It’s still the nuclear weapon.
DAVID AXELROD ON THE ROLE OF
TELEVISION ADS IN CAMPAIGNS, 2011
To help explain the brave new world of politics in which Americans now reside, we’d like to introduce readers to Bridget McCormack.1 She’s pretty impressive. A distinguished professor of law and associate dean at the University of Michigan, McCormack earned international recognition and a mantle full of awards and honors as the founder and codirector of the Michigan Innocence Clinic, a pioneering project to address the distinct challenges that arise when individuals are wrongfully convicted in cases where there is no DNA evidence. She’s also helped to launch and expand a mediation clinic, a low-income-taxpayer clinic, an international transactions clinic, a human trafficking clinic, a juvenile justice clinic, and an entrepreneurship clinic.2
Like a number of the nation’s top lawyers, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, she volunteered on a project organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which sought to obtain civil trials for suspects illegally detained by the U.S. government at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. As the New York Times noted, the “goal was not to ‘free terrorists,’ but to ensure that American prisoners were entitled to the rights and representation provided under international and American law. The Supreme Court affirmed those rights on more than one occasion.” McCormack’s involvement with the project was slim, as the prisoner she sought to represent was released by a military tribunal under a process developed by the Bush administration.
Fast-forward five years to 2012, when an opening occurred on the Michigan Supreme Court. Nominated by the Democratic Party to seek the seat in the November election, McCormack ran a classic judicial campaign, emphasizing her qualifications and promising to put the rule of law ahead of partisanship and ideology. In the final days of the race, however, she found herself under attack as a legal ally of terrorism. A slick television advertisement featured the mother of Joseph Johnson, a Michigan soldier killed in Afghanistan, saying, “My son is a hero and fought to protect us. . . . Bridget McCormack volunteered to help free a terrorist. How could you?”3
The woman in the ad did not pay for it. Nor does it appear did anyone else in Michigan. It was paid for by a Washington-based conservative group called the Judicial Crisis Network. There was no evidence to suggest that the Judicial Crisis Network had a bone to pick with McCormack; rather, the group in all likelihood shared the concern of Michigan conservative and corporate interests about whether the High Court would retain its conservative majority. To the ad’s question of “How could you?” the Times replied, “That’s easy to answer. She didn’t. Ms. Johnson may not know that, but the Republican activists who paid for the ad surely do.”
The attack on McCormack was so inappropriate that the nation’s newspaper of record decried it with a lengthy editorial that declared, “Without that legal representation, there can be no justice, no system of democratic values to defend against terrorism. An attack on lawyers willing to defend Guantanamo detainees is an attack on that system. Those lawyers aren’t helping our enemies; they’re deeply patriotic.”4 A few Michigan papers wrote about the ad as well, although they did so with headlines that only compounded the damage, including one reading “Michigan Supreme Court Candidate Defends Against Terrorism Claim.”5
On those screens in Michigan homes, however, it kept running on television stations that made little or no effort to clarify that Bridget McCormack was being unfairly attacked for defending the rule of law. The television stations merely pocketed an estimated $1 million in checks from the Judicial Crisis Network, as McCormack’s campaign scrambled to raise the money needed to counter the negative image of the candidate by raising more money to pay for more ads that would further enrich the very same television stations.6 McCormack won her election, in part because of her own TV ad featuring the cast of The West Wing promoting her virtues.7
But not every candidate has a sister who played the deputy national security adviser on The West Wing’s final three seasons and can call on Hollywood to counter dishonest attack ads.
Unfortunately, that’s the option that candidates who are lied about are left with.
The uglier, the crueler, the more distorted and dishonest campaigns become, the richer local television stations across the country become. As rackets go, it’s a lucrative one.
And it is this racket that has come to define American politics.
SINCE THE 1970s, there is little or no evidence of a seriously contested campaign for a consequential political office costing less than the previous campaign for that post. This is not a matter of inflation. Even in jurisdictions where population growth is stagnant, even as new technologies have made campaigning more efficient, campaign costs have risen at dramatic rates. It’s not because candidates are saying more, not because their message is getting any more elegant or deeper. Indeed, as campaigns grow ever more expensive, they grow more deliberately absurd and thuggish.
What’s happening here? After a brief interlude of Watergate-era campaign-finance controls, which might reasonably be thought of as the electoral equivalent of a nuclear arms control treaty, the courts began tearing up the rules and regulations, creating a political no-man’s-land. That land is not the border between two belligerent states. It is the American living room. The living room war that began in the 1970s has become the costliest political conflict in the history of the world. And no one has the courage to lay his or her arms down. So it is that for forty years political campaigns have raised ever-increasing amounts of money to spend on television advertising campaigns that have become the electoral equivalent of the old Cold War concept of “mutually assured destruction.” Candidates no longer raise the relatively modest amount of money needed to communicate their messages to voters. They raise the amount of money required to match or, ideally, surpass the spending of opponents.
Outside of war, there is no equivalent for the equation that adds up campaign costs. Economies of scale are rejected, along with simple logic. Candidates spend more time raising money in almost every election cycle. As in the Cold War, this has led to the formation of a multifaceted industry that favors not just the combatants but also the producers of the armaments. Just as Dwight Eisenhower warned about a “military-industrial complex,” we now have a money-and-media election complex, with a revenue base measured in the many billions of dollars annually. This complex has effectively become the basis of electoral politics in the United States.
In Chapters 2 and 3 we describe who is providing the lion’s share of the money for political campaigns and the legal and political structures that have been put in place to encourage their shenanigans. The next logical question is: What does all this money buy? The short answer is that the majority of the money goes to political advertising, and within political advertising the vast majority goes to television ads. The percentage of campaign spending that goes to TV ads has increased sharply over the past forty years. As a rule, the closer a race, the more money will be spent on the campaigns, and the higher the proportion will go to paid TV political advertisements. “We spent the vast majority of our money last time on broadcast television,” Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod told attendees at a 2011 cable convention. “It’s still the nuclear weapon.”8
This chapter chronicles the rise and nature of TV political advertising and explains why, under the commercial model that dominates U.S. television, it was destined to assume the forms it has taken.
For Americans born after 1950, and for those born before 1950 but with faltering memories, the televised commercial deluge that now defines American political campaigns is the “natural order.”9 But American campaigns were significantly different in the 175 years before political advertising, specifically television political advertising, came to dominate the discourse. Indeed, for politicians and much of the public, the initial response to the use of broadcast candidate advertising was hostile, even contemptuous, regarding the practice as antithetical to American democratic political traditions.
The story has a history going back to the 1930s and 1940s, when moneyed interests learned they could effectively use motion pictures, radio broadcasting, and, what was then used in a nonpejorative sense, propaganda techniques to win elections they might not otherwise.10 But political advertising only begins to be considered at midcentury when academic researchers like Paul Lazarsfeld and David Riesman observed that advertising and marketing techniques could be successfully applied to political campaigns and that voters shared many attributes with consumers.11 Legendary Madison Avenue ad man Rosser Reeves approached Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey in 1948 and proposed a series of radio spots. Dewey rejected the idea as “undignified.” Reeves was later convinced that Dewey’s decision cost him the election.12
By 1950, advertising people were brought formally into congressional campaigns, at least on the Republican side. This led the Republican-leaning New York World-Telegram to bemoan in a large headline the way in which “The Hucksters” had taken over the GOP campaign.13 Despite the World-Telegram’s dignified dissent, Republicans tended to be more open to employing the evolving talents of Madison Avenue, if only because the major advertising agencies were well known for their Republican sympathies at the time. By the early 1950s, the party had the huge Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn firm on retainer as its permanent agency.14
The 1952 Eisenhower presidential campaign was the turning point. For the first time, television political ads were deployed in a meaningful, attention-grabbing manner. Reeves took a six-week unpaid leave to develop what would become a series of forty TV spots for the campaign. He conducted market research to determine Eisenhower’s strengths and weaknesses with uncommitted voters and what issues they were most concerned with. The top issue was the war in Korea, so the campaign slogan became “Eisenhower, Man of Peace.” Reeves then developed a campaign whereby in each ad spot Eisenhower would appear to be answering a question from a voter. In fact, Reeves had scripted both the question and the answer.
