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Brooks Jackson

Brooks Jackson is the director of Annenberg Political Fact Check, a nonpartisan, nonprofit effort to monitor the accuracy of political statements and advertisements. He has authored two books on the American political system and was a reporter for The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN.

Sara Fritz interviewed Jackson on July 9, 2007.

Not all attack ads are false or have false information in them.

No.

But how prevalent is it for a candidate to run an ad that is false or is based on some stretching of the truth?

Well, I think it’s fair to say, we end up criticizing attack ads more often than we do the kind of “feel good” ads that might show the candidate and spouse and golden retriever and children and stuff.

Do you even check the positive ones?

Well, of course we do.

Oh, you do?

It’s possible for a positive ad to be just as false as an attack ad. There is no question about that. Attack ads tend to have more information in them. Positive ads tend to be more or less fact-free. So there is not much for us to check. The classic example would be Ronald Reagan’s reelection ad from 1984: “It’s morning again in America.” So what do you do, call the weather bureau? I mean that was a metaphor. It wasn’t a factual claim.

And positive ads tend to be that way. Not always, but candidates certainly have made false claims about their credentials, false claims about their achievements in a previous office or previously in the same office, and made all kinds of misrepresentations in a positive way about themselves. But others have observed — in fact, I was just going through a book here, In Defense of Negativity by John Geer. He finds that attack ads tend to have more evidence in them, that they tend to, in other words, make more factual claims.

Right. He is not saying that they tend to be true.

No. As a matter of fact, they tend to be criticized more often than the positive ads. He says, not necessarily, because they are by their nature more deceptive, but just by their nature, they contain more factual claims, more evidence. So there is more to check out.

Why is it illegal to make a claim about a consumer product that’s false and it’s not illegal if you make a false claim about a candidate?

Well, because what was ratified as the very first amendment to our Constitution was the notion that Congress shall make no law affecting freedom of speech. And one long-departed justice was fond of saying, “No law means no law.” So the whole notion of the First Amendment freedom of speech rests on the idea that candidates for office especially ought to be able to speak their minds. And it’s up to the voters to sort things out after hearing all sides.

So it’s just a fact that even if Congress were to try to enact some law that carried penalties for making statements that somebody deemed to be false or misleading in some way, the courts would look at that very skeptically. In fact, they have looked very skeptically at a number of state laws and have struck down a number of state attempts to accomplish this very thing. There are only three states that I know of that have tried to enact serious truth in political advertising legislation, and the courts force them to amend, in some cases, those laws.

There is only one that I know of that really stands out as having a good enforcement mechanism, in Ohio, where they have a pretty active and nonpartisan state elections commission. I think they put an “s” after it. But even though there have been cases, and we cite one on our website, where they were able to adjudicate an ad as being false before the election actually occurred — this is amazing.

The Federal Elections Commission sometimes takes months, and used to take even years after the election to find violations of campaign spending laws. But in this case, the case I am thinking of, the Ohio Elections Commission found that an ad run by candidate [Bob] Taft for governor, some years back, was false. And they issued that finding before the voters went to the polls, and Taft was elected anyway. There was no fine, because if they had tried to impose a fine, it would have gone into the courts and would, of course, disappeared for months and months and maybe been handled long after the election.

So the upshot is that even in states that have tried this, and the one, in particular, that’s tried it with a pretty vigorous enforcement mechanism, it really isn’t much protection at all.

But this law in Ohio still stands.

Yes, so far as I know. Last time I checked it did. And it’s still enforced by a pretty independent commission. But to stand the test of the courts, and not be a violation of the candidate’s freedom of speech, there can be no — I mean look at it this way. Who wants some government official deciding whether what a candidate says is true or false? Would you have wanted John Ashcroft to be hauling John Kerry’s campaign manager into court for making some statement that he considered false? Or Bobby Kennedy to have been going after some Republican? I mean it’s difficult for me, anyway, to conceive of what government functionary you would put in charge of determining what’s true. That’s our job as voters, and it’s the job of the press to help us. And I don’t think the press does a very good job of that.

You don’t [think they do]?

No, I don’t. By and large, I think the press is pretty timid, and I wish that every news organization attacked it as aggressively as we do. And then I could retire and go fishing.

I assume that’s the inspiration for this organization.

Well, we found an audience almost by accident. I did this sort of thing for CNN and found that, at the time I was doing it, viewers reacted very positively. After a while, CNN management was more interested in pursuing other kinds of news stories, missing blond teenagers, etc. There wasn’t room for me at CNN. And now they don’t do so much of that anymore, if any.

And I needed a job. And Kathleen Jamieson, who also shares my view that this sort of thing ought to be pursued more aggressively, said: “Well, come over. And we’ll write a book about deception of the 2004 election. And from time to time you can post your findings on the Internet.” Well, the findings on the Internet became FactCheck.org.

