for the segment, in the middle? we're looking at these ads, we are not looking at the great music and the images and the two questions. voi the lady and then -- the two of voices, we're looking at the sights, to see where this information came from and if the you. campaigns gave you that >> i have a question for mike information. so, i'm going to show you two first on a campaign we just got and for alan. you can answer them at your own through with in november and then kind of talk about that for choosing. a second. mike, you said that when you midst of that campaign and you had a candidate you were working for, you were >> u.s. supreme court will working for him and he came up decide about health care, as it with this terrible thing against him and you had a choice, you should. as attorney general, i'm using our courts to lock up centimeters. said you sat in on the campaign >> what's steve simpson be up meetings. to? you could have responded by bought a yacht the same year he denying what was said against failed to pay his property him and proving that it was taxes. wrong but you said, we'll pull simpson spend $74,000 using the state plane, including 22 trips out the dead priest thing, home. took a state-owned rv meant for instead. i wonder how that comes to be, that you don't care about disaster relief to a nascar discrediting what was said and race. and then wrecked it. instead you pull out something steve simpson. even dirtier and worst. living it up at our expense. and alan, what concerns me the most about, i admire that you

>> this is steve simpson. try to find truth behind what you do put out to your clients, this is his yacht. the same year he bought his because that's so important, but yacht, simpson failed to pay his i'm concerned like in this newt property taxes. his taxes were so late, they put gingrich thing that they said that he supported the one child a lien on his house. policy in china, which today he said paying his taxes was "not in the budget." jane said was totally untrue. but buying a yacht was? is there no legislation, is and as public safety there no board that has to be commissioner, he took a pay passed before these things have to come out, no retraction raise, while cutting the state necessary to make such a broad, highway patrol budget. steve simpson. sweeping and damning statement living it up at our expense. as that and let it sit, and how >> obviously this has a lot of come newt gingrich doesn't try negativity in it, as you can to say something against it? see. you know, in 18 years of doing >> well, i'll try to explain the this, the reason i want to show realities of the political world this, for a couple of reasons. here very quickly. we have never had an opponent that had this many negatives on we did challenge it and we him. i have never seen this. it was like going into the did -- there was a story in the campaign office every day and opening up a folder, saying, newspaper. but two things happened there, okay, what do we want to use number one, the story is in the today? and it just kept going. newspaper. so it's -- the guy's sitting on now, what happens is, these commercials were based on a witness stand and the attorney information that we had put together at the beginning of the says, you know, did you ever campaign. so, they were sent to the

rape your wife or something, even though it's not true, it's pollster, which the process -- politics is a defined process. still out there. so, we still had this story in so, our information goes to a the newspaper. second thing is, as people who are in this business know, pollster. they do their questions, they test it, they see what resonates you're not going to get a best with voters and it goes to fraction of the coverage in free the media guys and they put media as you are on a television their scripts together. i don't know if you know bill commercial. you're just not going to. so, our fear, again, was the knapp or jay marlin, but these unknown. what was going to happen with are the games that did those this republican onslaught, that ads. the poll questions come back to it was on its way. us to look at, we check those and make sure they are accurate and at the end of the day, yeah, and they kind of jive with what we did lose the house and the we gave in the report and also, senate, the democrats did, so, the skriments will come back to we could have been in a lot of us, too, one last time before trouble, if we didn't -- if we they are produced to make sure didn't really -- and we didn't they are accurate. what you are doing is, taking a know what was happening. so, you know, at -- in a 200-page research report and campaign, you want to leave all your cards on the table. distilling it into a 30 or you don't want to come back at 60-second spot, which is always the end of the day and get beat amazing to me, because every word in those spots is a story and said, man, if we had only done that, just do it, you know? onto itself. that's the way -- and do it if and you have to be so careful to make sure it's not getting it's true. do it if you can back it up. distorted and it's not somehow everything we had we could back lost in translation. up. so we felt good about it. now, these things that were on >> and to answer the other question, you know, i thought these two ads we already tested. we knew what we were going to this might come up in the