Eisenhower was reluctant to participate and not at all happy to spend time recording his “answers.” “Why don’t you just get an actor. That’s what you really want,” he protested. But he went along with the advice of his campaign advisors.15 As Lizabeth Cohen put it, “Ironically, it was the campaigns of down-home, grandfatherly Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and again in 1956 that brought mass marketing fully into the political arena.”16
Some Democrats protested mightily. Republicans “have created a new kind of campaign,” a speechwriter for 1952 and 1956 presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson said, “conceived not by men who want us to face the crucial issues of the day, but by the high-power hucksters of Madison Avenue.” Stevenson “hated the idea of using advertising in the political process,” David Halberstam noted. “This is the worst idea I have ever heard of,” Stevenson told a CBS executive.17 “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal . . . is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.”18
Former president Harry S. Truman went before the New York Advertising Club in 1958 to implore “the advertising profession” not to “take over the profession of politics.”19 By then it may have been too late. “Both parties will merchandise their candidates and issues by the same methods business has developed to sell goods,” Nation’s Business observed.20 As Cohen wrote, the 1960 Kennedy campaign embraced commercial marketing tools in a manner Stevenson never could and advanced the use of market segmentation.21
Nonetheless, political campaigns in the 1950s and much of the 1960s appear positively anticommercial compared to what would soon follow. The emerging role of television is a recurring theme in Theodore White’s epic The Making of the President series, especially for 1960 and 1964, but TV political advertising is barely present in either volume. By White’s account, Nixon paid virtually no attention to his Madison Avenue advisors throughout his unsuccessful 1960 presidential campaign.22 In 1964, the campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater spent money on TV political ads, but campaign managers “rejected the counsel of their advertising agency” for short, stylish spots with modish production values in favor of ads that had all the flair of an old ad from the early 1950s.23 According to Joe Klein’s research, in the 1950s and 1960s candidates routinely hired advertising experts and pollsters, “but these were peripheral advisers; they didn’t run the campaigns.”24
This quickly changed. The success of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy” ad—which was broadcast only once—took the understanding of how powerful televised political commercials could be to a new level. The spot was put together by Doyle Dane Bernbach, the agency that developed the legendary Volkswagen campaigns that made it a major automobile in the United States by the 1960s. The spot simply had an innocent young girl picking the petals off of a daisy until she was engulfed in a mushroom cloud. It was followed by a voiceover of LBJ saying, “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”
It was unprecedented and extraordinarily powerful, conveying the concern that Goldwater was far more comfortable with nuclear war than any sane person should be. As one scholar noted, “It was the first presidential television spot to contain no real information and no rational argument.” David Broder interviewed Johnson staffers after the landslide election victory and noted the “lip-smacking glee” they exhibited for “the way in which they had foisted on the American public a picture of Barry Goldwater as the nuclear-mad bomber who was going to saw off the eastern seaboard of the United States.” “The only thing that worries me, Dave,” one of the staffers told Broder, “is that some year an outfit as good as ours might go to work for the wrong candidate.”25
The 1968 presidential election proved to be a watershed. In 1969, Joe McGinniss published his groundbreaking The Selling of the President to chronicle what he termed “a striking new phenomenon—the marketing of political candidates as if they were consumer products.” The book, which involved McGinniss spending time with Nixon’s television advertising advisors, including current Fox News chief Roger Ailes, during the 1968 presidential campaign, seemed a shocking and sharp departure from the political-driven campaign narratives provided by the likes of White. McGinniss documented how Nixon came to rely upon TV political commercials, based on Madison Avenue marketing principles, as the foundation of his campaign. In the book, Ailes presciently concluded immediately after Nixon’s November victory, “This is the beginning of a whole new concept. This is it. This is the way they’ll be elected forevermore.”26
It is ironic that when read today, the book’s description of Nixon’s campaign seems downright quaint, even homespun, by comparison to subsequent elections. The liberal McGinniss was able to wander through the corridors of power in Nixon’s campaign like a serendipitous hippie roaming around at Woodstock looking for a roach clip. Similarly The Candidate, a sober 1972 film about a young idealistic California candidate for a U.S. Senate seat, starring Robert Redford, seems Atlantean today. The film, with a screenplay by a former Eugene McCarthy speechwriter, dealt with the phoniness and superficiality that marketing and television had brought to political campaigns. At the time, it was provocative and controversial, and it contributed to subsequent debates about the role of money in politics. TV political advertising plays an important role in the film and is cast in a negative light. But what is ironic is that the TV ads Redford’s character airs in the fictional campaign are not nearly as bad in tone and substantive content as the dreck that typifies political ads of more recent vintage. Ads of that caliber today would have political scientists and pundits shouting from the mountaintops that we have nothing to fear. But in 1972, such ads were considered highly suspect and part of the problem.
As it was, by 1972 the total amount spent on television political advertising for all races—from the presidency and House and Senate to governorships, mayoralties, state legislatures, referendums, initiatives, and city councils, the works!—had increased threefold from 1960 to reach $37 million.27 That would amount to approximately $200 million in 2012 dollars, so when we factor in inflation, the 1972 election spent around 3 percent of what was spent on TV political ads in the 2012 election cycle.
