“Lou Dobbs, I think, would be a perfect candidate for us,” said Barkley, the onetime senator who founded the Reform Party (now known as the Independence Party). “We were hoping he would have run last time.”

Anything could happen, as Barkley’s experience managing Jesse Ventura’s 1998 campaign attests. Also interviewed for the Politico piece: Ad guy Bill Hillsman, who lead communications efforts behind successful outsider campaigns by Ventura and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone. But Politico says neither Hillsman nor other “leading third-party operatives” have been contacted by Dobbs’ people — yet.

(Hat tip: David Brauer on Twitter.)

(UPDATE: Okay, it’s not as momentous a cinematic moment as, say, the cavemen discovering the monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But we’ve been reading these Rybak-Obama tea leaves for months now, so we take it as it comes.)

If the stunt sets a poor example for the state’s growing legions of job-seekers, the video  – which is meant to promote free weekend parking at Gaviidae Common in downtown Minneapolis during the holiday shopping season – actually lives up to its “fun” billing in the mayor’s tweet about it today. Other highlights: Rybak abusing escalator protocol and poking fun at his checkered driving record (news video).

And if the finger-puppet clip does nix R.T.’s chances for a D.C. gig, at least the video gives a taste of what a Bill Hillsman-type Rybak-for-Governor ad might look like. See it after the jump.

With the last month of a very long presidential campaign nearly upon us, we were interested to see what one of the most provocative and insightful consultants in political advertising had to say about Barack Obama and John McCain’s media strategies up to now.

So I phoned up Bill Hillsman. Hillsman, who heads the Minneapolis firm Northwoods Advertising, was the architect of the ad/media plans that played a crucial role in getting Paul Wellstone elected to the U.S. Senate in 1990 and Jesse Ventura to Minnesota’s governorship in 1998. More recently, he ran the media effort for Ned Lamont, the Connecticut challenger who nearly knocked off Sen. Joe Lieberman a couple of years ago. This year, Hillsman & Co. have been working on congressional campaigns in Florida and Colorado — while hanging fire on the cash-poor Dean Barkley campaign; more about that in the interview — and will likely do some work for “independent expenditure”/527 interest groups as well.

What Hillsman has to say about media in the presidential campaign is bound to be alarming to Democrats; he believes the Obama campaign has been fundamentally misreading what it needs to do to reach the independent voters who will decide this election, and that Obama made a serious error in trying to shut down pro-Democratic third-party/527 interest groups.

There’s a transcript of the interview below.

Listen: Bill Hillsman on Obama/McCain’s media strategies and Dean Barkley’s dilemma (18:18)

Minnesota Independent: Earlier this month you told Advertising Age that Barack Obama was making several mistakes in the way he was handling his campaign in terms of the organizing and getting out its media message. What are they?

Bill Hillsman: We’ve felt since June that there were some fundamental problems with the Obama campaign. The problem with the campaign was that people thought they were walking on water, and they weren’t really willing to listen to any advice coming in from outside. It’s been a very top-down command-and-control type of campaign, which is different from what a lot of people expected it to be. They expected it to be very much a grassroots, broad-based dialogue type of campaign, and it’s turned out not to be that way.

About 7-10 days before the Democratic National Convention, as the polls tightened — which is something we thought was going to happen all along — they started to get very nervous about these things.

A lot of what we had spotted in June — it was really chickens coming home to roost. We didn’t think they were doing paid media very well. And they had shut down all the independent expenditure groups. People forget that in 2004 and 2006, there were hundreds of millions of dollars in independent expenditures brought into the Democratic side of the equation. There was a lot of money brought in on the Republican side, too, but not quite that much.

By shutting down the independent expenditure groups, the Obama campaign was really trying to control all the money that would be spent on this particular race. Their mass communications, I think, have been largely ineffective among independent voters. In order to get independent voters — you can’t get them by field work or volunteer organization or grassroots organizing, because they don’t exist on any lists. You can’t really mail to them.

So the best way to get them is through mass communications, and the Obama campaign has proved to be not that adept in mass communications. If you remember, during the primaries, they had their biggest successes in caucus states, where hand-to-hand combat and field organization, that sort of campaign, really has a premium. They did poorly in big states where mass communication was the main way of reaching the voters. Big states like Texas and Pennsylvania, they really didn’t do very well in the primaries there.