use. but anybody who understands campaigns knows they are discussion about, maybe we still incredibly fluid. they are changing by the day. have that ahead, oi'm not sure, so, most of our work was done, discussion of commercial you know, when these ads were advertising and political advertising. produced. in july, like i said, this there really is no mechanism for calling an elected official to campaign, we just got through with in november. task for, or a campaign to task in july, there was a newspaper for uttering an untruth, article, kind of an obscure essentially, you know? article from the mississippi i mean, there's no -- there's gulch coast about a priest who freedom of speech. and so, you can't -- where as had been murdered. and so we looked at that, said, you would get sued for false you know, our guy used to be a advertising if you did it judge on the coast. let's just, out of, you know, commercially, you are protected just check it out, see if in many, many ways to a much greater level in politics. there's any connection, maybe he had been arrested before. this is frustrating to us, also, so, we go down there, we look at because just, you know, we want the records and it turns out everybody to rely on the truth. that our judge, mr. simpson, had but it doesn't always happen. and it's rare -- the media is, or the other campaign, are the previously seen an individual, most likely t being untrue. who killed the priest, he came there's nothing else to prevent it. >> and the last question? before his court on a child molestation charge. he could have given him 14 >> in terms ofyi nobody, if you years. that was the maximum. he gave him one, okay? so he gets out of jail.

researching for the opposition, because he was out of jail, he had the opportunity to kill the aren't you really with somebody? >> well, we are, that's where catholic priest. this happened right in the our reports go. and our reports go to democrats. middle of the campaign. so, we do work for democrats. and we have worked for some so, you know, you hate to say this is like christmas, but you republicans in elections, don't get these things very primaries when there was no often. you don't -- you don't get those democrat, because we won't do that. go ahead. willy hortons very often. >> i was just going to ask, how so, we had that. do you wind up with this and to just continue this story, candidate versus that? we weren't going to use it because we had so much already are they choosing you, are they and our candidate didn't -- was searching you out? >> the political universe is afraid of the blow-back of using very small. you tend to work with the same this because we were talking people over and over again. about a murder. work with the same pollsters, and we did have a lot of work with the same media guys, information already on this guy that we could use. same campaign managers, they go two factors changed that. just so you guys know how these from campaign to campaign until they reach a certain age and things go on and how they get on decide they want to do something tv and it's not just some kind different. so, yeah, we end up just -- a of willy nilly process. lot of word of mouth and working two factors changed that. with the same people. number one, our candidate was >> great. well, thank you michael and and still is the only -- is the alan. >> thank you very much. only state-wise democrat left in mississippi, okay? and this election year we were going through a lot of change. republicans were mounting an

incredible campaign to take -- more now from the new to take both houses. america foundation's forum on we were worried about that, because we didn't understand negative political advertising. what the impact on our race was going to be, even though our up next, two advertising agency guy, the incumbent, was very executives on how political commercials are different from popular. most times with a popular other types of advertising. incumbent, you don't have to do this negative advertising. you can just run on your record. we were worried about that. that was one thing. and we had considered that. and then two weeks out from the election, i remember we got a we're now going to shift gears and talk about the call from a newspaper reporter commercial realm. asking us to respond to this this is entitled -- incredibly outlandish charge against our candidate about misspending money that had absolutely no basis in fact to i'm very excited for this it. conversation. and i remember sitting in that campaign meeting and talking to one note is greg, the primary everybody about it and finally xeef officer, could not be with the decision was made, you know us here today. what, let's just do this. due to a last-minute situation and let's just make sure this is in new york. just over with. but we have representing so two weeks out, i don't have that ad to show you, but we did deutsche jayme muta who i was produce an ad, talking about the catholic priest and our judge told is natively digital.

