I don't think it's my job. I don't even think it's, you know, your job as journalists to say, okay, I bless that ad, I don't bless that ad. And yeah, sometimes the market doesn't work. Let's be honest. But there's a lot of reporters out there. There's a lot of money out there and I think it's hard to say that sides aren't getting their say. You know, we're talking about something. I think, Michael, it's also important to remember that we're, I mean, everything we're talking about are messages that are broadcast to a large audience. I mean, they're clearly targeted to an audience. But I mean, it's not like that most people, if you're flipping around the channel, aren't going to encounter these negative ads, these positive ads and these advertisements. The dark corner of political advertising is direct mail and is what I think is coming down the pike in this nanotargeting, you know, Google long tail nanotargeting and look at Al Franken did in Minnesota. I think it was 140 distinct messages to 140 distinct groups that they sliced into IC electorate so that the messages are going to, one message is going to your neighbor or another message is going to you and you may not know about that. And mail, I think is the most nefarious way to do it. It can come late, it comes so late in cases that there's no way you can respond to it and it does its damage before the candidate who was the target of that negative attack even knows about it. We need to schedule another session on Google long tail targeting before the end of the year. I can already, I can feel that's a great idea. In the last, before we turn to questions, I just want to talk a little bit about going forward in the campaign year, which is, this isn't going to get much different. In the last few days, I just noted that the Romney Super PAC has gone up in Michigan with nearly $2 million worth of ads aimed at Santorum. Santorum's three, four Super PACs have come back and answered that with almost half that amount. Ron Paul has kicked in another million dollars and I think in the last couple of days, Barack Obama's campaign has actually spent a quarter million dollars in Michigan attacking Romney. So would someone like to sort of sketch out where the next four or five months are going in terms of how much money I'm looking at can might be spent? Just take us through, say, August. Yeah, you know in the Austin Powers movie, when he sort of goes back in time as you know, you don't give me $10,000, I will blow up the world. I sort of feel like that's what the conversation we're having is now. We're going to see two and a half billion dollars conservatively, could be as high as $3 billion spent on spot local television. Presidential or everything. That's sort of soup to nuts, dog catcher to president of the United States. The dog catcher's actually not an elected office anywhere. Can you just hazard, I mean we want to hold you to this, but hazard a guess of how much of that will be positive and how much will be negative, given current trends. Well I think that's interesting. I think the Obama campaign, people have written about this, will be very much like the 2004 Bush campaign. I think the Obama campaign will be overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly trying to define whoever the Republican is. I think the Republican's going to have a choice, whether they want to talk about themselves or whether they want to, whether they think they need to go after Obama more. I mean one of the things which we saw in 2004 is the Kerry campaign actually didn't air any negative ads. The Democratic groups, people sort of forget that groups also existed before three weeks ago, right? So Media Fund and Move On, big $20 million gifts given by George Soros and Peter Lewis, those ads were overwhelmingly negative on George W. Bush. And I think if you talk to people in the Kerry campaign, they would say, you know we might have been better off if our allies actually would have been more building us up than going after an incumbent president. Why is that the case? Because attitudes were pretty well formed about George W. Bush. Attitudes are pretty well formed about Barack Obama. There's people who like Barack Obama, they're gonna vote for him. There's people who dislike Barack Obama, they're not gonna vote for him. There's a very thin swath of undecided voters. And their attitudes towards Barack Obama are probably out of the control of advertising. What's going on with the economy? What's going on in the world? And at the margin how those people can be influenced, I mean we all pay attention to this stuff. There's still people who are gonna decide the presidential election in November of 2012 who absolutely haven't tuned in. And I always give the example of the Super Bowl, not as an advertising example, but there's people only watch the Super Bowl. If you're someone who watches every game of the NFL season, you've got a favorite team. Okay, so if you're someone who's watching everything that's going on in the primary now and paying attention and going on websites and going on MSNBC and going on Fox and listening to Rachel Maddow and listening to Rush Limbaugh, you're not an undecided voter. You like one of the sides. At some point this election's gonna be decided by people like my wife in the Super Bowl. I gotta be careful, my wife's very sophisticated in politics but she only watches the Super Bowl. At some point this election's gonna be decided by people who only vote in presidential elections and only gonna tune into that presidential election two weeks out. I don't know, I just, I think because of Citizens United and the ability of corporate money to flow into these outside groups, you're looking at so much more money. I mean, we had that. I hope the money hasn't been so far in this election. Well, it's hard to tell because you can't really see what's going into the certain kinds of groups that you know, the 501C4s. And so it's hard to chart, but I wrote a piece. But in this case, most of the money in there now has been, you know, it's been Shelly Adelson. It's been these big, it's been these big givers. And a lot of that could have been done before. I think a lot of it's gonna be privately held corporations because I think publicly held ones have to deal with issues of stockholders and a lot of public attention. But I think you see people like the people I wrote about the Koch brothers. They have a privately held company that does $100 billion worth of business and they have a strong political agenda and the ability to use as much of that as they want. I think it could make an actual difference in a race. You know, we haven't really seen how it's gonna play out, but I think the outside groups are gonna be what