As an ad guy, I can sit there and say, I understand what’s going on. This guy is a tremendous speaker, so if you’re creating his ads, maybe you say, oh, wow, this guy’s a tremendous speaker; let’s put 30 seconds of him up on the screen and everybody’s going to be convinced. It’s really kind of a lazy way to try to communicate with independent voters. First of all, they’re not all that impressed. Second, you get inured to that kind of approach after a while. In reality, what they were doing was setting themselves up for the very shrewd attack that the McCain campaign laid the groundwork for with the Paris Hilton/Britney Spears ad that redefined Obama as a celebrity.

Those are some of the problems we saw, in addition to a potential over-reliance on the internet as a means of communication. The internet can be effective as communications, but it’s more effective with your base. It’s more effective to a partisan audience. When you’re trying to go out and talk to persuadable voters, it’s hard to aggregate the numbers that you need when you’re doing this over the web. To get a million views of a web communication is roughly akin to what a low-rated cable show might do [if used] one time.

So that’s the long answer.

MnIndy: You said you thought they erred in painting McCain as just like Bush, because independents weren’t going to buy that. Why not?

Hillsman: It’s a great message for the base, but it’s not a great message for the persuadable voters, and independents are going to decide this election. Independents still have a lot of pent-up affection and goodwill for John McCain, and that goes back to 2000 when he was running as a real maverick, and even thought about a potential third-party candidacy for the presidency that year.

So independents — these are not people who live and breathe politics 365 days a year, year in and year out. They tune in when they feel like tuning in, and they still remember John McCain from 2000. To try to suggest to these voters early in the campaign that John McCain is the same as George W. Bush made no sense to them. They remembered McCain running against George W. Bush.

Now, it is incumbent on the Obama campaign to explain how much John McCain has changed from the John McCain of 2000 to the John McCain of 2008. But that’s the message. The message shouldn’t have been John McCain is just like George W. Bush, because to the voters out there who need to be persuaded, it’s a non-starter.

MnIndy: How would you grade the McCain campaign’s approach to paid media?

Hillsman: I think it’s been very smart. I think the most effective work that’s being done, and the most interesting, is actually not in paid media. It’s been Internet messages.

But the few ads we can recall that either of the campaigns has run, it’s really been McCain ads that are more memorable. I think it’s less the ads and more the strategy that’s been effective. They did a great job, straight out of the Karl Rove playbook: You attack your opponent’s strengths. The popularity of Obama in a change year was something they went directly at. And they basically co-opted that message and turned it into a celebrity message. Which, in this case, basically meant: He’s a lightweight.

The other very shrewd thing they did — at the beginning of the convention, really — was to totally co-opt the change message and turn it into a reform message. And then used the brand of John McCain as maverick and reformer to siphon off a lot of the energy that the Obama campaign had from that positioning. So I would characterize (the McCain media campaign) as very shrewd strategically. Not necessarily that creative or interesting in terms of the actual messages, but the strategy has been very smart.

The other thing the McCain campaign did was to set up an advertising team that I think is a lot more effective than the Obama team. The Obama team has been relatively insular. They seem to be tone-deaf toward independents and some of these other constituencies out there that they need, like working-family Democrats and Latino voters.

They’re using the same suspects, the same Democratic aristocracy of consultants that has proved to be so effective in the last two presidential races.

MnIndy: How important is the between-the-lines factor of race, do you think, and what if anything can Barack Obama do through his advertising to blunt it?

Hillsman: I think it is what it is, and you’re not going to get around it. I think that Barack Obama is going to turn out a really high number of young voters, a really high number of new voters, and a really high number of African-American voters.

But even if he does all that, that’s not going to be enough to win the election. The election’s really going to come down to who can persuade the three major swing vote groups out there. And that’s independent voters, which is by far the largest cohort; working-family Democrats, the Hillary Clinton supporters and former Reagan Democrats; and Latino voters, who are absolutely critical in a couple of key swing states.