Even at those 1972 levels, the American public seemed to have had enough. Research in 1973 by the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB) determined that Americans “continued to be disenchanted with political advertising,” and found it less credible than commercial advertising, which was not exactly a high bar to meet. An FCB 1971 poll determined that three-quarters of Americans wanted controls to reduce the amount of TV political advertising. Only 19 percent of Americans wanted to keep the amount of TV political advertising at then-existing levels. The notion that anyone might want more TV political advertising was so laughable that it was not even an option in the survey.28
As the Watergate scandal unfolded, the demand for campaign-finance reform grew so intense that by 1974 candidates for the Senate as diverse as Democratic former attorney general Ramsey Clark, who was running in New York that year, and Maryland senator Charles Mathias, a Republican stalwart, were refusing contributions of more than $100 and talking about the “crisis” of campaigns defined by thirty-second attacks ads. Mathias said he wanted to “avoid the curse of big money that has led to so much trouble.”29
The “curse” had actually been recognized decades earlier. As television political advertising became prominent in American campaigns, the common refrain was that political advertising was bad because it was advertising, that it substituted the hustle and chicanery of a Madison Avenue sales job for the meat and potatoes of political debate and democratic governance. Lincoln and Douglas were replaced by Procter & Gamble. “Madison Avenue sells politicians like soap,” the lament went. The very term “Madison Avenue” provided a shorthand critique of advertising’s lack of ethics, sincerity, and integrity, and it encapsulated much of what people felt they were subjected to with TV political commercials. In 1960, for example, Richard Nixon so feared the tag Madison Avenue that he moved his campaign’s television advisers—according to White, “the finest brains of New York’s advertising agencies”—from their ad agency offices on that (in)famous street to new offices on nearby Vanderbilt Avenue.30
Despite the warm embrace of political advertising by Rosser Reeves and numerous other major figures on Madison Avenue, there was also a dissident element of the advertising industry offended by the comparison of political advertising to commercial advertising, as these admen regarded the latter as having vastly greater integrity and social value. The towering Madison Avenue opponent to political advertising was David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, and, ironically enough, the brother-in-law of Reeves. Ogilvy thought political advertising “represented the worst abuse imaginable of the advertising man’s skills,” as Halberstam put it. When Reeves showed his brother-in-law his TV spots for Eisenhower in 1952, Ogilvy wished him luck but remarked that he hoped “for the country’s sake it goes terribly.”31 Years later, Ogilvy called political spots “the most deceptive, misleading, unfair and untruthful of all advertising.”32 At another point, he stated, “Political advertising ought to be stopped. It’s the only really dishonest kind of advertising that’s left. It’s totally dishonest.”33
Ogilvy & Mather’s creative head, Robert Spero, shared his boss’s stance toward political ads. When told that TV political advertising sold politicians like soap, he responded that unfortunately that was not the case, because soap advertising was markedly superior as a source of useful information. Spero was so appalled by political advertising that he took leave from his position at Oglivy & Mather in the late 1970s to do a comprehensive analysis of every available presidential television political commercial from 1952 through the 1976 election. In Spero’s mind, the key distinction between commercial ads and political ads was that political advertising, unlike commercial advertising, had First Amendment protection from regulation for fraud and misleading content. This point is indeed crucial and cannot be exaggerated: political advertising can pretty much say whatever it wants without fear of regulatory reprisal.
Spero’s subsequent book, The Duping of the American Voter, demonstrated in a meticulous and engaging case-by-case study that political ads for all varieties of presidential candidates routinely had fraudulent traits that would have been impossible for a commercial advertiser facing the Federal Trade Commission and other forms of government regulation at that time. “Corporations and their advertising advisers have not become simon-pure in their evolvement from street hucksters. Historically, bending the truth has been inseparable from selling,” Spero wrote. “What has prevented the truth from being bent out of all proportion by corporations and their advertising agents is the phenomenal growth of advertising regulation over the past decade.”34 (It is worth noting that the 1970s was the high-water mark for regulation of commercial advertising.)
Industry dissidents remain, such as creative whiz Claudia Caplan, who in Advertising Age dismissed political advertising as “hectoring, polemical dreck” and argued that it was smart business for ad agencies to avoid it altogether.35 And then there is Burt Manning, the former chairman of the American Association of Advertising Agencies and chairman emeritus of J. Walter Thompson (JWT). Channeling Ogilvy, Manning warned on the eve of the 2012 election that “I relate the decline in Americans’ trust and acceptance of general advertising to their violent dislike of mudslinging political advertising. It’s more of a problem now, because there is more of it.”36
This sentiment is countered by the emergence of the money-and-media election complex, which means Madison Avenue still gets a piece of the action—even if much of the political ad business goes to consultants and their specialized agencies—so there is incentive to accept the status quo and go with the flow.37 After all, can political advertising really be that much worse than junk food, insurance, oil company, pharmaceutical, alcohol, or tobacco advertising? Bob Jeffrey, who has followed Manning as CEO of JWT Worldwide, noted that election cycles “for the advertising business, these are very profitable seasons.”38 What is clear is that any change of heart from Madison Avenue had little or nothing to do with the integrity or quality of the political ads themselves. Jeffrey was beside himself describing their imbecility.39 A study in the early 2000s of political spots cited by reputable sources found “roughly half of all ads to be unfair, misleading or deceptive.”40 Preliminary examinations of 2012’s political ads suggest that percentage has only grown, perhaps a great deal.
In fact, Ogilvy and Spero were too quick to regard political advertising and product advertising as being distant relations, though their approach has been widely internalized among scholars. Political scientists and political communication scholars generally understand political advertising first and foremost as an outgrowth of political campaigning—understandably, as that is the tradition scholars come from—and they pay particular attention to identifying the common themes that link the present to earlier eras. And because blarney, bluster, deception, character assassination, showmanship, manipulation, idiocy, baby-kissing, superficiality, overstatement, ridicule, hypocrisy, and hyperbole have always been present to varying degrees in popular politics, the argument goes, Americans should not be so alarmed that these traits now come packaged as candidate TV ads. Because in the past the American democratic system always ended up working effectively, and voters were able to cut through the crap and use the system to adequately convey their core political values and concerns, there is little reason to think that will not remain the case in the era of political advertising. The system works; the more things change, the more they stay the same.
This approach underplays or misses the decisive differences in the current nature of political campaigns wrought by TV political advertising. There is the matter of the enormous increase in funds necessary to successfully participate as a candidate and the strings that come attached to these funds. There is also the matter of the power, sophistication, and ubiquity of televised political advertising; it now replaces virtually everything else in the campaign, including all the forces that in theory could counteract the power of money and advertising. There is also the matter that people—to a significant extent and for rational reasons—detest political advertising in a manner that has no apparent precedent in American political campaigns.
In our view, our current political campaigns can be more accurately appreciated by understanding political advertising as a subset of commercial advertising. This approach has received too little attention from scholars, probably because so few of them have given much consideration to the matter, or seem to know much about it. Modern commercial advertising is not a function of what economists term “competitive markets,” meaning new businesses can easily enter existing profitable markets, increase output, lower prices, and make the consumer live happily ever after. Such markets tend to have relatively little advertising, if only because producers can sell all that they produce at the market price, over which they have little or no control. (Think of a wheat farmer in 1875.) This is why the largely local and competitive U.S. economy prior to the late nineteenth century had little advertising by the standards of the past one hundred years.
Modern persuasion advertising blossomed as a function of markets that were less competitive by economists’ standards. Generally described as oligopolies, these markets are characterized by a handful of firms dominating output or sales in the industry and having sufficient market power to set the price at which their product sells. The key to an oligopoly is that it is very difficult for newcomers to enter the market, no matter how profitable it may be, because of the power of the existing players. Under oligopoly, there is strong disincentive to engage in price warfare to expand market share, because all the main players are large enough to survive a price war and all it would do is shrink the size of the industry revenue pie that the firms are fighting over. Indeed, the price in an oligopolistic industry will tend to gravitate toward what it would be in a pure monopoly, so the contenders are fighting for slices of the largest possible revenue pie.41
At first blush, this is a pretty accurate picture of the U.S. economy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Under Dollarocracy, the economy has become far more monopolistic over the past thirty years.42 It is also a good way, though by no means the only way, to understand the emergence and dominance of advertising. Although firms are not in competitive markets, they are most definitely competing with each other to maximize their profits. Advertising emerges front and center as a major way to increase market share (and protect market share) without engaging in destructive profit-damaging price competition.
The election realm is similar to the economy in that it tends to be a duopoly in general elections, meaning there are usually only two options that could conceivably win, and, as in an oligopoly, they have used their “market power”—in this case control over election laws—to make it all but impossible for a third party to successfully establish itself as a legitimate contender. Nice work if you can get it. Even primary elections are almost always a matter of no more than two or three viable entrants except in a very small number of races.
