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He is responsible for getting Paul and Jesse elected. Minnesota's premier political ad consultant is the very best in the business. So why’s Bill Hillsman sitting this one out?

Photos by John Noltner

If American politics were the fount of democratic possibility it’s made out to be, Bill Hillsman would be a very rich man for one simple reason. In the fortysome-year history of media-driven political campaigns, there has been no one else remotely like him, no one who possessed his particular combination of razor-sharp ad skills, an impeccable feel for the spirit of the moment, and a gift for making people talk about his candidate. The media critic at the online mag Slate, Scott Shuger, called Hillsman “the greatest political adman who ever lived,” and by whatever yardstick you choose—the sheer inventiveness of his work, or its overwhelming role in electing not one but two populist longshots to prominent office—there is really no contesting the proposition.

With Paul Wellstone in 1990 and Jesse Ventura in 1998, Hillsman proved it was possible for outsiders to crash the party on a shoestring budget. He did it with ads that were funny and engaging and, most important, plainspoken. Hillsman’s spots, from “Looking for Rudy” to “Jesse the Thinker,” threw away the insular, sloganeering language of conventional political advertising; they made jokes instead, elegant little 30-second jibes that tapped workaday outrage over the tyranny of politics as usual. There’s just one problem with Hillsman’s professional prospects: The national political parties want nothing to do with him. “No,” Hillsman agrees ruefully, “we don’t get asked to play very much. The pollsters are against us because I’ve knocked polling. None of the established consultants have anything good to say about us, for obvious reasons. And the Democratic party…” Hillsman trails off without finishing the thought: The Democratic party machine doesn’t want to deal with any media guy whose specialty is getting the unanointed, insurgent candidate elected. At the end of the day, both major parties would rather lose with the known quantity than win with the unknown. The Rake sat down with Hillsman recently, to get his views on this fall’s races and to talk shop about the art and science of the modern political campaign.

The Rake: Do you agree with the argument Kevin Phillips and others have made recently—that scandals involving wealth and power and politics have reached a critical mass and there’s a sea change in public attitudes taking shape?

Hillsman: I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think I do. One thing that’s happened now because of corporate malfeasance is that a lot of people are hit where it hurts the most. Normally you would expect politicians to react fairly quickly when that happens, especially in an election year. Which is why you saw that legislation passed so quickly. But was the legislation meaningful? It was mainly window dressing. And maybe I’ve just been doing this job for too long, but I think by and large people will buy the window dressing until the next crisis comes.

The Rake: You made your mark in political advertising with Wellstone in 1990. What did you sense about the public mood that made you believe that style of political advertising would work?

Hillsman: It wasn’t so much what we sensed in the public mood. It was more a matter of trying out some theories developed for commercial advertising in the political arena. Paul really had nothing to lose, and he didn’t really know he was being used to try out theories.

The old theory of political advertising, which still holds in Washington even these 12 years later, is that media is nothing more than a commodity—and if you layer it on thick enough, you can convince the public of basically anything. That’s how you wind up with Al Checchi spending $40 million in California, [Jon] Corzine in New Jersey spending $60 million, and Mark Dayton spending $12-14 million in Minnesota, which is equivalent to spending about $60 million in Jersey.

It’s a benighted notion about how you win elections. But Paul’s bought into it in the last two elections—the notion that you have to fight fire with fire and keep pouring on the media so people can’t turn around without seeing a spot. Then the message will somehow invade their consciousness, and they’ll go out like robots and vote for that person.

My counter-theory—and this was out of necessity, really—was something that we started to fool around with in the commercial sector in the early 1980s. Commercial advertising used to be framed by this same view about media, that it was more or less a commodity and the number of ads you ran determined your success. When I first came up in the industry as a copywriter in the mid to late 1970s there was a formula for doing commercial ads. In a 30-second spot, you needed to mention the product name in the first five seconds, you needed to mention it at least three times overall, and you needed to show the package or the logo for the last 3-5 seconds. If you did all those things, you had a successful ad. But all this approach did was telegraph to viewers that they were watching a commercial. And most people don’t like commercials. They try not to watch them. What we decided in the early 1980s was, let’s not telegraph that we’re making a commercial. Let’s keep them in suspense, sometimes for up to 20 seconds. And let’s give the people watching a real payoff. It might be making you laugh, touching some emotion, or giving information that’s genuinely of value to you.

What we proved in the early 1980s, and a lot of it came straight out of Minneapolis, was that if somebody pays attention to your commercial, you don’t have to spend as much on media. And that’s significant because media is the single highest line-item cost in any sort of ad campaign. You’re talking tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.