so i'm very intrigued by that. and we won with 62% of the vote and we also had 30% of the i know you're a key part of the interactive division at republican vote, which is pretty deutsche. an advertising firm associated unheard of in a republican state and represented clients such as like mississippi. so, the work we do ends up on microsoft, pnc, and volkswagen and many others. tv, without us, without -- we we also have with us michael hughes who is the president of travel the country, we work on the martin agency. mainly congressional campaigns. we've worked on, you know, races mike has been hailed by ad week and research projects from as one of the nine best creative directors in america. his agency is one of the best creative agencies in the world presidential to public school according to ad week and many others. boards. without the things we do, you could still have, but you would have less documented factual his firm's clients include information to go with. geico, comcast, and walmart. and our -- the way we operate, i'm sure none of us have seen we don't give anything to a any geico ads recently. campaign that can't be documented. if we can't chase a piece of paper down and give it to them, we'll play an ad or two, if it's useless to us. we talk to many people, many of we're ready, john, that are quite different from the others them who you would consider just that we've seen today. out there and somebody you wouldn't take cyril usely. some of them have good el information.

but even though they give us that information, if we can't go somewhere and support that with documentation, then, you know, you're not doing anybody a service and the blow-back from that can be worse than it would have been. so, you have to be very careful in that. i'm going to turn it over to alan, because i know most people have questions about the crazy things we do. i want to leave some time for that. alan has got another one that has a segue to the current presidential campaign. >> yeah, when i'm listening to everybody talking about, you know, whether or not negative ads are good or bad thing, i realize, we're kind of outside the margin, in the margin, i guess, since that because our basic premise is that no one is fit to rule unless proven otherwise? that's sort of like what we do for a living. so, we -- our -- and we're kind of negative, by nature, i mean, michael gets on my nerves big time when we're t

mutual. this is just the way we roll. and so we go out there and we're looking for what's wrong. that's just what we do. andof you saw us on "the daily show," the last question jon asked us, who is beneath us, you know, in the political hierarchy of negative campaigning? is and we were like, hmm? well, there were a couple of guys in a pick yum truck that were harassing us for two days. we didn't bring that up. we're pretty much the bottom level in that regard. it's just -- that's what we do. so, we are out there gathering this information, and so if you are running for office, we're just trying to see, yeah, we want to know your strengths, too, but we really want to know your weaknesses, because if you've got someone leading you, their strengths are great, but their weaknesses can be devastating. and so, we always look at everyone that way. we look at, you know, what have you done wrong, and like michael

said, we look at our own candidates the same way. we don't win any popularity contests because of that. sometimes we see that our candidate is the worst of the two, it's very disconcerting when the best thing you find in a campaign is that the guy threw a pipe bomb at a homecoming float when he was in high school and he's your guy. that's happened to us. so, anyway, we -- we roam around the country looking for these things to put out there. and the reason we decided to write the book, it was really two reasons. one was, we had this vantage point that no one else has, exactly, you know? these two guys roaming around the country in a rented hundred day looking for trouble. for political trouble. and we go everywhere. and we're in some little courthouse in kansas one day and then we're in washington the next and so we felt like we had a lot of really good stories to tell, really, which is why we started talking about writing a book, just -- you can imagine, over 18 years, wandering around

the country, just behind the scenes and politics. and the other reason is that we feel -- we look at these ads, someone made the statement earlier that it's not really our role to question, orhe role to question whether there was any truthfulness to these ads and that's one of the things that bothers us is -- it's fine to be negative, but you need to know, when you watch that ad, is there anything underlying it? and often, there isn't. that really distresses us, because the ads are so much, especially now, therey are so mh slicker and impressive. when weer with on fox news last week, they showed some ads and had us kind of critique them and the one that stuck with me was, it was just, i don't know what it was about, it was really impressive, though, and i was like, against the guy when it was over because i had these great graphics and really cool music and it was really an

