Through a mixture of effort and good luck, I have ended up interviewing three of the major candidates this year (Giuiliani, McCain, Thompson) with possibly more to come. Some people have asked me what I thought of them personally.
I don’t have much to say about that, since the amount of social time around these interviews would total up to about ten minutes. These men are clearly scheduled down to the second. During the most recent interviews (McCain, Giuliani) I was being signaled constantly by their handlers off camera to wrap it up. The PJM WoT interviews, which are in depth and run over fifteen minutes, are not exactly what the candidates (or their handlers) are used to doing. The candidates love it – and have told me so – the handlers less so, although some have told me later that they also liked them.
But back for a second to the personalities of the candidates. I was impressed with all of them as men and politicians. They all seemed informed and, as I noted, enjoyed what they were doing, which makes it fun for the interviewer. Regarding Thompson, I am puzzled by the lack of voter support. I saw no evidence of the laziness charge and he appeared a prepared and knowledgeable candidate. Perhaps this is a media myth that has been adopted by the public.
We are also interested in your comments about the high definition format. To our knowledge, no one else is doing high def political content on the Internet (certainly many will the near future). We’re trying to get this right. Let us know your reactions either here our on the Pajamas posts.
Roger,
I’ve only watched the McCain interview so far and thought it was excellent. This type of format is so much more useful than those mind-numbing debates. This is an adult way to discuss important issues and find out where candidates are coming from.
Thank you,
Debra
I said it on my blog, but I’ll say it here, too. The HD format is the highest quality video I have ever seen streamed over the Internet.
And the interviews themselves were of a much higher quality than we usually get from the mainstream media. Hannity and Colmes this is not.
Great work. I mean it.
Gotta agree with the previous posts… good stuff Roger!
On the Thompson issue, I think there are a couple things…
A. There was so much hype over Thompson run that I was expecting Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy to be running for President. No way that he could have lived up to the hype.
II. Once he declared, it was a low fanfare, low key quiet affair. He didn’t immediately hit the bricks with talking points and glad hand shakes and all the fixins.
3. Fred Thompson the individual has a different personality than the characters he portrays on television. Some Americans seem easily confused by the distinction between “acting” and “reality”.
* Fred Thompson is not a spittle spewing, pulpit beating, Dean Howling sort of fellow… seems that he’d rather put his feet up, have a glass of scotch and maybe have a cuddle with his woman.
23. Thompson doesn’t behave the way that the flocks of American Sheep expect from their wannabe shepherds.
These 5 points lay out why some Americans have called him lazy. It also proves the Law of Fives, again.
I really like Fred’s policy positions, and the impression that he’s not consumed with ambition the way the other candidates are is plus as far as I am concerned. I think if he believed there was another candidate who could do the job as well or better and was electable he’d be happy to let them run and deal with the headache of being President.
That candidate doesn’t exist in Fred’s estimation, and I would agree.
He doesn’t appear to think very highly of the media (another plus!) and they don’t like him either. Also I think the media are more afraid of him than any other Republican candidate, were he to catch fire, so they try to starve him with little or no coverage.
If he does well in a primary like SC and gets sufficient exposure he will catch on and prove to be the best candidate by far imo. I think he’s the only one who can beat Obama, who appears unstoppable at this point.
I don’t know which of the candidates were approached about doing a WoT interview with Pajamas Media, but if you had told me three had agreed to do it, I’d have guessed these three. There’s a chance Romney would do the interview, but I can’t imagine Huckabee, Edwards, Obama, Hillary (as if) or any of the others would even consider it.
Pajamas Media deserves a boatload of congratulations for these interviews. So far I’ve watched Thompson and Giuliani, and I’m about to turn on McCain. (Wait, that didn’t come out right….) Seriously, this is the kind of interaction I want to see with the candidates. It’s so much more informative than those game shows masquerading as debates. I hope Romney and Huckabee agree to the sit for an interview, as well as the leading Democrats.
(Although, given the vapidity of their remarks on the Long War to date, maybe the Democrats and Huck should take a pass.)
Video is terrific.
McCain seemed voteworthy right up the end when until he spoke of the dreaded internet as though he were a cross between Bill O’Reilly & Grandpa Simpson. As President he’ll go after the First Amendment again. This time by trying to smother the internet in its crib.
No vote from me.
I’d put these interviews right up there with Charlie Rose. I like that they seem mostly unedited; I hate the 60 minutes style of remixing an interview to achieve the interviewer’s goals. All three interviews were excellent. After the election, can you guys make them available as WMV’s so we can save them to our hard drives? (I didn’t check thoroughly, maybe they’re already available.)