The great political theorist C. B. Macpherson was among the first to understand modern electoral politics—the two-party system—in terms of oligopolistic and duopolistic market practices. “Where there are so few sellers,” Macpherson wrote concerning political parties, “they need not and do not respond to buyers’ demands as they must do in a fully competitive system.” This means the parties, like oligopolistic firms, can “create the demand for political goods” and largely dictate the “demand schedule for political goods.”
In Macpherson’s argument, a duopolistic party system in a modern capitalist society like the United States will tend to gravitate to providing a “competition between elites,” who are the driving force and “formulate the issues.”43 The basics in the political economy are agreed upon by the two parties and are off the table for public debate or discussion. In Macpherson’s view, the two-party system produces citizen apathy and depoliticization—especially among those at the bottom end of the economic spectrum—and maintains elite rule, or what would be called a “weak democracy.” For supporting evidence, political scientist V. O. Key’s trailblazing research in the 1950s demonstrated the class bias in voting turnout—rich people often voted at nearly twice the rate of poor people—in the first half of the twentieth century.44
Macpherson provided these insights in the 1970s, before Dollarocracy and before political advertising nudged the Richter scale in political science. If anything, the linkage of the two parties to elite economic interests is stronger today than it was in his era. But the economic analogy is good only for a broad brushstroke, because elections are not commercial marketplaces and duopolistic elections existed a very long time before the emergence of political advertising. For political advertising to emerge as a major factor required a number of developments, first and foremost the establishment of commercial television broadcasting. Those nations with limited or seriously regulated commercial broadcasting have less political advertising and little political pressure to encourage it.
Where the oligopoly/persuasive advertising analogy is crucial to understanding political advertising—indeed the money-and-media election complex—is when we look at the content of the ads. Under conditions of oligopoly, firms tend to produce similar products and sell them at similar prices. Therefore, advertising that emphasizes price and product information can be ineffectual, if not counterproductive. (That type of price and product information advertising can be found in more competitive retail markets or in classified advertising.) An ad campaign based on “Hey, buy our soft drink because it costs the same and tastes the same as our competitor” probably won’t lead to awards, a promotion, or a long career. Firms put inordinate effort into creating brands that are perceived as different from competitors, and advertising is crucial in creating the aura surrounding these brands.
Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that Rosser Reeves, the pioneer of modern TV political advertising, is also generally considered one of the great visionaries of product advertising. He was reputed to have repeated the same presentation for years for newly hired copywriters at his Ted Bates advertising agency in the 1960s. He would hold up two identical shiny silver dollars, one in each hand, and would tell his audience in effect, “Never forget that your job is very simple. It is to make people think the silver dollar in my left hand is much more desirable than the silver dollar in my right hand.”45
Reeves advocated packaging as new and unique what was actually old and ordinary in a given product. Reeves specialized in making claims for his products that were not always true, but they were not entirely untrue either. His specialty was “the uncheckable claim.”46 It was an ideal approach to selling products in oligopolistic markets. “Since most brands are basically not that different,” William Greider wrote, “advertising’s fantasies provide as good a reason as any to choose one brand over another.”47
There is an endless search by advertisers for ways to capture attention and differentiate products that exploit possibilities that may have little or nothing to do with the actual product and the utility it might render to the consumer. This search also leads to ads that attempt to make a product virtue out of something that is insignificant or not specific to the product or irrelevant.
Television advertising, in particular, made it possible to develop this aspect far beyond what Reeves only began to imagine. It uses cultural cues to communicate fairly complex messages in less than thirty seconds, exploiting stereotypes and cultural references to pack a lot of meaning into a few fleeting seconds. It is expert at playing on emotions. TV advertising uses visuals in such a way that anyone only reading the text or listening to the words will miss the heart of what is being communicated.48 In short, television advertising is the highest grade and most sophisticated system of applied propaganda in the world.
“All advertisers know this,” former advertising executive Jerry Mander wrote. “They know that even the dumbest products and ideas can gain acceptance because advertising imagery does not appeal to intellect but exploits a human, genetic, sensory predisposition to believe what we see. That’s the way premodern humans protected themselves. In that sense, we are all still premodern.”49 On television, Mander noted, “even auto ads, which we would expect to have something concrete to say, are far more focused on glamorous curves, or speed, or good-looking people.”50
The nature of oligopolistic advertising leads to two paradoxes. First, the more products are alike and the more their prices are similar, the more the firms must advertise to convince people these products are different. Second, the more firms advertise to distinguish themselves from their competition, the more commercial “clutter” is created in the media and in the general culture. As a result, firms are forced to increase their advertising that much more to pierce through the clutter and reach the public.51 If there is anything close to an iron law in advertising, it is this: repetition works; the more exposure to a brand’s advertising, the better. This follows from the conclusion drawn from social science research: people are more inclined to believe what they have heard before.52 Repetition doesn’t guarantee success, but it increases the odds considerably.
This, we submit, is a good and necessary way to understand the practices of the money-and-media election complex and the content of much of political advertising. It flows from the approach Reeves laid out nearly six decades ago: “I think of a man in a voting booth who hesitates between two levers as if he were pausing between competing tubes of tooth paste in a drugstore. The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice.”53
Television provides a superpowerful mechanism to penetrate that brain. As TV political advertising’s role has grown, an industry has emerged with experts who refine its use strategically and tactically. Research is done to determine what appeals will work with the target audience to get the desired results, and advertising is produced to generate the appeal.54 The way to success is to relentlessly pound the message home. The more exposure to the ad, the greater the likelihood of brain penetration. As the president of a polling firm put it in 2012, “After the 5th, 6th, 7th, or 8th or 20th time—that’s when the ad may start to resonate with people.” Research shows that even if you say you are appalled by the repetition, it “probably won’t make you vote against someone.”55
In true Reevesian fashion, that the issues selected may be inconsequential, or that the positions presented in the ads may be misleading, or that the politician’s performance in office if elected will have no connection to the position in the ads is just built into the process. The basics of how the corporate economy is structured or how U.S. foreign policy is made are pretty much off the table, much like price and product information in beer advertising, because the two parties largely concur on the most important matters of governance. As Glenn Greenwald observed during the 2012 presidential campaign, the “propaganda orgy” promotes the notion of “vibrant political debate and stark democratic choice, even as many of the policies that are most consequential . . . —the ‘war on drugs,’ the supremacy of the covert national security and surveillance states, vast inequalities in the justice system, crony capitalism that rapidly bolsters the oligarchy that owns the political process—are steadfastly ignored because both parties on those issues have exactly the same position and serve the same interests.”56
To the extent that those subjects are broached, it is largely done in an opportunistic and manipulative manner, based upon buzzwords fire-tested by research on the target audience. So it was in the 2012 presidential campaign that fully 10 percent of campaign ads by both parties between June and September singled out the financial sector for criticism. These messages appealed to a population with serious concerns about the role of big banks in the American political economy, but they were mostly bogus, as both parties were soliciting massive contributions from the same sector and were demonstrated advocates of Wall Street’s interests.57 As Peter Baker of the New York Times politely put it, “The relationship between what the presidential candidates say on the campaign trail and what they do once elected can be tenuous.”58
Let’s start then with the premise that the content of political advertising will have all the value of a commercial for beer or soft drinks. That the material in the ads may be factually inaccurate or, more likely, may be decontextualized half-truths or quarter-truths is not a surprise, or a pressing concern to those producing the ads. Romney’s creative director in 2012 was Jim Ferguson, former president of Young & Rubicam, the nation’s largest agency. Ferguson had produced some of TV’s most memorable campaigns, such as “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” and “Nothing but Net,” a Super Bowl commercial for McDonald’s featuring Michael Jordan and Larry Bird.59 Ferguson made two hundred spots for Romney in 2012. “We were making commercials every day. We would test everything. We’d see what resonated with people and would pick a commercial or two to get ready for broadcast.”60 Vinny Minchillo, a Madison Avenue veteran who also worked for Romney, bragged that they had “an in-house ad team that could turn a gaffe into a spot in 90 minutes.”61
According to the most comprehensive research on the topic, nearly all political ads “make at least a limited appeal to emotions,” particularly enthusiasm and fear, “and a substantial majority make a strong emotional appeal.”62 Julian Kanter, curator of the Political Commercial Archive of the University of Oklahoma, observed that in TV political ads “the most important messages are those that are contained in the visual imagery.” That imagery, he pointed out, “can be used to create impressions that are untrue.” Through such visual tricks, campaigns duck the scrutiny they might face when only the words in the script are read.63 That the material in the ads may not be pertinent to the real issues the candidates will be addressing once in office or the actions they might take on those issues is beside the point. The point is to win elections by any means necessary.