I think that’s the job they have to do, and I admire them for thinking they could do a 50-state campaign, and for saying things like, we’re going to make Virginia competitive, we’re going to make Georgia competitive. North Carolina. But it just wasn’t that realistic given who the candidate is. I think he’s a great candidate, I think he’s ideally positioned in a change year to win this thing. But he is African-American, and there’s a certain component of the voting public that’s just not going to vote for an African-American, and I don’t think there’s much he or anybody else can do about that.

MnIndy: If you were doing the media for the last month of the Obama and McCain campaigns, how would you approach the high points of their messaging? McCain first.

Hillsman: Well, I don’t really answer questions like that, because there’s too much hip-shooting that goes on. And even if we were going to be accurate about it, it’s giving free advice, and this is basically how we make our living.

I just don’t know enough. I know what we know about who the persuadable voters are, which states are the key swings, but I don’t know enough about the inside workings of either of those two campaigns to really say strategically what I would do if I were in their position. I’m not in their position.

MnIndy: A few minutes ago you said the McCain campaign had really excelled on the web. How so?

Hillsman: I wasn’t saying that strictly about the McCain campaign. I think in both campaigns, including the primary campaigns, the most interesting work that we’ve seen has been done on the web. During the Kerry/Bush race of 2004, the ads you can remember are the windsurfer ad, the flip-flops, things like that. And there’s really been no paid media ad [this year] that sticks out to the degree of, say, the Will.i.am video for Obama, or “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama” by Obama Girl, or the Hillary Clinton parody of the 1984 ad, or even the Hillary Clinton “Sopranos” ad. There’s been nothing like that in mass communications and mass media. These two campaigns have been very, very careful in their advertising, and I think that’s OK for McCain strategically, because they seem to have a clearer idea of who these persuadable voters are than the Obama campaign does.

But I think (caution) is a deficiency for the Obama campaign, because you really have to go after the independent voters that he needs in the same way that you would advertise to consumers. They just totally run away from any communications that smack of traditional political advertising. They hate it, and as soon as they get a whiff of it, they’re out the door. So you have to come at them from a different direction to get a message to them.

MnIndy: Will you be doing media for Dean Barkley’s Senate campaign?

Hillsman: Well, we hope to be. I wrote a book that came out in 2004 that was called “Run the Other Way.” And one of the chapters in the book that got cut is about candidates like Dean Barkley who can’t get elected in the current system because money is so important to it. Jesse Ventura could overcome it because there’s public financing in Minnesota and because he had extremely high name recognition and a high profile.

Dean is a remarkably competent public servant who has done the job before and would do a good job in the office. But he can’t really raise the money to compete in a Senate race where there’s going to be $20 million spent on both sides. I can’t think of too many people who could raise the money to compete in that type of race. And that’s an indictment of the system. We may have the best candidate running of the three in Dean Barkley. But how’s he going to get his message out the same way Franken and Coleman have been able to get it out?

There’s a pent-up demand for a candidate like Barkley, particularly in the state of Minnesota, going back to 1992, when Ross Perot got one in four votes in Minnesota. He got one in five votes nationally. We saw it with Jesse Ventura, and we saw it (again) this year when it looked like Jesse could walk into the Senate race — after 10 years of the media really bashing him here — with numbers that were 22-27 percent. That means that, particularly in a change year, there’s a lot of pent-up demand for a candidate like Dean Barkley. And if he were able to get his message out with even a couple million dollars, he would be right up there.

This is one of those terrible situations where people who want to support a particular type of candidate can’t just do it with their vote. They actually have to do it with their checkbook as well, because there’s no other way to do it given the way the system’s been set up by the Republicans and Democrats.

MnIndy: Bill Hillsman, thanks very much for joining us today. What have you got coming down the road, if you can say?

Hillsman: We’re doing a lot of issue-advocacy work, particularly on the issue of health care. We’re looking at some independent expenditure groups out there that are thinking about getting into this race. We’re talking to some of them. We’re doing a very interesting Congressional race in a Republican district in Orlando, Florida, that has caused a lot of attention to be paid to that race in much the same way that attention was paid to Ned Lamont’s race. We worked for a Congressional candidate in Boulder, Colorado, who is almost certain to be elected and will become the first gay member of Congress from Colorado. And we’re just getting involved in a Senate race in Kansas as well, for a challenger to Pat Roberts down there.

More: A 2006 Hillsman profile from the Christian Science Monitor; Hillsman’s ad reel.