Mad. Ave. elections: Exhibit shows ads since '52

By J. Patrick Coolican
Seattle Times staff reporter

COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE Lyndon Johnson's 1964 "Daisy" ad showed a little girl picking petals off a daisy. As a camera zeroes in on her right eye, a technocratic voice counts down from 10 and there's a massive explosion.

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Vice President George H.W. Bush was facing a tough presidential election battle in the fall of 1988 when his Republican Party surrogates released a TV ad called "Bush and Dukakis on Crime," which became known as the "Willie Horton ad."

While Bush supports the death penalty for first-degree murderers, the announcer intones darkly, his opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, opposes it. Moreover, the Dukakis administration gives out weekend prison passes to the likes of one Willie Horton, who went on to flee and then kidnap a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend.

The visage of Horton, an African American, is squarely on the screen as his crimes are recounted.

"Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime."

The ad, which came to define Dukakis and tie him to Horton, can be viewed along with every other presidential campaign spot from 1952 to the present, at a new virtual museum exhibit called "The Living Room Candidate," hosted by the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City (livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/index.php).

The exhibit offers a virtual tour of recent American history through the medium of 30-second movies, passing by signposts both political and aesthetic, from a ridiculous 1952 song-and-dance number for Adlai Stevenson, to a 1968 race-baiting George Wallace, to Ronald Reagan's 1984 paean to American optimism, "Morning in America."

The most striking ads use fear as their animating principle, however, and with the benefit of time's clarifying focus, the exhibit acts as a brain scan, giving viewers a clearer look at the American limbic lobe — and the devices most able to manipulate it.

	COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE Richard Nixon's 1968 "Convention" ad capitalized on chaotic images from the Democratic convention.

"Even if you're disgusted by what you're seeing, that doesn't mean it doesn't stick with you or influence your attitudes," said Tom Hollihan, an expert in political communication at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.

Indeed, researchers had focus groups view the Willie Horton ad, then view another one from the Bush campaign in which actors in blue prison uniforms passed through a revolving door, which was meant to symbolize Dukakis' alleged policy of letting criminals go free. Those who had seen the Horton ad recalled the men in the revolving door ad were black, even though all were white, said Michael Pfau, a professor of political communication at the University of Oklahoma, which has the largest archive of political advertising in the country.

Although Dukakis' record was a legitimate campaign issue, the ads had the effect — intended or not — of tying him to black criminals with the thick rope of unconscious, but highly emotional, association at a time when crime was rising steeply.

The campaign's mastermind, the late Lee Atwater, was mentor to the current President Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove. He famously said, "By the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name."

The use of fear and association in presidential advertising was not invented by Republicans, however.

In 1964, during one of the hottest periods of the Cold War, Americans were rightly terrified of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. The two nations had come to the brink in October 1963 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 1964 saw the release of "Dr. Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick's doomsday comedy about nuclear war, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott.

Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, had said during the campaign that "some people" suggested using nuclear bombs to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam to prevent the spread of the guerrilla insurgency there, though he himself didn't endorse the idea.

Goldwater was also the most right-wing candidate in memory, a colonel in the Air Force Reserves, "a militaristic guy with a nerdy fascination with nuclear weapons and air power," said Rick Perlstein, author of "Before the Storm," an authoritative history of the 1964 election.

During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Goldwater said, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

All of this combined to put the seed in people's minds, Perlstein said, that Goldwater might be unstable.

The Johnson campaign and its Madison Avenue advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, used this seed to create its "Daisy" ad, in which a little girl picks petals off a daisy, counting imprecisely to 10 as she throws the petals. A camera then zeroes in on her right eye as a technocratic voice counts down from 10. Then there's a massive explosion, presumably nuclear.

The voice of Lyndon Johnson echoes W.H. Auden: "These are the stakes: To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the darkness. We must either love each other or we must die."

More ads See all the ads at livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us For an extended discussion of the ads, go to www.seattletimes.com/politics.

An announcer then says, "Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay at home."

This violent imagery tethered the minds of voters to their floating suspicions about Goldwater (though it never mentioned him by name): that he was a dangerous radical, unafraid to use nuclear weapons on a whim.

Tony Schwartz, who created the ad, referred to the method as "partipulation" — inducing viewers to participate in their own manipulation. The key was not to introduce new information, but to stir up latent feelings and get the viewer to believe that he'd reached conclusions on his own.

The ad ran on NBC's Saturday night movie of the week, just once. The White House switchboard lit up.

While Johnson was painting Goldwater as a warmonger, he was secretly escalating the Vietnam War.

Richard Nixon learned from Johnson and used his 1968 ads to portray the Democratic Party as the custodians of chaos at home and defeat in Vietnam, without explicitly saying so.

The ads have a psychedelic feel. They fuse fast cuts of graphic war and images of urban unrest with jarring music and ambient sounds, like scenes in "Easy Rider."

Nixon's closest confidantes, including Bob Haldeman, were ad men from the J. Walter Thompson agency in New York, who knew psychology and persuasion.

The tagline of the ads, "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it," implies that a vote for Hubert Humphrey is not just unwise but catastrophic.

Nixon won by a hair, before resigning in disgrace six years later.

J. Patrick Coolican: 206-464-3315 or jcoolican@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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