And suddenly, the tail was wagging the dog. We were getting 300,000 and 400,000 visits per day, and it just astonished us the kind of public reaction we had to this thing. And we had what was, I think in Kathleen’s mind, something that was going to be around for a while and then fold after the 2004 election. We’d go on to other things. [But it] became something we couldn’t walk away from.

So it’s been expanded. And we now have a much deeper staff than we had before. We have an educational website trying to encourage teachers to teach the habits of thought that we pursue here. Teach them how to check out, look for evidence; how to smell a rat in a deceptive statement; and how to think about things and find reliable information; where to find it, especially on the Internet.

So I don’t want to say it’s been an accident. But it was a surprise to us that there was such an appetite for this among rank-and-file voters. We thought we’d be primarily a service for a small-, medium-sized news organizations where the reporters were one-person orchestras trying to cover a whole campaign without the luxury of time to check into some of these policy statements.

But it’s the voters who are more interested.

Yeah, we got lots of reporters and talk show hosts. But when we did a user survey after 2004, we found that reporters made up about 2 percent of our subscriber base. You can sign up to get our e-mails for nothing. And 10 percent were teachers. And many of them were already using the stuff in class, hence our educational website.

So yeah, I think, from our experience, there is a deep hunger among voters for reliable information, especially when they hear candidate “A” saying, “The sky is purple,” and candidate “B” saying, “No. It’s more black.” Well, they both can’t be right and maybe neither of them is. People want some sort of neutral, trustworthy source, and we try to be that to sort things out for them or help them sort things out.

It’s always been standard wisdom that negative ads worked.

Well, sometimes they work, sometimes they backfire. I mean you take Pat Buchanan’s ad run against George H.W. Bush in Georgia accusing him of using taxpayer’s money to put on a homoerotic documentary. And people looked at it and Georgia Republicans, who are not a real liberal lot, in my experience, thought that was way over the top, and it backfired. And it just took Pat Buchanan’s eyebrows off, politically speaking. And you see ads like that all of the time. So look, we are not in a posture where we are criticizing ads just for being negative. A negative ad can be very useful.

I mean if the candidate who is running for office really was a child molester, and the ad says so, most voters, I think, would find that to be valuable information. Where we are going to have a problem is if the ad says they are a child molester, and there is nothing to it. That is false and deceptive and out of bounds, and we jump on it. And we think news organizations ought to as well.

As the story is told, Willie Horton becomes kind of the beginning of the modern era of negative ads and ones that push the truth. But there have been lots of negative . . .

Well, that was part of it. And my co-author and boss, Kathleen Jamieson, argues pretty strongly that there were misleading factual claims made in those ads. I wasn’t doing fact-checking at that time. But it’s absolutely true. David Broder wrote a very influential column about that time; the Horton ad was part of it. He just thought that the whole election had been decided on the basis of advertising that wasn’t very useful. There were issues raised about flag burning and other symbolic things that were part of it.

His argument was that the press ought to do a much better job of looking at the advertising, because we were kind of in a 19th century mode of covering candidate stump speeches, when most voters experience candidates through the tube. And often, candidates were saying one thing to live audiences, but sending a different message, especially the negative messages, through TV ads. So Broder’s column brought a response. A lot of news organizations started doing this sort of thing in the 1992 presidential election.

And his column was based on the Willie Horton ad, or it was prompted by . . .?

It was on that, on the whole campaign.

But it was prompted by . . .?

In part by the Willie Horton ad. I think it’s saying too much to say that one ad really prompted a movement. That’s not true at all. And frankly, my opinion was that the Willie Horton ad wasn’t as effective as a lot of Democrats made it out to be. I mean the idea that, but for that ad, Michael Dukakis would have won, I think goes way too far. There were lots of reasons Michael Dukakis didn’t do better in that election.

If I recall correctly, and you know more about this, that ad was seen as particularly extraordinary, because they pulled out a very small piece of information and blew it up. Is that why that was such a . . .?

Well, I am not an expert on what works and what doesn’t work. And my opinion about what that ad did or didn’t do really doesn’t stand for much.

But it was controversial.

Oh, absolutely. And there are actually two ads, at least, that made reference to Willie Horton. One of them was run by the [George W.] Bush campaign. And it didn’t show Mr. Horton’s image. It was an independent group that ran the ad that showed William Horton, I think is his given name, in a sort of Nick Nolte type mug shot, where he really looked particularly scary.

And he was a scary guy. He had done some pretty awful things. But he was also an African-American, and in the minds of many people, it was a racist element to this. That Michael Dukakis is soft on black rapists coming after your women, or something like that. So it was not the Bush campaign that had showed Horton’s mug shot. It was an independent group.

But then, you say, they picked it up and used it in their own ads?

