Presidential advertising: formulaic, contrived

By Darrell Laurant

Published: July 20, 2008

Like those whining cicadas that emerge every few summers to assault our eardums, the political ads are coming. Prepare yourself — it’s a presidential year.

The vanguard has already crawled into our TV sets, in fact, and the onslaught is right around the corner. This year, as an added bonus, we’ll get baloney in high-def.

Jackson Browne, the pop artist who morphed into a dour political protest singer, once told us: “They sell us the President the same way they sell us our clothes and our cars.”

Well, yeah — no revelation there. But did you ever think about how much of a connection there is between TV commercials and political advertising?

Here are a few ads you will undoubtedly see, in both contexts, this fall.

- Warm fuzzies. The best examples of these, commercially, are the ads for drugs like Viagara. They focus completely on the sweet love story between two devoted (if, perhaps, sexually challenged) babyboomers or senior citizens, and little about the drugs themselves. Similarly, politicians like to be shown talking to farmers in bucolic settings or sitting in cozy living rooms with attentive families, familiar music playing in the background. Never mind that the farmers and family members are probably actors.

- Inventing the Enemy. In this category, I always think of a 1970s muffler ad where a luckless motorist had his car destroyed by some cretinous mechanics in some mythical backwater. These people didn’t exist, of course, but the muffler company being pitched was compared to them, anyway. Political ad spinners are wonderful at coming up with straw men for their candidates to battle.

- Outrunning the Bear. There’s an old joke that has two hunters dashing desperately through the woods with an enraged grizzly in pursuit.

“What are you doing?” pants one hunter to the other. “You can’t outrun a bear.”

“I don’t have to,” the other hunter replies. “All I have to do is outrun you.”

In other words, political candidates don’t have to portray themselves as models of civic service. All they have to do is convince you that they’re a lesser evil than their opponent.

- Micro-maligning. This takes a little research, but is an increasingly popular ploy. Everyone who has been in public life for any length of time has done something stupid, supported a cause or bill that turned out to be a mistake, or blurted out an embarrassing statement. So the ad takes one damning snapshot from a long career and beats it (and, with luck, the candidate) to death.

- Fear Factors. We’re going to see a lot of these this fall, not only on TV but all over the Internet. Barack Obama is really a mole planted in the U.S. by radical Muslims. John McCain is actually working for George W. Bush (or, in another variation, the CIA). If Obama is elected, the country will be overrun by terrorists. If McCain is elected, the country will go broke. And so on.

Lyndon Johnson’s campaign set the standard for this tactic in 1964 with an ad showing a sweet little girl picking flowers, then being obliterated by a nuclear explosion. This sent a clear message: Barry Goldwater wants to destroy the world, including sweet little girls.

- Say, Didn’t I See You With ….? This ad works both ways, either by placing your opponent in the same photo or context with someone shady or dangerous, or having well-regarded people say something nice about your own standard bearer.

In 1988, for instance, the George Bush campaign blamed Michael Dukakis, then governor of Masachusetts, for crimes committed by Willie Horton, a convict let out on parole. (As if Dukakis had ever heard of Horton, or had been consulted before he was released).

It’s not that we’re all stupid, and neither are the political admakers. They know that over several generations of television watching, Americans have developed the ability to largely tune out advertisements while staring blankly at the screen. It has been proven, though, that the subliminal message often gets through.

There’s a defense against all of this. It’s called common sense.