The Rake: What are the first questions you ask yourself—and the client—when you’re exploring the possibility of working with someone?
Hillsman: For us, the first thing is we want to know background on the candidate, we want to know what the situation is in the race. Can you see the moves you need to make to get to the goal line? Now maybe it won’t work out the way you hope, maybe you’ll get tackled or blocked, but can you see a route? That’s the key thing. We never want to take on a race where there’s no possibility of victory. If you can’t see a route to winning, you can’t take the candidate’s money. In Ventura’s case the route was clearly there. It was the first time any campaign played out almost exactly as we projected in the first week of October. Winning was a pretty big surprise, but we executed exactly the way I thought we needed to in order to have a chance. But I get disappointed more often than I get pleasantly surprised. This year in Massachusetts the Greens had a huge opportunity in the gubernatorial race. Because of the clean election law, a Green candidate for governor could have qualified for a couple million dollars in public financing. Which would have made the Green candidate, win or lose, a big factor in that race. But they blew it. They didn’t get enough signatures and enough small donations by the required date. That’s unbelievable—you can’t be a party if you can’t do those very basic things.
The Rake: Do you find yourself declining clients much?
Hillsman: Yeah. You still see a lot of bad actors out there. The worst is when a candidate basically says to you, “Okay, I’m in your hands, tell me who I have to be to get elected.” Then I say, “No, we don’t want to work with you.” Those are the worst candidates. They’re the ones who give politics a bad name. They’re only interested in being elected, and it’s only because of the power and prestige involved. There are a lot of them out there—rich people from the private sector who are bored and want more power, people in lower-level offices who got into politics strictly to try to climb to the top. There aren’t that many candidates who are really interested in serving the people. For as much as anybody might want to criticize Ventura, or call him selfish, he never lost sight of public service. He was always thinking about his constituency, which was not the powers-that-be but regular Joes. He did things to benefit himself, but he never crossed those people or betrayed them.
The Rake: Why did he trend down so dramatically in polls near the end of his term?
Hillsman: I think it’s personal style. I think people came to believe in the image of him put forth in the press. He railed at the media rather than making his own case. You have to remember that he doesn’t mind being a villain. Most people would run from that. But a lot of the time he thinks being a villain is more interesting than being a hero. That comes from the psychology of the wrestling world. If you can get 17,000 people in Madison Square Garden all hating you at the same moment, that’s a tremendous feeling of power. I think he was always comfortable with that. And he’s a professional provocateur. He’ll do things that are unexpected and sometimes probably not very well thought-out.
The Rake: Besides the element of humor, what sets your political ads apart from the rest?
Hillsman: They’re unexpected. People don’t expect good political ads. Other companies have tried to do them, but it’s hard. The Washington guys think it’s a different discipline from commercial advertising. It’s not. But the Washington guys were threatened. They make you jump through ridiculous hoops and they have this handed-down-from-the-mountain attitude about how political campaigns are run. Even good creative agencies have a hard time making the transition to political advertising. You have to be sensitive to a lot of things, including the rules and regulations for political advertising, that they aren’t used to dealing with in the private sector. The same is true of the budget constraints—maybe an agency can do great work but not for $7,000. Or they don’t know how to handle the placements. One of the saving graces in Ventura’s campaign was that even though we got our money really late and everybody was booked up, they had to make room for us owing to equal-time provisions.
The Rake: It always seemed that what set your ads apart is that they avoided the kind of conventional, political rhetoric that doesn’t really say anything—that’s designed not to say anything. They humanized the candidate by talking about politics in everyday language and images.
Hillsman: The funny thing is, the guys doing commercials now for Wellstone and Coleman think the way to humanize candidates is to put them with regular people. It’s a terrible thing to do because it only makes the candidate seem less human. As a society we’ve been watching television a long time now and we’re pretty sophisticated about what we see on TV. So to have Paul Wellstone standing, talking, waving, and to see onlookers glowing—anybody can look at that and see it’s not real. But Washington media guys think that’s the epitome of real. And it’s not just the fault of the guys doing the ads. It’s the candidates too. Wellstone to this day believes that if you put him in front of the people in his ads and just let him talk to them, he’ll convince them. I don’t think so.
The Rake: You don’t get a lot of work relative to the high-profile successes you’ve had. The problem you face is the same problem that campaign finance reform faces. Which is that nobody in institutional Washington wants it to cost any less to get elected, because both parties are owned and operated by people whose control depends on its costing a lot to get elected.
Hillsman: That’s very true. Beginning with the Wynia race, it was fairly obvious to me that there were people not only badmouthing us in Washington but working very hard to make sure we didn’t get a foothold. We’re pretty much blacklisted by the Democratic House and Senate Campaign Committees (DSCC and DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee, so we have to take our story directly to candidates. And it’s a rare candidate who will say, “Yeah, I want to work with you even though everybody in Washington says not to.” It’s all about getting and keeping power, and the Democratic Party would rather maintain a self-perpetuating organization than win, if it comes to that. The party wields a tremendous amount of power. I was on a phone call once with a pollster and a DSCC official and Mike Ciresi. First off they wanted him to raise a lot of soft money for the party. I told him, “Don’t be fooled—they’re not going to put any of that money back into your race unless you toe the party line and it looks very winnable.” I’ve seen them do this with lots of congressional candidates—they say in effect, go raise money, and later they tell you to get in line with the party platform or get left out in the cold. Ben Nighthorse Campbell’s situation in Colorado was interesting to watch for that reason. He got himself elected despite the Democratic Party and then switched to the Republicans shortly after the election because he was so disgusted by the Democrats’ behavior.
There are so few competitive House races in the first place. You’re talking about 25-40 races in each election, max. The Democrats have plenty of money to run strong races in those 25-40 districts. But they hold that money over the heads of the candidates as a carrot and a stick. They tease them with it, and then they say, “But you’ve got to play ball.” You get a purity test where the guys at the DCCC say, “What’s your position on this?” And if it’s not the party’s position, they get no party support, even if it’s a very winnable race.