No one understood this better than Lee Atwater, the political mastermind who guided George H. W. Bush’s successful 1988 presidential campaign. Atwater explained that the battle between the two parties was always about winning the “populist vote.” “It is always the swing vote,” he said. This was all done through political marketing and, as Atwater conceded, had little to do with how either party would actually govern.64 By the 1990s, research demonstrated that most candidates had little or nothing to do with the marketing of their campaigns and the content of the advertising. This became the domain of the professional consultant, whose job is to win elections, period.65
Moreover, the two paradoxes of commercial advertising apply as well. First, candidates with less tangible records to distinguish themselves from their opponents have to spend more to create the sense that there is a meaningful difference. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, for example, need to spend less to make clear they stand in fundamental opposition to their competition even within their own party. Second, when the competition spends a great deal on advertising, that puts extreme pressure on a candidate to match the advertising and, ideally, up the ante. This applies to the Pauls and Kuciniches as well as everyone else if they are serious about winning.
As the clutter increases, the only course is to push down harder on the political advertising accelerator, not hit the brakes. There is also a certain desperation to break through the clutter and create an ad that will be noticed. So it was in 2012 that outside groups supporting the Romney campaign began using cute babies in attack ads on Obama. “Scare tactics are nothing new,” one ad industry executive with experience in politics said, “but with babies? This goes to new extremes.”66
Importantly, recent research confirms that, even though TV ads are clearly effective, the positive effect of ads decays quickly, so it is important once one goes on the air, to stay at full speed until Election Day.67 Everything else being relatively equal, the candidate with a decisive TV advertising war chest will win. “Advertising effects emerge most clearly,” political scientist John Sides wrote, “when one side can out-spend the other—and by a lot.”68
This pattern has been confirmed in recent political science research examining whether voters in presidential elections vote “correctly.” Drawing from exhaustive research to determine voters’ political ideology, Sean Richey of Georgia State University then determined whether voters vote for the candidate who best represents their politics. He found that between 1972 and 2004, where his research ends, as many as 20 percent of voters voted “incorrectly.” What is important for our purposes is that the research suggests that if a campaign significantly outspends its opponents “to do more persuasive manipulation than the other campaign,” it can increase the number of “incorrect” voters it gets compared to its opponent. “Generally,” Richey put it, “voters do not have the knowledge skills to overcome manipulation.” By Richey’s calculation, the spending imbalance in favor of Republicans was sufficient for George W. Bush to purchase enough incorrect votes to change the 2000 and 2004 elections from defeats to victories.69
Perhaps no campaign better exemplifies the logic of commercial advertising than that of Barack Obama’s presidential run in 2007–2008. “I serve as a blank screen,” he wrote presciently in his 2006 The Audacity of Hope, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”70 “By the time he won the presidential election, the Barack Obama brand had become a worldwide wonder,” media scholar Leonard Steinhorn noted. “He had become an icon, someone who seemed to embody our most personal aspirations and hopes, a larger-than-life figure who exceeded the powers and abilities of any mere mortal.”71 Obama’s marketing team put together such an extraordinary advertising campaign—“Change You Can Believe In”—that it was awarded Advertising Age’s “Marketer of the Year” for 2008. To win the award, Team Obama needed to get the most votes from the attendees at the annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers, people who know a good sales pitch when they see one. The runners-up included Nike and Coors beer.72
In retrospect, Obama’s advertising campaign was ambiguous, if not vacuous or deceptive, in terms of governance and policy—though that is now accepted as par for the course. Everyone else does it, the conventional wisdom goes, so why hold Obama to a higher standard? McCain’s campaign slogan was “Country First.” The candidates could have easily swapped campaign slogans in the summer of 2007, and it would have had no effect on their actual policy positions. This isn’t a bull market for nothing.
The Obama campaign underlined another aspect of commercial advertising that applies full force to political advertising: it works! Back in the 1970s, there was a branch of academic scholarship arguing that political advertising was not especially effective or even necessary for electoral success. Today those arguments can be filed away with the claims that cigarette smoking has no connection to lung cancer. “We can say confidently that ads are persuasive, especially if you have more ads than your competitor,” Travis Ridout and Michael Franz, two leading researchers who have devoted careers to the subject, wrote in 2011, noting that leading research confirmed “ad effects were also more widespread than we had predicted.” “We have found that televised political advertising influences people’s voting choices, and more specifically, we have shown that ads are having their greatest influence on those who are the least informed about politics.” “Ads have greater influence,” they added, “in highly competitive races.”73
The most comprehensive examination of the 2008 presidential race—Kate Kenski, Bruce Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s award-winning The Obama Victory—confirms that Obama’s ability to greatly outspend McCain for television political advertising in battleground states as well as nationally was significant. Controlling for other variables in evaluating daily tracking polls, the authors determined “that weeks in which Obama outspent McCain on national ads are significantly related to an Obama vote ‘if the election were held today.’” Specifically, the research determined that in battleground states Obama’s ability to put far more advertising on the air all but destroyed McCain’s hopes for victory.
“Whenever we grabbed a lead, a little toehold in a state,” a McCain media person stated, Obama would dump in a wave of new TV advertising “and explode the whole thing out for us.” The authors did not claim that Obama’s advertising necessarily won him the election, but at the very least, it may well have been decisive in traditionally Republican-leaning states such as Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia, where the spending advantage was large and the vote tally was close.74 Likewise in 2010, the new wave of Republican outside groups outspent Democratic ones 2 to 1, largely in tight battleground races, and, as one commentator noted, accordingly “annihilated them at the polls.”75
Crucially, research also suggests that television political advertising is even more effective in House and Senate races, not to mention other races further down the political food chain. “In presidential campaigns, voters may be influenced by news coverage, debates, or objective economic or international events,” Darrell M. West wrote in a book for the Congressional Quarterly Press in 2010. “These other forces restrain the power of advertisements and empower a variety of alternative forces. In congressional contests, some of these constraining factors are absent, making advertisements potentially more important. If candidates have the money to advertise in a congressional contest, it can be a very powerful force for electoral success.”76
Of course, not all advertising works, which has driven business executives crazy for a century. “I know half of my advertising does not work,” goes the urban legend of an exasperated businessman, “but I do not know which half.” In the commercial world, only on the rarest of occasions have major advertisers actually curtailed their practices sharply absent their competitors doing the same, and this move has been met with declining sales and no enthusiasm by their competitors to pursue a similar course.