impressive ad but i had no idea if there was any underlying documentation. what we wanted to do with the book is show people, it is still possible to try to know what the truth is. and we're not trying to be lofty and put ourselves out there as, you know, the finders of the truth. but well, that is what we do, really, and we want everybody to do it. we want everybody to question whether what they're being told has any factual documentatiodoc. this is an old ad, from 2004. we don't generally name names in the book, because we didn't think it was crucial. if it was some candidate for congress in 1998 got a dui, do you really need to know his name? the point for us was just to tell these stories about how the system works. and we didn't want to get into the position of trying to break

it down to personalities, because that just wasn't our role. we gather the information we give to the campaign and they go out with it. but in this case, the guy was -- he was tied to some notoriously racist groups that had donated money to his campaign and they had done some really weird things and it was pretty strong stuff and so the ad -- they ran the ad and it was in kansas. and they ran the ad and so even though you could figure it out, which is what happened, in the book, we never named him outright, well, then, a reader, actually, a couple of people figured out who he was and we hadn't really followed him lately. we tend to just go and do these things and we immerse ourselves in these campaigns for a period and then we move onto the next kill. that's just the nature of the job for us. so, we didn't realize that this guy was, from 2004, is now the secretary of state in kansas and

is mitt romney's immigration adviser. so, when that came up, we were talking to a reporter at politico and we were like, you know, i think we should just tell somebody this because even though we didn't make a point of naming this guy in the race, it kind of matters who he is now and so we put it out there and politico did an article about it and, you know, the guy had an opportunity to respond. anyway, this is what this ad is about that ran in 2004, if y'all can go ahead with it. >> why are kansas turning from kris kobach? look what is supporting him. people and groups typed to white sue prem twists. one even hired kobach. it's true. an extremist group hired him to file a frivolous lawsuit. now his campaign won't return

the contributions. says "absolutely, we're going to keep it." kris kobach, wrong for mainstream kansans. >> i do love receiving the tag lines at the end. now when you don't see them, it kind of bothers me a little bit. off belts are off about what's going to happen with the super pacs. and so, that's pretty much our -- i'd really rather open it up for questions now. you want us to sit over there? >> yeah, why don't you sit over there. >> is there dirt on everybody? have you looked into candidates and you report back saying, this guy or this woman is totally clean? >> there were two, i think. that we remember. that we remember. you know, everybody makes mistakes.

and it -- in the higher you go in elected office, the more opportunities you have to make mistakes and the more scrutiny you're going to come under. so, it's not unusual that we find things on people. especially in congressional races. but every now and then you do find someone, there's really and, you know, that's -- even though we're very negative by nature, we're always thrilled by that. it kind of restores -- because, you know, we kind of dwell in all this negativity. it's nice to find eb make the w better place. it doesn't happen very often. >> when we hear about political opposition research, i think people tend to think of guys sifting through the trash of some candidate as opposed to the public record. but i'm sure it's -- i know it's a mix, but -- how do you -- what percentage of y'alls time is spent, you know, combing through the record, when you say mistakes, maybe the mistake is

supporting a program that cost taxpayer money to arguably bes wasted, but then make the mib take was something more in your personal life, what's the kind of balance there? >> you know, we're paid pretty well but not well enough to go through somebody's garbage. i don't want to get in there. most of our days are spent -- they're long and they can be boring, sitting in a courthouse going through minutes of some, or city council minutes and just looking for that one little tidbit of information. you know, it's not -- it was discussed here earlier. it's not really the silver bu bullet that kills somebody, it's the shrapnel that adds up. we dig through records and we talk to people. alan, i remember, was one night found himself on the front porch of this guy's trailer on the north carolina/south carolina state line and the guy had a shotgun across his lap because he was worried that somebody was going to kill him for talking to us. you know, we talk to ex-wives,

ex-anythings, really. they make some pretty good sources. but it's a combinational of those things. and again thoep you talk to somebody and have good information, if we can't back it up with documentation, then we really don't have much. >> and at a certain point in the process, you mention that you hand off the information to a campaign and the advertising people. do you feel that -- do they come back to you, do you have sort of the right to sort of sign off on the end product or there 0 kaxs when you feel like something that you might have found got sort of exaggerated or blown out of proportion in the advertising that you see on the air? >> it varies. sometimes when we return in the report, they're done with us and we just move on. sometimes they will keep us close by and like michael mentioned earlier, where they will poll, they will run the poll questions by us and -- but it's rare that anyone says, shows us the ad and says, this is truthful or whatever.