No, no, no, no. The Bush campaign . . .

But not the pictures.

Actually, it was Al Gore who first raised this in the primaries. He had brought up the whole business of prison furloughs and the Horton incident. So Al Gore, then running against Dukakis in the Democratic primaries, was the first to bring this issue up as evidence that Dukakis, as governor, was somehow soft on crime and criminals, in general. The idea of a prison furlough program, to people who just figure we ought to lock them up and throw away the key, well, he was giving them the key. That was the idea.

So as often happens, themes that are first used in a primary against the eventual nominee get used by the other party, if it looks like they are going to get any traction. The big issue that people talked about afterward was the propriety of using this black man’s image in the ad.

I see. So it was the race . . .

It was not the Bush campaign that did it. Some people were suspected that the group wasn’t all that independent, but there was never any finding afterward that there had been any coordination. The Federal Election Commission does look at this stuff when it can. And if they could have found any, there would have been a fine and some repercussions, but none was forthcoming.

The inheritor of that was Floyd Brown.

I believe that is correct. 

And the inheritor of his organization has been Citizens United, the David Bossie organization.

Is that right? Yeah, I’ll take your word for it. 

I thought maybe, have you paid attention to Citizens United?

Well, I think we just ran an article the other day about David Bossie, as a matter of fact. Let me refresh my memory here, if you’ll permit me.

I didn’t see it.

Yeah. David Bossie produced an ad in which Newt Gingrich appears claiming that the immigration bill that was at that time before the Senate, and it would have represented a compromise of sorts on addressing our somewhat broken down immigration system.

Gingrich claimed the bill would have granted residency to gang members and potential terrorists and all sorts of other things that if you read the bill, it wouldn’t do. That was a very misleading ad. And I don’t know if Bossie’s responsible, or Gingrich, primarily. But we criticized it pretty severely.

No, I did see that headline. But I didn’t realize it was that.

That’s a Citizens United ad. So yeah, as recently as June 27 we are on their case.

Have you ever run into Floyd Brown again in business?

It seems like he popped up here and there, but I get more focused on the content of the ad than the personality behind it.

I want to talk about 2004. But between 1988 and 2004, were there any famously false ads?

‘88 and 2004?

The Willie Horton to Swift Boats.

Well, goodness, I think I mentioned the Pat Buchanan ad in Georgia, which was in addition to having just a distasteful tone to it, which is what backfired in Buchanan’s case. It also took some liberties. It had actually been Ronald Reagan, I believe, who had approved the grant that eventually funded the documentary, not Bush, as alleged. And there was some irony in the fact that Buchanan was saying, “George Bush is using your tax money for this.” Well, Buchanan was using the matching funds for his campaign, using tax money to put on the ad which repeated some of the distasteful scenes that he was objecting to, so the hypocrisy of it was kind of amusing.

They were kind of earmark projects or something. Weren’t they?

But look, there have been any number of ads that have been misleading, out of context, in some cases just outrageously false. They don’t always get blamed for a candidate whose poor performance is being attacked. That, I think, is why I remember the Willie Horton ad today. Because it became, for a lot of Democrats, the thing that if they just hadn’t run that awful ad, our guy would have [won]. Well, come on, there were other problems as well.

Well, let’s move on to the Swift Boats. I assume you followed that pretty closely.

Yeah, we wrote a number of articles.

And you are a Vietnam veteran, too.

That’s true.

So I would assume it would be kind of some interest to you.

Well, that’s right. In fact, I haven’t really talked about this publicly, but I passed up the opportunity to volunteer for Swift Boats when I was serving on a United States Navy cruiser and in the South China Sea back in that period. This sounded like a good way to get shot at. And I figured, I was doing enough where I was. And I wasn’t looking for trouble.

So I have admiration for John Kerry and anybody who took on that very dangerous duty. It turned out to be more dangerous than they thought. When I was first asked if I wanted to, I was a lieutenant junior grade at the time, and they were looking for junior officers to skipper these things. And the idea was that they were getting close to shore. And they would try to intercept the flow of arms and men that was coming down in these small, light shallow draft vessels along the coast of North Vietnam. And there was sort of a Ho Chi Minh trail by water that was being operated at the time. Now that’s at night. And all of that’s thrilling enough for me to think, “I’ll stay on board this big cruiser and put in my time and go home and go to graduate school,” which is what I did.

Later they started running these things up the rivers, in very close quarters, where you were liable to be ambushed from other side at any minute. And to what purpose, I am still not clear. Some people say Elmo Zumwalt, who was CNO [Chief of Naval Operations] at the time, wanted his Navy guys to get their share of medals. And so he was happy to provide these guys.