The same is true with political advertising. “So much of presidential advertising is wasted money,” noted Mark McKinnon, who made ads for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and worked for McCain in the 2008 primaries. “The ads become just background to a broad architecture the campaigns are trying to create. . . . Easily half of the money spent on TV ads in presidential campaigns is a complete waste and would be better spent online or on other activities.”77 The fact remains, though, that TV political spending is not optional; it is necessary for political survival, not to mention success, in the contemporary United States as much as it is for a commercial advertiser like Coca-Cola or Coors beer or Nike shoes in an oligopolistic industry. Indeed, because of the nature of elections, it is arguably more imperative to maintain a foot all the way down on the TV advertising accelerator.
This point emerged in the 2012 campaign. As the airwaves were flooded with political ads, numerous observers noted that there had to be a declining effectiveness for the money being spent. Nothing short of a fortune was being spent to influence the votes of a sliver of uncommitted voters in a handful of swing states. Why isn’t there a better use of resources? According to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the research is clear that voters are more likely to change their minds if they live in “swing states” marinated in political ads than they are if they live in states without much political advertising. Political advertising may not be especially efficient, its impact may be only “marginal,” but as Daniel Adler put it, “it’s probably more efficient than any alternative.” And in a “market” where the difference between having a 49.9 and a 50.1 market share is life or death, one scholar noted, “that marginal impact is worth it.”78
Back in the 1990s, there were a handful of major candidates in statewide races who made a virtue of their unwillingness to accept large campaign donations, which meant they could not run anywhere near as many television ads as their opponents. Ed Garvey’s 1998 race for Wisconsin governor and Russ Feingold’s 1998 Senate reelection campaign in Wisconsin are the most recent and striking examples. The consequences of those campaigns—Garvey lost in a landslide, and Feingold barely won a race he, by all rights, should have won handily—sent a loud and clear message that such a course greatly increases chances of electoral failure. Since then, no major party candidate, not a single solitary one, has dared to emulate them with what is known derisively as “unilateral disarmament.”
There is one crucial area where political advertising differs sharply from commercial advertising, and it is here that the blood pressure rises for the likes of Ogilvy and Spero and their modern-day heirs Caplan and Manning. This is negative advertising, where the purpose is to attack and denigrate the competition. In a commercial marketplace such advertising is of little value. The point of commercial advertising is to protect and promote sales for the advertiser’s product and ultimately increase profitability. There are no bonus points for simply decreasing a competitor’s sales, and in fact it might just take consumers away from the product category altogether, which would be counterproductive. “Tide could attack Cheer to get a little market bump,” Carter Eskew wrote, “but Cheer would respond, and soon nobody would be buying detergent because things would be, well, a little dirty.”79 Or as one clean election advocate put it, “If car companies did this to each other, people would be nervous about getting behind a wheel.”80
Not so with political advertising. Negative advertising can be tremendously effective, even if it does not generate a single new voter for the candidate (or supportive “independent” group) placing the ad. If it simply takes voters leaning toward the opponent and makes them less likely to vote for the opponent, maybe not vote at all, that is a victory. After all, the point is to get the most votes; lowering an opponent’s numbers has the same effect as increasing a candidate’s own total.
Moreover, negative advertising can have the delicious side effect of forcing an opponent to respond to charges, no matter how spurious. Negative advertising can amplify spectacularly the classic political move captured by the story of the politician who told his campaign manager to start a rumor that his opponent was a child molester. “But he isn’t a child molester, is he?” responded the aide. “Of course not,” said the candidate, “but I want to hear him deny it.”
Perhaps because of this, negative ads have always been a staple of TV political ads. Over the years, though, they have grown in such prominence that they now account for the vast majority of all TV political ads.81 The most comprehensive research to date concludes that between 2000 and 2008 the overall percentage of negative TV political ads rose from 50 percent to 60 percent.82 Two years later, the percentage increased again for a simple reason: the new independent groups formed with anonymous money following Citizens United—unencumbered by identification with candidate, party, or even funding source—devoted their resources primarily to negative attack ads.83 “We’re seeing a lot more negativity,” said political advertising researcher Travis Ridout. “When the outside groups are advertising, we’re finding that they are predominantly negative.”84
The definition of a negative ad is open to interpretation, so the data are hardly uniform. What all research shows is that the amount of negative TV advertising increased sharply in 2012 and the more competitive the race, the more negative the advertising. A disproportionate amount of the so-called positive ads were run by candidates who were not facing a serious challenge and, using their ample campaign contributions, wanted to keep their name before voters.
In October 2012, Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, whose research is held in high regard by the ad industry, calculated that 84 percent of the broadcast TV ads for the 2012 presidential race were negative.85 A similarly respected operation, the Wesleyan Media Project, determined 86 percent of Obama’s and 79 percent of Romney’s advertising was negative, compared to a combined negative rate in 2008 for Obama and John McCain of 69 percent and a combined negative rate in 2004 of 58 percent for John Kerry and George W. Bush.86
Yet even that seems to understate the situation, perhaps because the notorious third-party ads are undercounted. When a number of ad buyers analyzed all the political spots aired in all the swing states on July 12, 2012, they determined that every ad was an attack ad.87 When National Public Radio commissioned Kantar Media to assess all the TV political spots in Colorado Springs, Colorado, for a week in September 2012, it determined that only 50 of the 1,500 spots were positive.88
If political advertising is effective, negative political advertising can be especially effective. Obviously, campaigns have to take into careful account tactical and strategic considerations as there is always a risk that negative advertising could backfire.89 Some research suggests that negative ads work best in moderation, that overexposure can become counterproductive.90 Even then, research from the 2008 primary campaigns suggests that negative ads that are widely regarded in exit polls as having been unfair can still be effective, and candidates can still win the votes of the people regarding their ads as unfair. Such advertising can sow doubt in people’s “guts,” and that can determine how a person votes.91 So it is not clear how damaging an “unfair” negative ad campaign, or “excessive” exposure, can be to a campaign. The ones usually cited, like Jack Conway’s accusation in Kentucky’s 2010 U.S. Senate race that Rand Paul acted weirdly as a college student, come from candidates who are almost hopelessly behind in the polls, and these accusations are akin to a “Hail Mary” pass in football.
But when done smartly and when fueled by piles of cash, negative advertising can drive the talking points in a campaign like nothing else. Defenders of political advertising twist themselves into pretzels to demonstrate the value they see negative ads providing. Some argue the ads mention legitimate issues, like jobs or deficits, while avoiding the fact that the actual statement about the legitimate issues is mostly inaccurate, decontextualized, and/or misleading.92 Some emphasize that voters can learn from these ads and that they often provide citations for their charges. We find this line of reasoning unconvincing, but this much we do concede: negative attack ads are more memorable and entertaining than the standard issue “positive” ad featuring a politician playing Frisbee with his dog and holding hands with his granddaughter, or the endless empty “issue” ads where the candidate says she is for jobs and education and health care and veterans and clean government and against crime, corruption, and terrorism. We understand why people in the money-and-media election complex favor them and why viewers would remember them. “In the final analysis everyone complains” about negative ads, Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar noted, “but that doesn’t mean they don’t listen.”93
So negative ads tend to work, even when people say they despise them. Drew Westen showed a group of voters an anti-McCain ad by Obama and an anti-Obama ad by McCain from the 2008 presidential campaign.