I'm gonna be watching, because I think that's maybe what the amount of money they have to play with is more than before. I'm clear that the story is outside groups. The question is, are the Koch brothers gonna spend more than they would have? Because it's not like they don't have a lot of money personally also. Or whether there'll be other people who get in as a result of the easier, this is gonna be a lot easier to do this time around. I'm more organized this time. Narratively though, I think we're kind of already seeing the contours of the general election while the GOP primary campaign is continuing. And I mean, my colleague, Molly Ball wrote a story about whether or not Romney has been pre-destroyed almost at this point by this sort of democratic effort to define him, which has been picked up, you know, very vigorously by his Republican opponents. I mean, I have seen things that were, you know, written on TPM one day and were turned into a Gingrich anti-Romney out the next day. And I mean, it's just, it's kind of amazing to watch how much of the democratic anti-Romney message is being picked up by his Republican opponents at this point. I haven't really seen the anti-Obama message yet. I think this is all this sort of, you know, pre-game. I think the real thing in the general election is gonna be amazing, I think. I think negative. I imagine whether the president has 50 opposition researchers already working for him in Chicago, and I'm guessing it's not because those 50 people are gonna be going door to door. Okay, we're gonna do some questions now. We have 10 or 15 minutes, so I'll start in the back. Yes, sir, in the black. Yes, sir, yes. Please wait for the microphone and identify yourself. Jim Snyder, a former American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in Communications Policy, and also one of former colleagues, Robert, maybe also Ken, Tim Cook was one of my dissertation advisors in political communications. He was also a communications policy fellow in Congress. So, one, a comment, just a caveat on this, about 500,000 elected positions in the United States. The presidential election is clearly the most important, but it's still only one. And it often happens that local and state politics are qualitatively different than federal elections. There's not just a matter of sort of trickle down, you know, what works in terms of analysis at the national level applies at a local level. It's often very different, and unfortunately, as an academic who wants to go work at a major university or speak at a major think tank like this, you've gotta focus on presidential elections, and that's what you study, and it's unfortunate, because sometimes I think we have to be very cautious about the inferences that we make from studying this one type of election. But my question relates to something different, and that is in order to get these ads on the airways, you have to go through a gateway, which is your local TV broadcaster. And I have never seen, I haven't followed literature in more than a decade, a study about how broadcasters exercise their discretion and possibly abuse their power. They have inside information as to when these ads are gonna run, and many of the marketing directors at these local TV stations work for politicians on their campaigns, give them advice, getting heads up on negative campaigns is a big issue. One of the commentators mentioned, well, both sides can do this as fair. Well, not necessarily. Broadcasters do exercise discretion. The issue arises most when they have a direct economic ownership interest on an issue. There are lots of anecdotes in the literature about broadcasters exercising this discretion, but I've seen no academic study. So the question is, do you feel that the gateway to getting on the air, the local broadcasters are significant players in any way in shaping what happens. I don't think it happens at a presidential election, but I do think at a local level, they have a lot of discretion over what they carry and don't carry. Well, they certainly have, the third-party ads are not entitled to say anything they want. The broadcasters have more control over what they air and what they don't. And I think in some cases, those broadcasters, a lot of exercise, they're right to insist that this be accurate. A lot of times it takes a lawsuit by the candidate forcing the station to do that, but, and I think most stations don't wanna get into the business of playing umpire, but they have that right. Yes, sir, in the blue shirt. Hi, I'm Mark Nadell, I'm just independent. The message I get from all of you is that negative is not up this year. I mean, overall, if you look back to 1800, wherever it's been there, so that's kind of stable. My question is, what is going up? Is it spending per capita on advertising? Is it that negative ads are more misleading in that having super PACs advertise will lead to even greater percentage of misleading ads? And lastly, I think Ken mentioned that he didn't think his role was to criticize, I'm not criticized, when there are misleading ads out there that it's the voters to decide, but I thought the press is supposed to go after misleading ads to correct things. Well, I'm not the press, but no, I think the press does discuss these ads and I think they do. I mean, if anything, the press probably discusses the ads too much. It's, thank God, it was my career, but it's like catnip for people in journalists getting the advertising information. What's different about this year? And I think this actually will be a nice segue into the discussion about why commercial advertisers tend to not go as negative. This is an unusually negative primary. And the reason why people tend to not go negative in a primary is not because it's a family, family fights can sometimes be more brutal, right? It's because sometimes you'll have multi-person races. And so the 2004, Howard Dean Richard Gephardt, it's famously called a murder suicide in Iowa, where Dean went after Gephardt, Gephardt went after Dean, and then Kerry and Edwards were able to take one and two in Iowa. And I think actually a bit of Santorum can be explained by Romney and Gingrich going after each other so heavily in Iowa, there wasn't much advertising in New Hampshire actually, in Iowa, in South Carolina, in Florida. And what happens is, one of the reasons, and I'm making this up, I'll hear from the people who really know what they're talking about, one of the reasons why Burger King might not go after McDonald's is because if they go after McDonald's, well, it then benefits Wendy's. And in a general election where you only have two candidates, you don't worry about that. So there's no disincentive to going negative. So I do think there has