So look, it was very dangerous duty. And the men who commanded these boats and served on them were all volunteers, I believe. And they were doing their duty as they saw it. Take nothing away from John Kerry for what he did there. But, at the end of the day, you had a very small group of officers who had served together, not on the same boat, but on the boats running 20, 30 feet from each other and docking at the same docks and drinking in the same bars after work. You had people who just remembered things, and apparently saw things very differently 35 years later and halfway around the world.

A lot of people think today the Swift Boat ad as being like the Willie Horton ad, responsible somehow for John Kerry’s defeat. We could not find anything stated in those ads that was false. I’d have to go back and check. But I don’t know exactly what it is in those ads that people think would be factually, provably false. There were eyewitness accounts that were different from Kerry’s accounts.

They were simply conflicting?

They were conflicting. Two groups of men on the same narrow river at the same time agree on one thing, that the swift boats were — I am talking about the incident in which Kerry won his Silver Star. Everybody agrees that the swift boats were firing rapidly at the shore. These are big 50-caliber machine guns. And there are four of them out at quad 50s. And they make a lot of racket. And so there were bullets flying. There is no question about it.

There is a difference of opinion, now, years later, about whether there was any fire from the beach. Now if you have ever been around a 50-caliber machine gun firing, and I have only on very controlled circumstances, they make a lot of racket, and that gets your heart pumping. So it’s entirely plausible to me that everybody is telling the truth as they remember it.

Well, in fact, the lawyers will tell you, the least valuable information is eyewitness accounts.

And we have social science research and criminologist research year after year after year proving the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. So we reported that the initial funding for that ad came from the biggest Republican contributor in Texas. And that is certainly a factor that anybody who wants to evaluate this sort of thing should take into consideration. That’s not to say that anything in the ad is false, or anybody’s intentionally making things up.

So it became notable, in part, because it was the sort of part of the debut of 527s?

It is notable, because it’s independent spending. It’s not part of the Bush campaign. And a group like this can take money from anybody they want and pretty much say anything they want and attack a candidate in any way they please. And there had been some restrictions on when 527s could run this kind of ad using corporate or union money. The Supreme Court just knocked some of that down.

So yeah, we are in an era where there are millions of dollars available for running ads that, well, it could be positive or negative, but our concern is that a lot of them are not factually accurate. I would not put the Swift Boat ad up as a prime example of a false ad, because I can’t prove it’s false. We can note discrepancies. We can note that one of the former enlisted men, who is among those saying “nobody was shooting at us from the beach,” also got a decoration in that very same incident. And the paperwork, at least, says he got a Silver Star, or maybe it was a Bronze Star. But in any case, his citation says he came under fire. So now he is saying he wasn’t under fire, and he professed to be all flustered and unable to explain that.

So that’s definitely a discrepancy that would make any reasonable person think, “Well, maybe their memory . . .” If he was willing to accept that award years ago on the basis he was being shot at, and now he’s saying he wasn’t. I am not going to put a whole lot of weight on what that guy says. And we reported that. It was originally reported, I think, by The Washington Post, if I am not mistaken, but in any case, other good reporters.

So we present the evidence we can present. But in this case, I don’t think it’s a matter that anybody can say — in fact, I believe The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and a colleague dug in very deeply in this and concluded that they couldn’t prove that the Swift Boat ads were wrong, and you couldn’t prove Kerry was right, either. You couldn’t prove either side was right or wrong 35 years later and halfway around the world.

Some people would say, “Well look, it’s right there in Kerry’s citation.” Well, yeah, it is, which was written up by somebody back in Saigon weeks later who was not there at the time, and who relied on somebody else’s eyewitness testimony, which, as you just pointed out, is notoriously unreliable.

So there were plenty of false ads. But in 2004 and previously, I wouldn’t put the Swift Boat ad up as example of a false ad, a provably false ad. It was certainly one that Kerry disputed and apparently was very effective; at least Kerry came to think so. And the tacticians will tell you, he should have mounted a much more effective response to that. Well, that’s tactics. That’s not truth or fact. So that’s not the sort of thing I concern myself with.

From looking at your website, from the ones that you went through in 2004, some of them it was hard for me to tell the origin of the ad. But they seemed to be, actually, from the Bush and Kerry campaigns.

Well, you are talking about what’s on our website from 2004.

They seemed to be primarily campaign ads and not independent.

I have not gone back and surveyed. We looked at everything. And we looked at Swift Boat Veterans. We looked at, oh goodness, there is an independent group — actually, one of the most factually incorrect ads.

This is VoteVets?

Well, this is from 2006, you are talking about.

Oh. VoteVets is 2006.

Yeah.

OK. We are talking 2004 now.

Right. There is the sort of the whoppers of 2004. A few days before the election we ran kind of a recap thing. There was a Bush ad misrepresenting Kerry’s health care proposal, a Kerry ad claiming Bush is going to cut Social Security benefits. Well, we get around to independent groups. Here are some of the independents: The Media Fund. That’s right.