The voters we surveyed claimed to despise both ads, describing them in focus groups as “pandering.” They insisted the ads would backfire with them. But using a well-established method for assessing which words the commercials activated unconsciously, we discovered that although voters consciously disliked both commercials, the ads were nevertheless highly effective. Both “stuck,” triggering negative associations of Obama and McCain in the minds of most voters, including those who thought they were unaffected.94
Researcher Dianne Bystrom of Iowa State University reported, “What we find is, even when they say they hate them (ads), there’s a movement in the needle.”95 “When asked in focus groups about what they think about candidates,” veteran North Carolina political reporter Rob Christensen noted, the same people who “almost universally say they hate negative ads” will “often play back the negative messages they have subconsciously absorbed in commercials.”96
The recent political ads that have caused electoral upsets have usually been negative and more often than not entirely bogus. In Wisconsin, the 1986 U.S. Senate race provided a chilling example. Democratic challenger Ed Garvey had a solid lead over incumbent Republican senator Robert Kasten two weeks out from Election Day. Kasten then ran a series of TV ads charging Garvey with embezzling money from his days as head of the National Football League Players Association. Garvey was low on money and could not afford TV spots, so he never effectively responded—even as the news media emphasized the charges were unproven and probably bogus. Garvey lost the election by a hair, and shortly thereafter Kasten’s campaign apologized for the misleading and inaccurate ads. But Kasten, not Garvey, went to Washington for a six-year term.
Arguably the most famous example came two years later in the 1988 presidential race between Democrat Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, and George H. W. Bush, the vice president. In late summer, Dukakis held a seventeen-point lead and was doing especially well with women voters and traditional Democrats. Under the aegis of Lee Atwater, who worked with a staff that included soon-to-be Fox News chief Roger Ailes, the Republicans test-marketed attack ad ideas with a focus group of “Reagan Democrats”—traditional white working-class Democrats who could be pried away if the discussion got away from economics and core government programs like Social Security and Medicare. Atwater was legendary for his conviction that exploiting white racism was the best way to appeal to such voters.97 The research hit the mother lode when Atwater saw how negatively the focus group responded to the story of how Governor Dukakis had provided a weekend furlough to Willie Horton, a black man, who jumped his furlough and went on to rape a white woman. Atwater boasted, “By the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name.”98 “The only question,” remarked Ailes during the campaign, “is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”99
Willie Horton did indeed become a household name.100 It is unclear how decisive the Willie Horton TV ad was in sandbagging the Dukakis campaign, but by all accounts it played an important role. What is also noteworthy is that the story about Dukakis was entirely decontextualized. The story conveyed nothing distinct about Dukakis that would have bearing on his conduct as president and the policies he would have pursued. What came through was a scary black guy was raping white women and Dukakis seemed to be his un-apologetic wingman. The message was directly out of Rosser Reeves’s playbook, and it worked. (Shortly before the forty-year old Atwater died of brain cancer in 1991, he is reported to have apologized for the Horton ad and the racist flames it so triumphantly stoked.)
A more recent example comes from the 2004 presidential race between Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush. Kerry held a lead over Bush in the polls coming out of the conventions. Kerry made a big deal out of his record as a decorated soldier in Vietnam and campaigned with his “band of brothers,” the term for his fellow Vietnam veterans. The contrast with Bush, who had ducked military combat in the Vietnam era, was expected to work to Kerry’s advantage. Then a shadowy independent group—Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—ran a series of TV ads asserting that Kerry was actually a coward who had betrayed his “brothers” while in Vietnam. The ads were bogus and repudiated by the likes of Senator John McCain, but the issue became the hot topic of the campaign for weeks. The Kerry campaign was staggered by the charges and eventually lost a nail-biter in November. “For Republicans a swift boat was a very good thing,” columnist Robert Novak stated about the 2004 election. It “kept John Kerry from being president.”101
The 2008 presidential race certainly featured a fair share of slash-and-burn television. Toward the bitter end of a Democratic primary contest, Hillary Clinton’s campaign took a swipe at Barack Obama’s perceived inexperience on the international stage with a television ad that featured a ringing phone at 3 AM and the question “It’s 3 AM and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” That fall, the Republican National Committee doubled down on the theme, airing ads that asked, “Would you get on a plane with someone who has never flown? . . . Would you go under with a surgeon who has never operated? Can you hand your nation to a man who has never been in charge of anything? Can you wait while he learns?”102 But the 2008 campaign, still operating under the old, pre-Citizens United rules—and influenced at least in part by the mutual regard Obama and Republican presidential nominee John McCain had for each other—was gentle compared with what was to come.
Almost a year before the actual vote, in a December 2011 New York Times column, Paul Krugman wrote, “Welcome to post-truth politics,” and he predicted that if Mitt Romney were the Republican nominee, America would witness a campaign “based . . . around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn’t done and believing things he doesn’t believe.”103 Romney delivered just that, with a campaign slathered in money and untethered from fact. To be sure, Democrats and their super-PAC supporters made outrageous statements during the course of the 2012 campaign; and it is appropriate that they were fact-checked and called out.
But nothing rivaled the remarkable closing claim by Romney that Obama had somehow paved the way for the shuttering of America’s Jeep plants. Jeeps are made in Toledo, Ohio, where the iconic American vehicle has been produced since 1941, and Romney needed to win Toledo and the rest of northwest Ohio if he were to stand a chance of securing the battleground state that was key to the presidency. Two weeks before the election, Romney went to the region and shocked voters by suggesting, “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.”104 The story, an October 22, 2012, report by Bloomberg News, had specifically stated that “Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. [Fiat/Chrysler executive Mike] Manley referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.” Yet Romney spoke of the company that manufactures Jeeps moving all its production to China.
The statement stirred fundamental fears in a region that had been battered by plant closings. So much so that Jeep’s parent company, Chrysler, rushed to explain that Romney was completely, totally, incredibly wrong. “Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China,” announced Chrysler. Company spokesman Gualberto Ranieri said that Romney had remade the facts so aggressively that “it is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.”105
It was front-page news, nightly television news.
In the old days, a chastened Romney would have apologized and moved on. But in the new age of commercial carpet-bombing, Romney’s response to being caught in a lie was to lie even more. The Romney campaign began airing an ad on Ohio television stations that claimed President Obama had, with the auto bailout that saved domestic vehicle production, “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.” The ad concluded that Romney—whose Bain Capital enterprise was identified as “a pioneer of outsourcing”—“will fight for every American job.” Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said of the Romney campaign’s attempt to suggest that Obama had engineered a change in Jeep’s status that would see the Toledo plant shuttered and its more than 3,500 workers idled, “They are inviting a false inference.” The Washington Post “Fact Checker” site reviewed Romney’s ad and declared, “The overall message of the ad is clearly misleading—especially since it appears to have been designed to piggyback off of Romney’s gross misstatement that Chrysler was moving Ohio factory jobs to China.” The pushback from Obama’s backers and his campaign was even more aggressive. Former president Bill Clinton flew to Ohio and decried Romney’s claim as “the biggest load of bull in the world.” Vice President Joe Biden said, “I have never seen anything like that. It’s an absolutely, patently false assertion. It’s such an outrageous assertion that, one of the few times in my memory, a major American corporation, Chrysler, has felt obliged to go public and say, there is no truth.”106
But, ultimately, the Obama campaign recognized that simply correcting the record was not enough. Romney had unleashed his nuclear arsenal. Obama had to return fire. An Obama campaign ad announced that “now, after Romney’s false claim of Jeep outsourcing to China, Chrysler itself has refuted Romney’s lie.” What was Romney’s response? His campaign upped the television ad buy and went on radio with an even more aggressive message.
