There is a great untold story that people havent paid attention to over the years, and its a story you can only do with incumbents. A good friend of mine, Chuck Louis, who runs the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, has been trying to work on this, is to look at state legislators or members of Congress and look at their personal financial holdings and their voting record. I think one of the great underreported stories in the country right now is what people have in stock portfolios and how they vote on issues. If you look at the Telecommunications Committee in Washington I used to serve on, anybody who has bought stock in the last 15 years is going to have it in something that goes through the Telecommunications Committee. Every week, it would be rare if we didnt vote in the Telecommunication Committee on something that doesnt affect our own personal portfolio.

     Now back to cynicism: the honest truth is, most of the time folks dont pay attention to that, but they should. Im not sure that people are really sitting up late at night calculating the impact on Southwest Bell if you vote on telecommunications deregulation, but its a very awkward situation for politicians. Its something that I think is absolutely fair game in political campaigns. And at the end of the day its a much more important story because its somebodys personal self-interest being served by what they do legislatively than it is about whether or not they got $50 from the guy who runs the local gas station and how they vote at the last session of Congress.

[question]: I thought the issue spot was really good, the one about the stadium. My impressions of the spot with Watson, and the reason people asked, Is that your dog? isnt because hes a really cute dog, they were wondering, Is this real?

Klug: No, I dont think so. If you run a story on the 10 oclock news that says somebody had 16 dogs who starved to death and you do a story on a kid who got beat up by their parents, Id be willing to bet youd get 15 times as many phone calls outraged about pets than you will about kids.

     But what Im saying is that most of the time folks were identifying and saying, I have a dog, you have a dog, whats your dog? Kids would ask. And it was funny to us because we literally were trying to figure out some way to do something with this commercial that didnt make it boring and at the end of the day it was the image of the dog that took off in a way that nothing else had. I understand your question. The questions werent kind of cynically driven (and, incidentally, it wasnt my porch) in terms of the dog. It really became a kind of image that cut through, that people more readily identified than with what I was saying.

[same questioner]: Maybe in Wisconsin that would be the case. I do think that the issue with ads and the reason reporters do the evaluation of ads as fact is because I think weve lost credibility in terms of commercial ads and so I dont necessarily think that people believe what it is that theyre seeing.

Klug: I disagree with you and thats why people spend so much money on TV, because it works. And if you guys do a one-minute, fifteen-second story on a Tuesday night and Ive got a $500,000 buy, Ill beat you every time. Im just trying to be honest with you so you have a sense of what it looks like on the inside when folks are trying to do it strategically. Part of my frustration is I think a lot of political campaigns do very cookie-cutter stuff and people are so tired of those, you know, flying headlines and the black and white shaky images. I think its almost become a cliché and its wallpaper. The best stuff that Bob Dole ever did was when Bob Dole did the Visa commercial where hes in the little diner. He looked the best, he was the most personable.

     Smart campaigns hire people who can cut through clutter and so one of the other things you have to look for is to find a way to make commercials not look like every other political commercial. Point well taken on cynicism, but youre cynical. I dont necessarily know if the woman in the PDQ store is [cynical]. If you asked them theyd say, Ah, politicians. You know, Who cares, theyre all the same. At the end of the day, people hate Congress, but they usually like their own member of Congress for exactly that reason.

[question]: We had a session this morning and we were talking about a continuum in the kinds of different things to put into your coverage. Stepping aside from the political side and your political consultancy and back into your journalistic role, what would you put into your coverage of politics and the elections?

Klug: More people stories. I think thats absolutely essential. I think youve got to be awfully careful about citizen stories because, well, Dave [Iverson] and Andy [Moore] and I have had long arguments about We the People, which is a show that Wisconsin Public TV does and they bring citizens into the studio to ask questions. The folks who show up for those kinds of studio tapings arent regular people. I mean, if politicians are weird, theyre even weirder. I mean its folks who are really kind of passionate advocates for one side or the other. So if you can get real people who are real people, yes. I mean I think then it really adds a lot of value. I think if you even talk about candidates, if you do polling or focus groups that pinpoint issues, to find somebody who illustrates the kind of tension thats out there in the community.

     I think that the interesting thing now is to watch Bush try to campaign for the president in California. In the Hispanic community does stuff get held against him because of Pete Wilsons legacy or does Bush have more of a sense of the feel because he speaks Spanish and obviously hes very comfortable with the Hispanic community in Texas? And Id go find five or six average, I mean if there is an average, Hispanic voters to illustrate the different sense of perspective.

     The more you can focus on a person who tells a story&I think the best writing I generally see anywhere is still in the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal stories on the front page are always built around people and they can sometimes take really tough, complicated issues that you could end up with some four-page spread with graphs and charts and nobody would care about it. If you can find people, pull them in. And I also think finding the people involved in helping candidates makes for interesting stories. Not necessarily the activists, although you can do that. I think its more everyday people who decide to throw a house party, distribute literature, stick up yard signs, a kid at a high school club who suddenly gets involved in it. I just think that makes people connect and understand real issues.

[question]: When you first ran for Congress, did it help you being a former media guy that much or do you find yourself falling into some of the pitfalls?