Who was Clinton’s deputy White House chief of staff back in the Chinese money scandals? Son of FDR’s former interior commissioner.

Oh, Ickes.

Harold Ickes. They ran $47 million worth of ads. Maybe it was more by the time of the election. We did two on them. They had a radio ad — I don’t know if you are interested in those.

Yeah.

But this kind of recycled something that had only been implied in the Michael Moore movie, that kind of Bush let that plane load of Saudis go before any other planes were flying. It was a week after the airspace had been opened. I mean it was just, Moore was terrible, but our headline on this was the Media Fund was distorting the truth even more than Michael Moore.

And another ad that Ickes did, let’s see, this is back in May 2004. They had some false claims in that ad that showed the Enron sign going up in front of the White House. What did they do? It implied Bush hadn’t acted to protect pensions.

And this is another one that said he didn’t provide a real prescription drug benefit. What do they mean by real? When they complain it costs even more than they said it did. And they were all up in arms about that. It was not as much as they wanted, but I never quite got the criticism of that. But basically, what they are complaining about was that this should have been a Democratic bill. And we’re not getting credit for it. So the Media Fund was a prime trafficker in false and misleading ads. We had Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

And then MoveOn.

A couple of articles on those — MoveOn.org, oh God, yes. Well, I would say their assault weapons ad was one of the worst. Let’s see if this will play. This is the one I am talking about.

[MoveOn.org ad]: This is an assault weapon. It can fire up to 300 rounds a minute.

True.

[MoveOn.org ad]: It’s the weapon most feared by our police. In the hands of terrorists, it could kill hundreds.

True.

[MoveOn.org ad]: That’s why they’re illegal.

True.

[MoveOn.org ad]: John Kerry, a sportsman and a hunter, would keep them illegal.

True.

[MoveOn.org ad]: On September 13, George Bush will let the assault weapon ban expire.

True. However, assault weapon ban doesn’t cover automatic weapons. They have been illegal since the days of Machine Gun Kelly. And they remain illegal. The assault weapon ban, the title of that legislation, in fact, is inaccurate and misleading. It’s just like “death tax.”

That’s an example of Democrats and liberals framing an issue successfully with a title that invites an erroneous conclusion. Well, of course, who wouldn’t want to ban assault weapons? Well, what it banned was weapons that look scary, and some argued, could be easily converted. But that was already illegal.

This is a wonderful example of a completely false ad that manages to make statements that, each of them taken individually are true, but what it implies is that Bush was going to allow weapons that could fire up to 300 rounds a minute and in the hands of a terrorist could kill hundreds, to become legal, which is absolutely false. And by the way, he said he supported the assault weapons ban. What they were faulting him for was not somehow getting Tom DeLay to agree with him. Well, good luck on that. And there were a lot of Democrats who were quietly, I think, relieved to see that thing go off the books, because it was so ineffective and really had been sold to the public on a false premise.

So yeah, there was that MoveOn and several others. They showed one that we criticized. I mean, frankly, it got a little embarrassing for us that we found ourselves criticizing MoveOn.org so regularly, just because their ads seemed to provide more material for us more often then other groups.

They had one showing George Bush or some guy wearing cowboy boots with George Bush’s initials on them quietly or sneakily, literally, pulling the rug out from under some middle class couple of senior citizens. And they go flying on their butts. And it’s as though giving people this enormously expensive drug benefit was somehow equivalent to physically assaulting.

Well, I understand the Democrats, many of them, wanted a more generous benefit than Bush enacted, or that got through Congress by one vote, in the House anyway. But to imply that because it’s not more generous, it’s somehow beating up on people, we thought went over the top.

Oh, and National Rifle Association.

[NRA Ad]: John Kerry says he’s a sportsman. So why did he vote to ban deer hunting ammunition and vote nine times to ban guns? Why is Kerry sponsoring a bill in the Senate that would ban every semiautomatic shotgun and every pump shotgun? If John Kerry is really a sportsman, why is he endorsed by groups that want to restrict your gun rights and outlaw hunting? “Well, I think we ought to tax all ammunition. I think we ought to tax guns.” Kerry a sportsman? That dog don’t hunt.

He’s a poodle.

I know.

A French poodle.

You have got to give them credit for the French poodle. Well, that aside, how credible do you think it is that John Kerry wanted to ban deer hunting ammunition?

I doubt.

When you look at the bill that they are referring to, it’s armor-piercing ammunition. And their argument is that any high velocity rifle could pierce a police vest. But the wording in the bill says ammunition designed and marketed as armor piercing. So there are plenty of independent groups that we criticized.

Although there were also plenty of campaign [ads].

Oh, yeah. Well, you are right.