I’m a big Fred supporter. Near as I can tell, the media simply has a story about him that they push as hard as they can. Whenever Fred is mentioned in the press, it’s in the context of “he can’t win”. Whenever they interview him, they skip the substantial questions and ask horse racy “why are you losing” questions instead. Very disappointing. If he wins SC, watch for that to change.
In the MSM’s defense, though Glenn Reynolds had a similar story about disorganization in the campaign’s earliest days. I’ve served in political campaigns before and it doesn’t surprise me, but it might be that there was an early, long-remedied grain of truth to the story.
Maybe the press hates Fred because he can win the general election. Who knows.
Wellspring,
What are you basing the “Fred can win the general election” comment off of? Most of the polls I’ve seen across the fifty states put in in single or barely double digits. Maybe its all a vast Left-Wing CoN… but is there other data that indicates he’s doing anything besides falling over?
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/candidates/Fred-Thompson.html
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/
In NH he’s currently looking at 2%… In SC he’s all the way up to 11% but Huck is 25 points ahead of him, McCain is 6 points ahead and Mitt is 8 points ahead… so even in the state where he has double digits, he’s still in 4th. Maybe those polls are biased and maybe the MSM is hiding how good he’s really doing, but I haven’t seen any data to support that theory.
Do you have some data to support it?
No data, dclydew, just my feeling about how the candidates will be perceived. Note the “will be”. Note also that this is just my feeling, but I’ll make my argument below so you can see what I’m thinking.
Fred hasn’t had much MSM exposure. His campaign ads are only airing in battleground states. So his image to the public is very hazy right now. Candidates are also perceived very differently in the primaries vs the general, for one. So you have to take the raw poll data as what it is: a snapshot of a public that by and large only recently started paying attention at all. Even in the battlegrounds, the polls are saying that people are not married to their current choices.
Once we get past the convention, the Republican candidate, whoever he is, will need to do three things. First, bring out the full GOP base. Second, bring over enough independents. Finally, if possible, suppress democratic voter turnout. This is all complicated if there’s a sufficiently viable third party candidate again. George W. Bush owes his first time, and Clinton both his terms, to third party spoiler candidates.
I say Fred has a better shot in the general election because he has the ability to appeal to the entire conservative coalition without having small but crucial segments staying home on election day. If Obama’s the nominee, you can forget about the democrats staying home– they’ll turn out in droves, *especially* if the GOP candidate goes negative (if he does, it will have to be done very delicately). With Clinton and Edwards, things are much more like they usually are– deeply negative campaigns on both sides.
Once you have a candidate who can bring out the whole GOP base, then the question is can this person win independents over? That’s a tougher question than it seems, since independents often vote based on intangibles like personality and style.
If I did want to make predictions about the candidates, I’d be on better ground using a different kind of survey instrument than is used by conventional political pollsters. I’d use a technique from statistical market research to create a perceptual map that identifies key issues or candidate attributes, then place candidates on that map to determine theoretical matches between nominees.
When you use this to map products like cars or soap, you can get accuracy from a relatively small sample to within +/- 0.5% points. You can also do what-if scenarios that can forecast the effects of changing your message. The technique would have to be tweaked to cover people staying at home, but I think it would help correct for media exposure effects that we’re seeing this early in the campaign.
So no, now that you mention it, this isn’t a rigorous finding, just an informed gut feeling. I’m getting tempted to try to really do some measurements though.
Roger,
Great interview, great content, and video quality.
I know you live in Los Angeles, as do I, and that nobody really wears a coat & tie anymore.
I really think that as a show of respect towards a Senator, you should have worn a coat & tie.
Or am I being “stuffy”…
Sincerely,
Alejandro
Wellspring,
Thanks for the well thought out response. My initial thought, though, is that while it may be that Fred could win if its him vs. Obama… he’s got to beat Rudy, McCain and Mitt before he’s gonna get a chance at that. He placed badly in Iowa, he’s tracking to place badly in NH… how many more of these primaries do you think he’ll stay in with that kind of response?
Fred might not do too badly for the GOP in terms of base… but I’d probably still put my money on McCain vs. Democrat than Fred vs. Democrat for the win. While there are some drawbacks on McCain’s side (Campaign finance etc), he has experience, he’s respected on both sides of the aisle, he has strong approval ratings among Dems, the GOP and Independents. If the MS were trying to hide a potentially winning GOP candidate… Fred seems a lot less of a threat than John.
If Fred doesn’t do something to drastically improve his visibility (and soon) this whole discussion will be moot, maybe we can agree on that?
dclydew, no problem, I was a bit worried we’re hijacking Roger’s thread, but you raised a good point. Yeah, if Fred can’t break out of the trap he’s in, the question definitely does become moot. I think if he can break into that top tier, though, he’ll be formidable.