So why do voters care about it? Relatively speaking, things are pretty good right now.

We've got a system that doesn't work so well for the candidates, and it doesn't work for the voters. So why do we have this system? It works for two groups: It works for the two major political parties really well, and it works for the political-industrial complex. It works for all the businesses in Washington that rely on campaigns, and that's the pollsters, the fundraisers, the direct mail groups, the media consultants, all those people. There's entire industries that rely on this. And they're not very good at what they do, but because there's all this back-scratching and circle-jerking going on, it's very difficult if you're on either end of the spectrum to reform that system. It's hard for candidates to reform that system.

So you've got an increasing number of people who are disgusted with both parties because they're perceived as corrupt. How do you reach this audience?

Nobody really looks at the lapsed voter market. By definition, all the Washington people think, "They don't vote, so why bother?" One of the things I'm always saying is, look, let's assume that there are going to be 40 or 50 percent of people who vote, and another 60, 50 percent who stay home. Well I know that everybody else is going to be concentrating on that 40 percent.

If I'm a marketing guy and I've got severely limited resources, why wouldn't I go talk to that 60 percent and see if I can get them to vote? I don't have any competition over there. To some degree that's what we did with Ventura's case.

But isn't this a risky strategy, targeting people who are so turned off that no matter what you say, they won't show up at the polls?

How is anything risky when you're dealing with these types of candidates? They're long shots at best, so I don't really see where the risk would be in adopting that type of strategy. To me, it comes down to: How are you going to make the most progress with the limited resources you have? Why would I want to go into a battlefield where everybody is competing with way more resources than I have, when I could go someplace else and have the stage to myself?

How do independent voters differ from active Democrats or Republicans?

Independent voters do not believe what politicians have to say. They do not believe what political parties have to say. And quite frankly, they don't believe what the media has to say. So what are they doing to get their information? What they're doing is they're going to the Internet. And they understand that any Internet site they might visit has some type of bias.

But there are two things that they're working. The first thing they're working is they feel like they're in charge. They're not just getting that information from a campaign or from a candidate, or from the media. They're in control. And they are selecting what they consider to be the spectrum of viewpoints that they want to make that decision. So they are the ones setting up the point-counterpoint -- they're not getting it from CNN, Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan arguing with each other. They are doing their own research; they are in control. And that's going to have a tremendous, tremendous effect on politics.

The Internet played a big role in McCain's and Ventura's campaign. Was it a big help in reaching independent voters?

Our entire field organization [for Ventura], for what it was, was organized on the Internet. Because when you have independent voters you're not going to get a lot of troops en masse to volunteer at a campaign headquarters or something. Independent voters by definition are not those types of people. But you can get them to turn out if you know how to go about doing that.

You also targeted young people in the Ventura campaign. Can you do the same with Nader?

Oh yeah. That's a constituency that's already there. If you look at who comes out to Green Party events or who comes out to see Ralph Nader speak, it's a young crowd.

Both Ventura and Wellstone, who are quite different politically, were able to tap into this disaffected audience, and your TV and radio ads were instrumental in winning them over. Why were the ads so effective when you didn't run them very often?

I think the two major parties have sort of sold people a bill of goods when they say you've got to raise a lot of money and put a lot of stuff on TV. I explain straight up to candidates what's going on out there: "You know, your media firm is probably going to take 15 percent of the buy. Which is why they're going to recommend to you to spend more money on commercials whether you need to or not." There's an inherent bias in that system.

But the media firms don't get a commission on the cost of the ad itself, right?

That's why political commercials suck so bad, because most of the time they're not spending any money on the commercials themselves; the production values are no good. They don't get a commission. They'd rather do a commercial for $3,000 and run it for $3 million than spend any amount of money on a commercial. If you're going to spend 3, 4, 5, 6 million dollars of your money running a particular commercial, don't you want it to get the audience's attention? Don't you think that's kind of a good idea?

The average cost for a 30-second commercial is between $150,000 and $200,000 these days. Pepsi spends $800,000 on a spot. And those are the commercials that you have to compete with on the air. Political spots, it's like pulling teeth to get someone to allow you to make a spot for $20,000. These people from Washington, the campaign managers, the pollsters, the consultants, they just go ape shit: "You can't spend that money, you can do five commercials for that!" Well yeah, you can, and that's why political commercials are so bad.

So you've got cheesy ads, running all the time. Do you think this has anything to do with declining voter turnout?

Oh yeah. The prevailing notion in politics is you can somehow annoy these people into voting for you, but you can't -- all you do is annoy them.

Earlier you said consumers are voters, and you've also said that you view voters as consumers. What lessons have you learned from your work in commercial marketing that you can apply to the political arena?

The Ventura '98 campaign was akin to working in a marketing field where you would have three strong brands, and brand preference might shift from one to another. The big difference, and this is what the Washington people say all the time, is you can't compare politics to consumer marketing because the store is only open one day a year. You can only buy on a particular day through these particular hours. And that's true, but it's not really that different. All that says is you've got to orchestrate a campaign in such a way that you get the purchase decision within a particular time frame.

To me it's not that big a difference, but they think it's a tremendous difference, and that's what leads them to do what are incredibly stupid things, like pack an incredible number of advertisements into a short period of time.

Your ads relied heavily on humor to get the message across. How important is humor in your approach?

It's overrated. We use humor where it's appropriate. Humor I think helps in politics because so few people do it, and they do it badly. After the Wellstone '90 race, we saw a bunch of people attempt to imitate it, and God, it was so bad. If you're going the funny route you better damn sure make sure that it's funny. You can't come close -- it's either funny or it isn't, and that's something the consultants in Washington haven't figured out yet.

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