Yeah. There tends to be this sort of idea that the independent groups have really fostered the negative campaign ads, when really, most of them came from [campaigns].

Oh, you can say this. I can’t give you metrics. I can’t measure it. But you go back to the days of the National Conservative Political Action Committee — I know you were just a slip of a girl then, Sara, but probably you have read about this in the history books later. Here is a group that ran nothing but negative ads, and it was the first big money independent attack ad operation that we had seen. And that’s 1980.

And they took credit, I think, far more than they were actually due, for defeating six liberal Democratic senators. And it’s true, they were defeated, but I think the clock was going to be up on some of those guys, at least, anyway.

So they were independent ads before.

But they were independent ads. Now the organization is a little different. We think of 527s, because of their legal organization. But really, it’s the same thing. It’s an independent group outside of the control of a candidate, or at least disguising any connections it might have to a candidate, raising money to either support the guy they want or attack the person they don’t. So this is nothing new.

One thing that got them a bad reputation was that they were undisclosed for a while.

Well, it’s true. Even now, the laws are such that it’s sometimes difficult or impossible to tell who’s behind some of these ads. And people want to know who is saying this stuff. And they should. I think they have a right to do that. I wish the laws were a little tighter and even better enforced than they are.

What I started to say, though, is I think it’s fair to say that independent groups tend to be more negative. Sometimes, as in the case of NCPAC, or frankly, in the case of MoveOn, now on the liberal side, totally 100 percent or close to it is negative. There was one group that actually surprised me, one of the big 527s. I mean the pattern has been, for independent groups, to be predominantly negative, sometimes totally negative.

I could speculate about the reasons for that. I think it’s easier to raise money for that sort of thing. People who are just really highly motivated to give money tend to be people who are really sore about something and really can’t stand the idea that this candidate or that candidate is going to get in. It’s not so much that they support the other person. But they just can’t stand the person who they are attacking. That’s why they get the checkbooks open.

That’s definitely a stronger emotion.

But that pattern was broken, notably, by one group in 2004, so it’s not always true. Brian McCabe is the guy who came and spoke at our group. Progress for America Voter Fund claimed after the election that they had spent 28 million dollars on TV alone. And let’s see, a big chunk of that was for a TV ad called Ashley’s Story.

Oh, yes. I know what you mean, with the hug.

Totally positive. This was George [W.] Bush hugging the little girl whose mother had died in 9/11. I guess they thought that was a terribly effective ad, because it showed this compassionate side of Bush, showed him in a very positive light.

But that ad really stood out. Because it was — I don’t want to say the exception that proves the rule, because exceptions don’t prove rules; that’s a stupid aphorism. But it stood out, because you expect groups like that, basically, to be attacking Kerry, not praising Bush, so it really was a standout.

This is extremely helpful to me. With these independent ads, is there a tendency on the part of the campaign to then pick it up in some kind of watered-down form? Or am I asking too much of you?

No, I don’t think so. What you do see, because the law says that an independent group can’t coordinate with a candidate, they can’t get together and say, “OK, you run the really nasty stuff. And we’ll run the milder stuff.”

But this isn’t rocket science. What the independent groups do frequently, in my experience, is they watch the themes that are being put forth by the campaign. The Willie Horton ad’s a classic case. Here is one that I mentioned Gore came up with originally, but the [George H. W.] Bush campaign had raised that issue — Bush in speeches and also in an ad that showed a revolving door at the prison gate. And it didn’t show an image of Mr. William Horton, the convict. And the announcer went over some of the awful things that had happened in that case.

So it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure they think this Horton business is a winner. But they can’t take it as far as we can, because it might backfire on them. So we’ll take it. And we’ll run with that theme. We know they think it’s a winner. We’ll take it and do an even stronger ad. NCPAC’s founder [Terry Dolan] famously said that one of the great things about an independent group was that, [“A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate stays clean.”] It’s a pretty good principle.

What you have said here would tend to dispute when politicians talk about 527s or any independent group; they say, “Oh, we don’t like this, because it takes it out of our hands.”

Well, they don’t.

I know. But by and large, it seems we are talking about ads that have helped candidates.

Well, yes and no. They can blow up. I don’t think the public holds a candidate accountable, necessarily, for what some supporter might say, but there can be a crossover. But look, candidates want to control everything about their election. They don’t like it when somebody else is sending a message that might hurt them. But they’d rather that they got that money and that they controlled all of the messages. 

That’s just natural human tendency. I am not sure it’s a great big public policy issue that the rest of us ought to be worried about. Unless you are a candidate for office yourself, it’s not going to affect you. As a voter, I don’t see the problem with whether the candidate controls the message or some independent group controls the message.

