A recent Review-Journal letter-writer expressed an entirely novel reason to visit our fair city. He longed to return, not to avenge roulette losses or to dispatch another $6.95 prime rib, but to watch the political advertisements he could not see in Illinois. The Battle-Born is a battleground state, unlike the Land of Lincoln.
It has become commonplace that American politics is all about television, which is to say it is all about artifice and emotional manipulation. Every four years, commentators dredge up the grainy, glairy, 1960 tape of Richard Nixon and John Kennedy verbally duking it out, and tell us the good-looking Kennedy knew how to exploit the medium while the dour Nixon remained mired in the politics of whistle-stops and stump speeches.
But Nixon was one of the first politicians to use television successfully. On September 23, 1953, he took to the tube to confront charges about a slush fund provided by wealthy donors. He was running for vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, and the allegation nearly spared us a lot of awful history. But Nixon sat himself at a desk and, partly reading, partly extemporizing, refuted the accusation. The money was for political expenses, he said. His wife, Pat, did not own a mink coat, but a standard "Republican cloth coat."
And oh, yes, he did accept another gift. Someone sent his family a little cocker spaniel, christened "Checkers" by daughter Tricia. And damn the consequences, he was not sending it back. That the nearly half-hour speech should be remembered for the brief canine anecdote illustrates that sentimental chicanery was understood to be Nixon's aim. And it worked. Perhaps too well—maybe that's why he decided seven years later that he did not need makeup during his first debate with Kennedy. His five-o'clock shadow undid him, or so we're told.
Actually, the pair debated four times that fall, still a record, and the election that produced the Kennedy administration was one of the closest in history, as the one approaching might well be. The following election, in 1964, was a blowout for Lyndon Johnson, mostly due to the anguish over Kennedy's assassination a year earlier. But pundits also like to point to a television ad said to have devastated the campaign of challenger Barry Goldwater. "Daisy" ran only once, on September 7, 1964, during a movie on NBC. But it so infuriated Republicans that it aired again on all three network news programs the next evening—an early charting of the now-familiar route to free airtime.
The ad shows a little girl counting petals on a daisy, then zooms in on her eye as a male voice counts down to zero and a nuclear explosion. It is one of the most exquisitely manipulative commercials ever produced, playing on fears of nuclear annihilation at the hands of a right-wing hothead. The spot was created by the legendary Tony Schwartz, whose book, The Responsive Chord, was an early landmark in what we now call "media literacy."
Schwartz firmly believed in using sounds and images to beguile viewers—although he did so mostly in the service of the progressive causes he championed. As they co-opted the cranky iconoclasm of the 1960s left, Republicans proved they'd learned well from their tormenters. Probably the next most celebrated, or infamous, political ad helped win the elder George Bush the presidency in 1988. Anyone remember the revolving door of the Willie Horton spot? It pinned the "soft on crime" label on another "Massachusetts liberal." This had nothing to do with being president, and everything to do with the emerging political standard of "values."
It's been largely forgotten that the "Daisy" ad ended with a Johnson voice-over warning Americans that "we must love each other or we must die." Subsequent manipulative advertising, like the Horton spot, has focused almost entirely on fomenting hate. Candidates have been slandering each other since the birth of the republic, to be sure, but television has a way of injecting venom directly into the brain. And you don't need anything nearly as clever as "Daisy." The tools are familiar and simple: the unflattering, polarized image of the opponent, the ominous voice-over, the bulleted points (• hates children; • tortures kittens; • steals from the blind—how can you trust him?).
Sadly, it works. Look what happened to John Kerry's lead in the polls after the "Swift Boat" ads. In fairness, the liberal group MoveOn.org has battered the president with ads for months. Possibly its best, a clear competitor for "Daisy," showed little children working adult jobs to pay off the deficit. (CBS refused to air it during the Super Bowl—good thing they didn't offend anyone that day.) And its latest, a grieving mother lamenting her son's death in Iraq and condemning the administration's shrewdly misleading war call, could be more damaging than "Daisy."
But Kerry lifted himself back into the race through the debates. Petulance can be off-putting, as Al Gore discovered in 2000 and Bush learned this fall, but on the whole it's the real deal we see, even in makeup. Debates clearly reveal if a candidate is informed and capable, or merely given to lobbing labels at the opponent. They are the "Daisy" antidote.
Kerry's latest ads show him on the stump, simply and directly rebutting charges and describing his policies. After four years of cynical machination, how refreshing it would be to find that this actually works.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.