Victor De Grazia Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

and he went on the air with these "Walker Report" commercials. In my own
judgement they weren't very good commercials. They were Ogilvie himself,
just by himself, I think he was sitting on a stool. He is not the most
charismatic person on television and he hammered away at Walker being the
author of the infamous "Walker Report" that talked about police riots and
blamed everything on the police.
Now we had, as I said, determined that that was going to be the assault
at the end if there was an assault, so we had our answering commercials
which we'd called the "Sixty Day Trial Law" commercial, in which Dan
Walker talks about a proposal to try everybody in sixty days. Now we had
tested that idea in a poll and it was a most staggering response I've
ever seen in a poll. I don't know, I think maybe seven hundred people we
did statewide in a scientific sampling, and out of all of those only one
person was against it. And that was a University of Illinois professor.
(laughs) What we hadn't realized when we were talking about the idea was
that it cut both ways. That is, conservatives looked at the proposal and
said, "Yes, let's get them off the streets and into jail in sixty days,"
and liberals looked at the proposal and said, "Well that means innocent
people won1 t languish in jail for more than sixty days." So, as I said,
we hadn't realized that that was what we had, but it was obvious that it
was an extremely popular proposal and so we used that as the answer to
Ogilvie' s "Walker Report" charges.
Q: Can you remember some of the other advertising? It is so expensive.
How do you decide what to say when there's so much money riding on it and
the election perhaps riding on it?
A: That's what's always astonished me about some politicians I've worked
with. Not Dan Walker. Here you spend a million dollars, say, on a media
budget, and they scream and holler about spending a hundred thousand
dollars on research to decide what you should spend that million dollars
on. I guess politicians, and lawyers are a lot like that too--there are
many lawyer politicians, so maybe that's it--they trust their own
instincts so much that they'd rather go that way. The polls are also
scary to politicians because a politician out campaigning rarely gets a
bad response. When he's walking on the street or anything, people don't
go out of their way to insult them. People in general have got good
manners, but a poll shows in black and white how people really feel about
him, and sometimes a candidate really is afraid to learn that.
Q: Can you tell me about some of the other ads, specifically what you
learned from the polls that you should do in the other ads?
A: Well, as I kind of indicated yesterday or day before yesterday, the
"walk1' as a symbol was terribly important so there were pictures of Dan
on the "Walk" in every commercial we did. The other commercials were--
it's hard for me to remember. (laughs) Generalized commercials. One
thing I remember is, because of Dan's phenomenal background we did a
long, relatively speaking, long commercial on his background, what he had
done . . .
Q: His childhood or his past career?