As a voter, what we voters ought to be concerned about is know who is speaking. All right, this ad is from the candidate. I understand that. This ad is from the Realtor’s Association; well, I am going to believe that or not depending on my feelings about realtors. For example, they once did a lot of independent spending. Now they don’t do any.

Have you paid any attention to the idea of, for example, in ’04 Alex Castellanos did the ads for the [George W.] Bush campaign. And he also did some of the negative independent ads.

Is that right? At the same time?

Yes.

I don’t know. I think that’s kind of verboten now. You can’t use the same consultant, but check me on that.

The people who say that you can’t are people like Ben Ginsberg, who supports for representing the RNC and the Swift Boats.

Right. I never quite saw that as evidence of coordination.

Nowadays they talk about firewalls.

Yeah, within a media group. Well, theoretically, I suppose that would work. But it’s up to the Federal Election Commission to decide whether they are going to put up with that nonsense or not.

I haven’t seen any of them moving anything. What’s been the impact of your work? When you call these people and ask, “On what are you basing this?” do they have an answer, usually?

Oh, sure. One of the things that others, not just me, have pointed to is that once ad watches became widespread, in the run up to 1992, campaigns, parties, even independent organizations became much better about providing at least some sort of footnotes or citations as to where they are getting this stuff. So it is very rare, today, for us to approach a group saying, “Where are you getting this stuff?” And for them to say, “Screw off.”

In fact, the only group that did that recently was the National Republican Congressional Committee in the 2006 election. They just were adamant and, back to us anyway, would not supply backup for the ads that they were running when we asked for it. Basically, they told us if you are a station owner and you are not going to run the ad unless we provide backup, then we’ll provide it to you. But if you are a reporter, forget about it.

So that was kind of a hard-nosed attitude that I don’t think served them very well. They certainly ran a number of ads that we criticized. In some cases, we had to deduce where they were getting some of their stuff. One case they accused a candidate — this is a woman [Francine Busby] who ran in a California 50[th congressional district special election] who was a school board member — of running up a deficit in her school board. Well, what are the numbers? Where are you getting that stuff? They wouldn’t say.

So we went to the school board, and we got the actual numbers directly from the comptroller of that school board. And what it showed was that they had a substantial surplus at the end of each year. They go into each year with a reserve fund, and the reserve fund had diminished. But by the time they ended up, they spent down the reserve fund rather than raising school taxes. And they still had a reserve fund that was many times higher than the state law allowed. So yeah, the deficit spending increased, but that really wasn’t the whole story.

There wasn’t truly a deficit.

But, yeah, for the most part people will give you some sort of citations. Now that’s where the fun starts. Because then you have to check the citations and see if they really support what the ad says. And, of course, our work would be so much easier if that were the end.

But I like to tell reporters that what I am always looking for is one of those Woody Allen moments. If you remember the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen is standing in line for a movie behind some crashing bore in a tweed jacket, this Columbia professor who is trying to snow his date by talking about Marshall McLuhan, and he is just getting it all wrong. And Woody Allen pipes up and says, “I don’t think that’s right.” He said, “Well, I am a professor at Columbia. And I know what I’m talking about.” And whereupon Woody Allen reaches behind the poster and pulls out Marshall McLuhan himself, who says, “Why no, that’s completely wrong. I didn’t say that at all.”

Well, there have been instances where we have gone to the author of a study that’s cited as evidence that this ad is right. And they say, “Why no, that ad completely misrepresents my study. It doesn’t support that at all.” And sometimes we find that. So that’s a good day when we produce one of those Woody Allen moments.

I would like you to tell me your experience with VoteVets.

VoteVets ran an ad, and they ran similar ads in other states, that said, “Senator George Allen [of Virginia] voted against giving our troops this,” while the fellow on the screen is holding up an armored vest. “Now it’s time for us to vote against him.” And on the screen, they show “Vote number 116 in the 108th Congress.” So they supplied their backup right in the ad.

Well, if you go to vote number 116 in the 108th Congress, what you find is that there was a proposal made by Senator [Mary] Landrieu, [Democrat from Louisiana], on the Senate floor about a week before the fall of Baghdad. The troops were already advancing into Iraq. And it would have provided $1 billion and a little more for unspecified equipment for the National Guard. There is no mention in the bill of body armor or any other specific equipment. We read the whole debate. Not one word about body armor was spoken by proponents for this bill or opponents for this bill. If that vote was about body armor, it was a mystery to all 100 senators.

And even beyond that, if we dug down and we were able to come up with a Government Accountability Office study of just exactly why there had been shortages of the more modern body armor, the distinction was between the old Kevlar vests, which had been standard issue up until two or three years before, and the new ceramic plate stuff that the military was beginning to phase in just as the war came along.