Klug: Mike James is an old buddy of mine in Seattle who ran for the Senate and lost. Actually, there was a very popular governor of Oregon for years whod come out of television. Charlie Roy was the mayor of Seattle and had come out of TV. Its a two-edged sword. It gives you more immediate face recognition. The candidates usually have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just so anybody knows who they are. Thats why websites are spending millions of dollars at the Super Bowl, just to get somebody to remember their name. But I also think you have a really big credibility problem because of that.

     If somebody comes off like an empty suit, you cant really hide in a way maybe you could if it took longer for the public or the press to understand that. The difference is if you are comfortable doing media things, it tends to get invited back on. If you are comfortable on camera you get invited back more on camera, which helps you do things. So its both an asset and a liability and I think its up to the individual candidate to essentially develop the credibility. If they dont have, if they cant answer questions, I think you fall much faster from grace.

     When I was in Congress the National Republican Congressional Committee would kind of regularly parade folks through who had come out of television and were going to run for office and some of them, like J.D. Hayworth from Phoenix, got elected and was on everybodys list and keeps getting reelected. Other folks have run, there is a guy who used to work in television in the Quad Cities who has run a couple of times against Lane Evans and could never get over the hump. For candidates, if youve got the brain power to go along with it, its a tremendous asset. If you dont, you really expose yourself quickly and some of the fastest fading campaigns have been folks who have tried to make the jump from TV and radio into politics and they werent able to carry it off.

[question]: When you were wearing the hat of a politician, were there any memorable issues or things that you were worried or scared about the press learning about?

Klug: Well, shes now 29.& Yeah, actually in one of those kind of gray oops moments. When I first got elected in 1990 there were seven or eight of us who were really involved in the House Bank stuff in Washington. I can remember this clearly because my father-in-law came to our house on a Friday and threw a copy of USA Today at me and it was a story about how all these members of Congress had bounced checks and I knew absolutely nothing about it.

     We went back to Washington that Monday or Tuesday and Tom Foley, who was the Speaker of the House, called a meeting late in the afternoon at 4:00. Foley had the demeanor of a head master at a prep school. It was like you stole a goat, you know, the other schools mascot. It was kind of, Boys! We wont have any more of this and thats the end and well figure out a way to take care of this problem and nobody will talk about it again.

     Well, for those of us who kind of started to poke around, it turned out that the House Bank was actually set up in Congress not long after the Civil War when people had a hard time transferring money back and forth and actually in the 1870s in Congress scouts honor a former employee of Congress and a dancer named Lulu took all the money out of the House Bank and fled to Canada, which should have been a good warning for us. So a bunch of us said, This is crazy. You have to disclose what this is. The sense was there were 10 or 15 folks who had done this very consciously and were kind of floating checks for large amounts of money and then there were lots of other folks who werent paying attention, like me.

     One of the first things that happened when the House Bank stuff broke, the Sergeant at Arms who ran the House Bank asked me very discreetly to come into his office so he could show me a check Id written and, actually, it was a huge scandal. Id written a check for $31 to transfer funds and there was actually $30.66 in, so I had a 24 cents overdraft&but its a little hard to pose for holy cards when youre a sinner as well. So we actually disclosed it right away, figuring the best way to do this was to do it.

     That was one of those times when I was in Congress where I went, Gulp! I mean I had really gotten myself out on the edge and had trouble. And for a lot of us who were involved in it, we didnt even know they were doing what they were doing and, you know, my wifes writing checks in Madison and Im writing checks and sometimes we didnt talk everyday and didnt record it so I got myself in trouble.

     That was really the only time, I think, that stuff happened. Most of the time, frankly, the local press corps was exactly as had been described earlier, kind of scrambling from story to story, day after day, they never really had the sophistication or the training to ask the kind of tough questions that could get you in trouble, so fortunately there really werent very many of them. But a lot of us operated under the assumption that if you didnt want it on the front page, dont do it.

[question]: What stories should we have done that we didnt? What hard questions should we have asked you when you were in Congress that we didnt? Should we have looked at what your investments were, for example, would that have told us more about who you are?

Klug: Well, it would have been a short story on my investment portfolio so& its hard for me to think of that individually with me, but I think yes, you should have. And I think one of the great questions in the state of Wisconsin Herb Kohl is the U.S. Senator in Wisconsin Herb Kohl has refused to release his tax returns or any of his records. As a journalist Id be horrified in that weve had a guy now in Congress (you know, my goal in life is to someday have as much money as Herb Kohl pays in income taxes every year) who has never had to release any of that kind of information. I think the press really hasnt done a very good job on that. So I think individual members financial records, bankruptcy problems, credit problems, all of that stuff should absolutely be fair game. If they cant take care of their own money, they shouldnt be taking care of yours as a taxpayer.

     The truth for Congress is what I told you earlier about raising money, that there really arent briefcases of cash. For the most part it is a really, really boring crowd and I suspect thats true for the state legislature in your communities as well. Its a weird crowd of people who put themselves up to do this and they may have a lot of strange idiosyncrasies and may have a lot of shortcomings, but usually corruption is not one of them. Be careful to kind of make that leap of faith, which I think a lot of people in this room are inclined to do far too easily.

Thanks.

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