been an unusually high level of negative advertising in this particular presidential primary. I think that's what's different. And also the ability of, you know what Jane was saying, I mean, the groups are obviously a big deal. And it used to be you'd win a primary, you'd get a little momentum, and then it would take you a week or two to raise some money to then go get on the air. Now, a win can be a $5 million check within 30 minutes. And then that can be wired right to the television stations. So also the speed of which that momentum can happen in chain is different, I think. The speed is really a difference now, you were talking about how you can see something on a website one day and then add the next day. The Willie Horton ad that you wrote about was surfaced by Al Gore. The information months before McCarthy actually ran it, that seems like almost an acquaint period of time now. Third row, you're right. It was in a Democrat debate. And in a primary debate, yes, third row, yes. I may leave you a freelance writer. Under Citizens United, is there disclosure? How do we know if foreign entities are putting money into American politics? Well, Under Citizens United, is there disclosure? It allows, the super PACs, it seems to me, a lot of people are confused and think that there's no disclosure of who's giving you the super PACs. That money is disclosed and you can figure out who it is and that's why you know about Foster Fries and Adelson and people like that. But there are other categories that are on the margins, the 501C3s and 501C4s. And 501C4s, you do not know where the money is coming from. And they're not supposed to be explicitly involved in electioneering. But the lines have just gotten so muddy. They were somewhat muddy before Citizens United, but what people tell me is that Citizens United was seen as a green light that basically told people with a lot of money that might wanna give it secretly. Don't worry, you're not gonna be prosecuted. Before, it was kind of iffy legally and a lot of people didn't wanna take the risk. Now no one's worrying about taking the risk. They're just throwing the money out there. That's at least how I read it. Yes, sir. It's like a third row back. Hi. Don Blowey's former DDB creative and now with senior creative people. We were talking about the history of negative advertising and we see how far back it's gone and that it continues and that it's not in many ways very different. However, due to Citizens United, isn't there much more of it along with the connectivity that we have today with the internet and everything else? Isn't there a much greater flood of it so that while it may not be different in content, it's different in quantity? You know, listen, I think one would have to, and I'm careful of speaking about things without the data, but I imagine if you went back to the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, one you had a much more robust print journalism, some multiple newspapers in particular markets. Some of those markets and some of those newspapers were more directly partisan than we would be used to having newspapers now. So Fox News as a TV station or MSNBC as a news station, that was sort of the norm for many newspapers and how they did coverage in this country. So, is there more negative television advertising? Apps, you know, absolutely. Are there more negative things being said? I don't know, what was said at the bar before? What was said in speeches before? What was said in places of worship before? What was said in partisan newspapers before? What was said in newsletters before? What was said on the radio before? I don't know, I don't have the empirical evidence, but I guess I'd be suspicious that it was the good old days. Yeah, if the money just keeps going up and up. Right, I mean, you're talking about two and a half billion. What was it last time in 2008 on ads? It was nothing like two and a half billion. I mean, it wasn't that much less than that. Compared to inflation, it's not, it's one of the sectors of the economy that's booming apparently is political ads. What you're seeing in the advertising is, I mean, the big effect of a lot of these campaign finance decisions, sort of the twin of McCain-Fine Cold, the bipartisan campaign reform act, and then the Citizens United decision is what it's really done is weakened parties. So if you look at the size of the pie, the size of the pie in terms of spot advertising on television has not grown tremendously. Now there's obviously the internet and there's other ways of communicating. But the slices of the pie are different, where the slice that the party controls has gotten much smaller. The slice that candidates control has stayed about the same, but the slice that these groups control is much bigger. So what sort of the decision in McConnell versus FEC and then the Citizens United, together what they've really done has made it very difficult for parties to be major players in terms of the message ad war. All right, and if you look at the groups who's in the groups, basically the voice that's gotten amplified are the voice of the super wealthy. The people who can give a million dollars is a lot louder this time around than it's ever been before, or 10 million. We have time for one more. Edward McBride with The Economist. Can you tell me about people who try and be positive? I mean, obviously we've already discussed the example of Gingrich piously saying he wasn't gonna do negative ads and getting hammered and then deciding actually negative ads were a great thing. But what about, I don't know, in 2010, Hickenlooper in Colorado who did that spot of himself in the shower, which I'm sure some of you remember. If you sort of trumpet yourself as being positive, does that make any headway with voters? Is there any evidence on that? Oh, Obama's entire 2009 campaign was based on that. I mean, yes, there was the negative ads in the contest with McCain and arguing over the economy. But without his positive message, I mean, the whole thing was based on the idea of hope and change. And it's been sort of interesting to watch the very few videos that the Obama campaign has actually put out so far where they're trying to figure out how to continue that positive message and highlight his accomplishments as a president and put that out there in an environment where there's a lot of criticism of him. I was struck by how bad can the negative ads really be if in a debate which we saw on Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Ron Paul simply looked at Rick Santorum and said, you're a fake. That's gonna conclude. I wanna thank Ken and Granz and Bob and Jane. I wanna thank you. I wanna thank New America for having us. And we'll do this again.