by that point, we really have usually moved on or they've, you know, but hopefully it's based on it. we have seen a couple of cases where something has come up, but you know, we're print journal ilss by training. and so, to us, when everything has to be distilled to 15 or 30 second sound bytes, we always cringe. there's so much more that needs to be told to put it into context. that's probably why they don't ask us about the ads. >> i can relate to that. let's take a question or two from the audience. here in the front row. >> elizabeth brownstein, retired historian writer. i spent a lot of my life researching for accuracy. do you people have a staff? do you have a morgue? do you use the internet? how many candidates do you work on at once? i'm just intrigued, the two of you might be doing all of this stuff. it seems incredible. >> we do mainly do it ourselves. and we've enjoyed doing that.

because it allows us to go to these places where people are from. in general, we start off on the internet and we build a foundation. and it gives us a road map. but as you know, the internet is notoriously unreliable. so, we have to go to where these people are from. and we go into their towns and we get the information we need and we're out before anybody really knows that we're there. however, the name of the book is "we're with nobody." and that came from two different, for two different reasons. number one, every time we go into a courthouse, we are raising red flags with a clerk or somebody who -- we're going to ask for tax records on an incumbent congressman. that's raising, you know, red flag right there. so the first question we always get is, who are you with? and our answer is, you know, we're not really with anybody. we're with us. the second reason is because, when we're doing this, we are -- we have to be extremely objective. we can't get caught up in the passion that most people get

caught up in politics, because we have to research our guy with the same vigor we're doing his opponent or her opponent. so, if we are not objective and if we don't look at him with the same scrutiny, then, you know, we end up with a stilted report and it didn't do our campaign any good. we do, you know, we'll do as many as 10 or 12 campaigns in a season. go to these places and work with them and, but you know, we're in and out pretty quick and, you know, after having done it for 18 years, you get it down toed kind of a science and you know what you're looking for, you know how to do it. but it changes. it's fluid. like everything. what are people upset about in a current environment? that's what we look for. a few years ago, worldcom and enron. we were looking at con try brugss from them. if an incumbent passed legislation to help giant corporations. so, it really, a lot of it depends on what people are upset

about at the moment. jobs now, obviously. so, yeah. >> in the back? >> hi, my name is jonathan, i'm independent. you mentioned that you two are pretty, oh, not, you deal in the muck of the issue and you mentioned that you are both pretty -- not bitter, but -- i can't -- >> not bitter. we enjoy it. >> you look at the dark side of everybody's past and you look at kind of the underbelly of the system. i'm wondering if you see -- is there a connection between kind of the increase in kind of looking, the negative advertising and people's perception of government bei being -- perception of government not working for them and kind of, you have this 9% congressional approval rating. do you see those two as

connected or do you kind of think connecting the two kind of skips a whole other thing that's separate? >> well, michael may have something to say about that, too, but my answer would be, there's certainly a connection, but is the connection -- is it only between negative advertising and voter dissatisfaction or is it just increasing knowledge about elected officials? whether it's from advertising or news reports or whatever? we just know everything about everybody now. and that's never pretty. and so, you know, i -- i don't think you can blame negative advertising alone for people's dissatisfaction with government. i think we just know a lot more and, you know, the old adage that, you know, you never eat sausage if you can see it being >> let's take one last question made. well, everybody sees it being made now, and so i think that's part of the reason everybody's a little disenchanted.