That was the theory. And with Wellstone you had to do it that way, because there wasn’t any money. We basically decided to make the entire campaign a media campaign. Paul had already been out there on the stump, and he was in danger of losing the primary to someone who hadn’t campaigned at all. That’s how little interest there was in this guy’s campaign. Rudy Boschwitz, on the other hand, was going to be on the air a lot. So we tried to pre-empt him, to make every Boschwitz ad that came on work against him: “Anytime you see a Boschwitz commercial, it just means he’s trying to buy the election.” That was the positioning for Paul in a nutshell. It was entirely a media campaign and we pulled it off.

The attitude of the spots was different enough that they appealed to a lot of people who hadn’t felt interested or involved in politics since the 60s or early 70s. It brought a lot of progressives out and united a lot of people. It caught the attention of younger people who had pretty much given up on politics. In many respects it was a precursor to the Ventura campaign. It took people that wanted to believe in politics but had been so disappointed they practically gave up.

But none of those people would have voted for him if you had told them that in 12 years he’d be running an $8 million re-election campaign.The Rake: What do you make of Wellstone’s choice to adopt a more cautious, conventional persona?

Hillsman: He is so Washington. He drank the Kool-Aid in 1996—before that, really, in 1993 or ’94. The turning point for Paul in many respects was when he realized it would be a lot harder to get things done than he ever expected. When universal health care failed so miserably in 1993, it shook him. The White House basically botched things up. They made a rookie mistake—they made him take his universal health care plan off the table, which left Hillary’s plan as the most liberal proposal on the board. The other side then came out and blasted away at her. Paul’s plan should have been on the table; it would have meant the Clintons got more. I think since then Paul’s decided just to play the game and get what he can get.

The Rake: Let’s suppose Wellstone woke up tomorrow and said, “What am I doing? I’ve got to take more risks.” And he calls you. Could you do a striking Wellstone campaign this time, or has he made himself too much a gray figure for that?

Hillsman: It’s not that he’s a gray figure to most people. That’s only evident to the people who are paying close attention. And they’re an important part of his base, but what he really doesn’t understand is that his swing vote is elsewhere. In 1990 his swing vote was really the Perot vote, though no one knew about any Perot vote yet. It wasn’t until ’96 that we really figured out who these people were, and it turns out they’re the Jesse voters too. I worked with Ed Gross in 1996 on this. Ed’s a very smart guy. He’d look at the data coming out of Washington and he’d tell me, Wellstone’s people don’t get this. They don’t see who the swing vote is. We need to talk about these people.

They were mostly guys, living up in places like Anoka. You’d ask these guys, “Why do you vote for Wellstone? You don’t agree with him on a single thing.” And they’d scuff their shoes and look at the dirt and say, “I think he’s honest. I think he’s got integrity. And there ought to be one son-of-a-bitch like that in the United States Senate.” And that’s his swing vote. He’s not going to get them this time.

In my opinion he shouldn’t be running. What Wellstone doesn’t understand, because he’s too caught up in Washington, is that the two-term pledge he made is a deal-breaker with these people. These are people he made a promise to—I mean, I was there when he made it, time after time. He hated being called a professor because Boschwitz was calling him that to paint him as ivory tower, out of touch. So he said, “No, I’m a teacher. And after I serve my two terms in the Senate, I’m gonna come back to Minnesota and I’m gonna teach. And it’s not going to be at Carleton or any other private school, it’s not going to be at the University of Minnesota, it’s going to be in the community colleges.”

Well, that’s these guys’ kids—that’s his swing voter’s family. That’s where they go to school. That was a deal to them, and now he’s reneged on that deal.

The Rake: What are the key themes for this fall’s races?

Hillsman: I don’t think that’s the right way to pose the question. That’s how Washington looks at it, it’s what they poll and test for. I think you need to start closer to home, with where people’s heads are at. For years now, until 9/11, you could do any sort of poll you wanted and it always came down to the same four issues: education, taxes, health care, crime. No matter what the order, they would always be on top. That’s not necessarily true anymore. I think there are two main things on everybody’s minds. One is the aftermath of 9/11, and people’s sense of personal safety. That day was a shocker to everyone, and to people in the center of the country it’s remote yet it’s not. The image that haunts us all is the suicide bomber. And the Office of Homeland Security says “You know, there’s really nothing we can do about that.” So how can we be safe? What caught so many of us off-guard about 9/11 was that we did not believe there were people out there who hated us enough to kill themselves along with a whole bunch of innocent people just to make a point. Well, now we know they’re out there, they’re recruiting, and they’re apparently not having a hard time coming up with recruits. When you hear of people getting on buses… I mean, how difficult would it be to put on a suicide bomb and walk on to the University of Minnesota campus? It just isn’t that hard.

People are concerned about that and they don’t have an answer to it. You have to address that feeling of uncertainty with people. I don’t think people are dumb enough—let me put it this way: I know women aren’t dumb enough to think that if we go in and root out al-Qaeda, that that’s going to solve the problem of terrorism. It’s not. The solution to the problem is the answer to the question, Why do people hate us this much? That’s where you have to begin. But no candidate has had the courage, or maybe the vision, to begin to grapple with that question publicly. I don’t think anybody will do it this time around. It’s political dynamite.