And the Obama campaign upped its ad buy.
Mutually assured destruction framed around the lie that an American president was trying to shutter the American automobile industry. Obama ultimately won the Toledo area and Ohio and the presidency. But at enormous cost.
Most false advertising, like political advertising in general, is done on television. But TV is, remarkably enough, a milder political battleground than radio. And if you want to see the real dark side, open your mailbox and read the targeted direct-mail attacks that Rove most favors. Or pick up your phone and listen to the most toxic form of negative advertising: push polling. “A push poll,” as a leading political science book defines it, “is essentially political advertising masquerading in the guise of legitimate scientific research, and it spreads lies, rumors, and innuendos about candidates.”107 The campaign attempts to influence or alter the view of selected respondents under the guise of conducting a poll, usually through telephone calls, and thereby facilitate entree to unsuspecting voters.108 Phony “pollsters” ask a bogus question meant to promote suspicion about the opposition candidate.
Lee Atwater was one of the first to champion the use of push polling in the 1980s. And Karl Rove was not far behind. Rove’s most famous candidate, George W. Bush, used push polls in his 1994 bid for Texas governor against incumbent Ann Richards. Callers asked voters “whether they would be more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if they knew that lesbians dominated on her staff.”109
Perhaps the most famous use of push polls was in 2000 when it was alleged that George W. Bush’s campaign used push polling to torpedo the campaign of Senator John McCain. South Carolina primary voters reportedly were asked, “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” The poll’s allegation had no substance but was heard by thousands of primary voters.110 In the 2008 general election, Jewish voters in Florida and Pittsburgh were targeted by a push poll attempting to disparage Barack Obama by linking him with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Push polling is the poison gas warfare of political campaigns, and in some respects it can be seen as simply taking negative advertising to its logical conclusion. But it is controversial for self-evident reasons and is always done surreptitiously. (In each of the 1994 and 1996 election cycles, there were credible reports of push polling in at least three dozen races.)111 Campaigns that get caught with their fingerprints on a push poll can suffer blowback . . . if the discovery is made before Election Day and if there is a news media hawking the situation. That is why push polling, like the Kerry Swift Boat ads, is best done by third-party groups formally independent of the campaign so that campaigns have plausible deniability. Push polling is most effective when it is compatible with softer messages being done in the campaign’s own attacks on the opposition, creating an echo effect and a sense that where there is smoke, there must be fire. The current environment is ideally suited to this caliber of campaigning.
Defenders of negative TV political advertising—no one defends push polling, to our knowledge—acknowledge it has a seamy underside. Their response, however, has been that the solution is to return fire with fire. “Responding to ads with ads,” Glenn Richardson wrote, “is perhaps the most appropriate redress to distorted charges.”112 “Any ad from one candidate or party can always be countered with an ad by the opposing candidate or party,” Ridout and Franz stated, adding, “This is a particular strength of television compared with other forms of campaigning.”113 “Advertising provides a visible and relatively effective way to respond to attacks,” another team of researchers led by Franz argued. “For every thirty-second distortion, there can be a thirty-second clarification; every accusation can be met, every charge responded to in an effective, efficient way.” These researchers chastised John Kerry for failing to respond to the Swift Boat attack ads right away and with full fire, much as others criticized Dukakis for failing to answer the Willie Horton charges in 1988.114
In 2012, serious candidates took this advice to heart. Both presidential campaigns were prepared to respond almost instantly to attacks against them and to return fire. Ads could travel from their “edit suites” to TV stations for immediate airing within hours. During September, the Obama campaign was rotating twenty unique ads among sixty markets and had the capacity to shift those ads at a moment’s notice.115 One account said that the campaigns could get a fresh ad on the air “within an hour” if need be.116
Franz and his colleagues, to their credit, acknowledged that the amount of money it takes to respond to attack ads has become more than a little daunting. It allows those with the most money to set the agenda for the campaign with bogus and/or irrelevant negative charges and forces the opponent to respond with gobs of money or let the charges appear legitimate. Psychological research indicates that there is a great advantage to playing offense, not defense, and to be the first to levy charges against an opponent.117
By this logic, the offended party would be wise to shoot first and force the other candidate to respond to the negative ad blitz. “Even principled politicians are under enormous competitive pressure to succumb to a manipulative politics of unreason,” Bruce Ackerman wrote. “After all, if your opponents will batter you with hot-button sound bites, it won’t do your principle much good if you lose the election. The only good defense is a sound-bite offense!”118 In our view, that is more than a minor drawback to an otherwise functional democratic election system. It is absurd and disastrous. For fear of being repetitive, we want to say that playing offense is eerily close to embracing the mutually assured destruction of nuclear war games. But it is American electoral politics.
And, tragically, that is not the worst aspect of negative political advertising.
What is most striking about negative television political advertising is that it accentuates the tendency toward depoliticization. Countering the legitimate concerns people have that the great problems facing the nation require political solutions by a democratic state is an immense and overwhelming centrifugal force driving rational people away from the political system. It logically follows from the clear purpose of negative advertising: to turn prospective voters off from the candidates they are most likely to support.
Instead of being a “struggle of ideas,” Franz maintained, attack-ad-based “elections are now about convincing people that the other guy is dangerous for America.”119 All ads seem idiotic and deceptive, so the wise course is to just abandon politics altogether. As one observer put it, “The only practical course for now is to believe nothing.”120 Even appealing candidates spend what seems like nearly all their time hassling their supporters for even more donations to pay for their own arsenal of negative ads or for responses to their opponent’s negative ads. Why make a donation if the money is to pay for such slobbering nonsense? Let the billionaires cough up for such idiocy. They will win in the end anyway.
Depoliticization is an eminently rational, if ultimately self-defeating, response to a political universe where negative political advertising is the lingua franca. The trailblazing experimental research of Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar has been invaluable in this regard. They have demonstrated that the main consequence of negative ads is that it demobilizes citizens and turns them off from electoral politics, if not public and civic life altogether. As they put it, “The demobilizing impact of negative advertising has been a well-kept secret, and a tacit assumption among political consultants.” The trend is toward “a political implosion of apathy and withdrawal.”121 Even those scholars who otherwise defend TV political advertising acknowledge the research establishes that “exposure to negativity is likely to increase cynicism, especially among nonpartisans.”122
Depoliticization is cancerous to any credible notion of democratic self-government. Subsequent research by professors at Rutgers University and George Washington University “linked negative campaigning with reduced public trust and satisfaction with government.” Richard Lau, Lee Sigelman, and Ivy Brown noted that negative advertising “has the potential to do damage to the political system itself.”123
From 2008 to 2012, voter turnout fell from 58 percent to 52 percent, one of the larger such declines in consecutive presidential elections in recent American history. The explosion in negative advertising was not solely, or even necessarily primarily, responsible for such a drop-off, but it likely played a role. If nothing else, the correlation is striking. America’s chattering classes and punditocracy were too entangled in their political junkiedom to see the forest for the trees.
So why does the United States have so much TV political advertising compared to nearly all other democracies? A seasoned observer of American life might ask if the reason such a dubious practice as political advertising is playing such a large and definitional role is because someone is getting very rich from it. It is time to follow the money. Where it leads is the subject of the next chapter.