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Like all advertising, political advertising is subjective, presenting a biased point of view. Just as a Ford ad is selling Fords, not other car brands, a political ad is selling a specific candidate. That can sometimes be obscured by the noble trappings in political ads, which are often filled with images of American flags, Mount Rushmore, amber waves of grain, and the White House.
"Don't expect you're going to get objective voter information" from political ads, says Christopher Malone, a political scientist at Pace University in New York. "That's definitely out of the question."
Political advertising has been around since the mid-19th century, but it took the arrival of the major media in the 20th century to elevate its importance. Before there were large daily newspapers, national magazines, or coast-to-coast radio and TV networks, political ads were mostly limited to buttons, banners, and posters intended to generate local turnout at candidate rallies and at polling places on Election Day.
That began to change when radio's reach became widespread. The first national commercials on the fledgling medium aired in 1928 for Republican Herbert Hoover and Democrat Al Smith. But the seismic shift came when television entered the picture in the presidential election of 1952.
TAKING TO THE AIRWAVES
That year, Dwight D. Eisenhower was promoted in cartoon-style commercials featuring the upbeat slogan "I Like Ike." And he became the first presidential candidate to appear in TV ads, after a Madison Avenue advertising executive convinced him that the sights and sounds of TV offered the quickest, most effective way to get his message to voters.
There were concerns that appearing in commercials as if he were a product would diminish Eisenhower's stature, but the results proved otherwise. The short commercials, themed "Eisenhower Answers America," ran before and after popular series like I Love Lucy and were a huge hit. (Eisenhower's opponent, Democrat Adlai Stevenson, thought such commercials undignified and ran half-hour speeches on TV instead. Four years later, when he challenged Eisenhower again, he too appeared in TV commercials.)
ANSWERS BEFORE QUESTIONS
Tellingly, it was at the dawn of TV campaign ads that their reputation for shading the truth began to develop. While Eisenhower was seen replying to questions from typical voters on issues like the Korean War and the cost of living, it turned out the answers had actually come before the questions. Questioners had been recruited to read the questions from scripts after the Eisenhower "answers" had been filmed, with the order reversed in the editing process.
"Political commercials pretend to be like documentaries, but they use all the techniques of fiction filmmaking, including scripts, performances, and music," says David Schwartz of the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York. (The museum's online exhibit of political advertising, "The Living Room Candidate," is at movingimage.us.)
It did not take political operatives long to realize that "going negative" in ads could be extremely effective. In 1964, the campaign of President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, ran what is often described as TV's first negative political ad. The so-called "Daisy" spot capitalized on concerns that Johnson's Republican opponent, Senator Barry M. Goldwater, would not rule out the use of nuclear weapons against America's enemies. The ad showed a girl in a field, pulling the petals off a daisy and counting up from one. Her voice was replaced on the soundtrack by a stentorian male voice, counting down from 10 as a prelude to an atomic blast, which filled the screen with a mushroom cloud as the spot ended.
BLAME THE CONSULTANTS?
With the Daisy ad's success, other negative ads followed, especially in the campaigns of 1968 and 1972, when Republican Richard M. Nixon ran for election and re-election. His '68 campaign so shrewdly used advertising that it became the subject of a popular book, The Selling of the President.
"There is undeniably evidence that a certain kind of political advertising—not just negative, but negative and untruthful—can be effective," says Mike Hughes, president of a Richmond, Va., ad agency. "But I think we have to hold political leaders accountable, telling them 'You are not fit to run the country if you do that.' "
Hughes and others blame the increase in negativity on the fact that most political ads are no longer created by advertising agencies, which, he says, "have to be accurate and truthful" when producing product pitches, but rather by political consultants who specialize in campaign commercials and "don't have to worry about the lawyers." That's because political spots are considered privileged as free speech under the First Amendment, so their content cannot be regulated. By contrast, product ads enjoy less constitutional protection, so false claims can be challenged by the Federal Trade Commission and other regulators.
'DEVASTATING' ADS
Negative ads were particularly potent in the 1988 presidential campaign, says David A. Caputo, a political scientist who is president of Pace University. Consultants working for George H.W. Bush, the Republican candidate, produced a variety of aggressive attacks on Michael Dukakis, his Democratic challenger.
Two commercials "were so devastating," Caputo says, they entered the realm of political lore. One, showing Dukakis looking silly riding around in a tank, portrayed him as weak on defense. The other was intended to paint Dukakis as soft on crime. It showed an ominous photo of Willie Horton, a black convict who raped and assaulted a couple while on a prison furlough granted by Dukakis when he was Governor of Massachusetts. The Horton ad was also notable for being sponsored not by the Bush campaign but by an organization known as a political action committee, which was affiliated with, but not officially part of, the Bush campaign.
SWING STATE SATURATION
In the 2004 campaign, third-party organizations known as 527s (for their identification in the federal tax code) are spending millions of dollars to promote or oppose the candidacies of President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry. This time, more than ever before, that spending is being funneled into a few crucial states—known as battleground or swing states—where the election is seen as close. That's why residents of states like Florida, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin are being inundated with TV spots, while residents of states where one candidate has a big advantage, like California, Massachusetts, Texas, Mississippi, and New York, are likely to see few or none. The huge war chests for the 527s are separate from the $75 million each candidate can spend in the fall campaign.
The 527s, which carry names like MoveOn.org (anti-Bush) and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (anti-Kerry), "can bypass lots of the restrictions the candidate committees and parties are regulated by," says Costas Panagopoulos, a political scientist at New York University. This makes it more important than ever "to consider the sponsor" of political ads when trying to determine their accuracy.
These days, he adds, "It requires more work to be a smart consumer of political advertising and not be fooled by all the bells and whistles."
Stuart Elliott covers advertising for The New York Times.