And what they found was that the Pentagon, long before the invasion actually took place, increased its orders for this ceramic plate armor tenfold. And because of supply bottlenecks, the Pentagon was buying up every single vest that the U.S. economy could produce. Another billion dollars wouldn’t have produced one single ceramic plate. So this is an example of an ad that is as false as it can be.

Our experience was that they were adamant, kept insisting that they were right. There was a liberal group that ran one or two articles on why we were wrong to point this out and making arguments that never addressed the central point, that body army not only wasn’t mentioned in this bill or in the debate. But this bill could not have resulted in any additional body armor purchases. So that’s basically our experience with them. They ran an ad that just did not stand close scrutiny. It was false.

George Allen did not vote against giving body armor. I mean what senator would? And by the way, this was originally a charge that was made by George [W.] Bush against John Kerry when he voted against the supplemental appropriation. And the Bush folks pointed out that some tiny fraction of the money would have provided some additional funds for body armor. It wouldn’t have produced additional body armor, as I just mentioned. So they originally accused Kerry of voting against body armor. And we criticized Bush at the time. This was even worse. The Democrats picked it up and tried to use it against Republicans.

Well, it’s pretty unusual for a group to fight back quite that hard?

Well, to be as adamant in error, yeah.

Do you know why? Do you have any idea why they didn’t . . .?

I can only speculate.

Please do.

Well, if you insist. Well, let’s put it this way. If this charge is believed, it’s terribly effective, because you want to vote against somebody who would vote against sending your modern body armor to your troops. The fact that it’s not true, I think, was a political inconvenience for them.

Frankly, I think this is an example of something we talk about in our book, Kathleen and I, unSpun. The psychology of deception is such that sometimes people who are making the charges are deceived themselves. Look, this is cognitive dissonance at work. When you believe something — we all do this — as human beings, we accept any little scrap of evidence that’s going to support us in our current beliefs. And we reject all kinds of evidence, however weighty and solid, that might force us into the very uncomfortable position of changing our minds and having to say, “I was wrong.” Nobody wants to do that. So I think this was an example of them becoming adamant that they were right and ignoring evidence, quite conclusive in my view, that they were wrong.

We have tried to follow the creation of VoteVets. Do you know about where this organization came from?

I can’t give you the personalities involved.

I do know that the general from Arkansas . . .

Wesley Clark?

Yeah. That he is now a big mover and shaker in that group.

He may be. I don’t know if he was then. As I said earlier, I tend to pay less attention to the personalities behind the ad than to the substance of what’s being said. But no, I have read stuff about them. And it just hasn’t stuck to the point where I put it out here. But it’s clearly a group that’s raised a lot of money. And there are, clearly, lots of Iraq war veterans who came back thinking this is an enterprise that shouldn’t continue. It’s a legitimate point of view. And we are not arguing against that. They are entitled to it, just as the Iraq veterans who come back and say, “We should stay the course,” are entitled to their opinion. But in this case, the ad was just outrageously wrong.

Let me just test this theory with you. Well, before I start looking into this subject, I thought the Republicans had done more of these independent attack ads in 2004. And it turns out not.

No. No, they were latecomers.

And, in fact, they were very critical to begin with.

If you want to get into it, why don’t you take this book [Electing the President 2004: The Insiders’ View]. This is a book that was published by Annenberg, and we put on a conference here on 527s. Start here on Chapter 6. I think the whole transcript is in there.

That’s fabulous. But because of Swift Boats, a lot of people got the idea that the Republicans were really heavily into it.

Well, what happened was, they fought it at first. When they saw that there were Democratic groups willing to raise and spend tons of money under the new rules of McCain-Feingold, they at first argued — and I think Ben Ginsberg was the lead counsel on this, if I am not mistaken — that this shouldn’t be allowed, and that any of this independent spending that MoveOn.org and the Media Fund and others eventually did would be illegal.

And, of course, they couldn’t very well be organizing their own independent spending operation while maintaining that it was all illegal. So they lost that. And they lost a lot of months of organization in the meantime. I forget how far this went, Appeals Court or where, but when the decision finally came down that, nope, this sort of stuff is allowed. The Republicans found themselves with no organization, no independent groups. And they had to scramble and play catch up, because in my experience, Republicans do not want to be put in the terribly embarrassing position of being outspent by Democrats. This is just not allowable. But they got a late start, and they raised tons of money.

And what you’ll find in there is a transcript. I think we had three groups on each side, maybe two groups from each side. I forget. But the Swift Boat folks were there, or at least the folks who did the ads. And it’s one of these campaign debriefings. You know how people won’t return your phone calls for months before.

Afterwards they want to tell you.

Then they want to do all kinds of chest beating about how much money they spent, and what a great job they did spending it. Well, this was that sort of thing. They came and talked about how effective they had been, both sides of course, and how much money they had spent. I think it’s a resource for anybody looking at independent groups, because that makes a record about what happened in 2004.