Corporate malfeasance is the second thing on everybody’s mind. That should work to Paul’s advantage. But the Democrats have no clue. When I was at Harvard, back in March or so, they did a panel on the future of the Democratic party. And there was no message, there was no sense about the future. These were the best thinkers they could put on the stage, and there was nothing coming out of their mouths. Then all of a sudden [James]Carville wakes up and says, “Oh! These business scandals are the best opportunity for the Democrats in a long, long time.”The Rake: And yet they’ve done remarkably little with it. Because ultimately the party’s view from the top down is not that there’s an opportunity here, but that their cash clientele is under siege and it’s time to circle the wagons.

Hillsman: Absolutely. The two parties are entirely the same when it comes to money. The DLC [Democratic Leadership Council] completely dominates the Democratic party now. When Wellstone says he represents the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, I’m not sure I believe him, but it’s certainly what’s needed. The DLC’s all about money and the Democrats are now accustomed to getting elected on the backs of big money. The three races I mentioned before, Corzine, Dayton, and Checchi, they’re all Democrats. In ’94 and ’96 the Democrats were out recruiting millionaires to run. They cast their lot in this direction and they’re gonna go that way. They believe it’s easier to raise money and play the game than to make any substantive changes. If anything, the closest thing we’ve seen to the kind of popular backlash that Kevin Phillips is talking about is Ventura’s election. That’s finally where everybody got tired of the money and the two parties being the same and decided to do something about it. Perot got big traction on that message in 1992, even though he spent $60 million to do it. It was a message that had good resonance. And when you consider that the others spent about $150 million each when all was said and done, $60 million to get one out of five votes in the country isn’t a bad job. There’s a lot of people who aren’t being served by the duopoly.

The Rake: But Perot and Jesse are both very distinctive personalities. They were natural lightning rods. Breaking through in the way they did really requires a larger-than-life personality, doesn’t it?

Hillsman: It does require a personality, until the playing field is leveled a lot more. I think we showed with Wellstone what you can do with a candidate who’s not necessarily a Jesse Ventura or a Ross Perot. But you can’t do it with John Marty. There’s all sorts of people you can’t do it with. I don’t know if you can do it with Tim Penny. Tim’s saving grace is that the competition just isn’t that tough this time around. It’s not like running against a Humphrey and a Coleman. It’s running against the second string. So it should be easier for him to pull it off. But until you can take some of these inequities out of the equation, you need somebody who’s more of a personality and a lightning rod.

The Rake: Is there anybody out there right now you’d like to recruit as a political candidate?

Hillsman: Nationally, I like to contrast [Russ] Feingold and Wellstone. Feingold got something done—even though it didn’t go far enough, it’s amazing that he got that campaign finance legislation through. He’s actually done something. Not just talked the talk but walked the walk. It was a lot more of a nail-biter than it was for Wellstone for him to get re-elected, but he stuck to his principles. I think in many ways he may be the Wellstone of 2004 for the Democrats. He’s sort of put feelers out to suggest he’s thinking of running for president. I like him; I read a New York Times article about him a couple of months ago and I thought I was reading about Ralph Nader. Can you do something with someone like that? Against that much money? I don’t know. The really sinister thing about the DLC is not just that they’ve made it all about money for the Democrats too. It’s what they’ve done to make the nomination even more unattainable for an unanointed candidate. They’ve pushed up the primaries, changed the party rules; the debate commissions are basically made up of Republicans and DLC Democrats. Everything’s in their favor right now. Moving up the primaries, for instance, makes it very tough for another McCain-like figure to emerge. It would be very, very tough to do anything constructive through the Democrats. McCain is the other figure on a national level who’s interesting. I do believe that if he’d run as an independent in 2000, he would have won.

As far as third-party politics are concerned, I believe the Greens and I disagree strategically. The Greens think they’re going to prosper through building from the grassroots up over the long haul. I don’t think you’ll get there that way. The Democrats have too much vested interest in knocking you out, and it’s too easy for them to block you. As a party you need to win something and you need to win something fairly big. And then you’ve got a base of power, some place to work from. What I said to the Greens was, take your best candidate and put that person in a statewide race that you can win. I think there are two offices in practically every state that Greens should have really good shots at—secretary of state and attorney general. Nader has talked about the Greens being a watchdog party; those offices are perfect places to do that. You can make such a strong case in your campaign: Don’t we really want someone who’s neutral with respect to the major parties and more closely tied to the people to be watching out for us? Plus you can win races for secretary of state without a lot of money. So I’d have run the Greens’ best candidate for secretary of state, and I’d have won. That’s the key. You’ve got to win something. The Greens get pushed into the spoiler role because in spirit they embrace it.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.