Thursday, October 2, 2008

All time 5 Nastiest Televised Presidential Ads

Television advertising has been an important part of the Presidential
election process since the 1952 race where Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson. Recently, the Museum of the Moving Image has made the entire body of Presidential campaign ads available on its website in a project it calls The Living Room Candidate. After spending several hours digging through those videos, I have chosen the five nastiest political television ads of all time. By nasty I mean that the ad either directly attacks an opponent, or plays on the fears of Americans regarding some group (a minority race, for example) and implies that the country will be at risk from that group if the candidate's opponent is elected. Below are the top five nastiest ads of all time. All of these ads can be viewed on the Living Room Candidate website of the Museum of the Moving Image.

"The Threat", Bob Dole (1996)

Dole's ad opens with and image of the girl from the Daisy Ad discussed below, immediately evoking all of the fear that accompanied that ad to those who viewed it. The ad then goes on to equate the modern issue of teen drug use to the fear of nuclear attack thirty years before. The ad points to the doubling of teen drug use in recent years, and implies that the Clinton Administration's policies somehow played a role in that rise in drug use. The ad, entirely shot in an ominous black-and-white, ends with a boy of around age 12 standing on a playground smoking a crack pipe. Overall the ad plays on the public's fear of teen drug use and attempts to pin that fear to Clinton, but provides no real facts to establish that he played any role in its increase.

"Streetgov", Jimmy Carter (1980)

The streetgov ad is a series of "man on the street" interviews of people in California, where Carter's opponent Ronald Reagan was Governor. The overall implication of the ad was that individuals in Reagan's own home state believed that Reagan was too incompetent, and not trustworthy enough to be President of the United States. Clearly, this ad did not have its intended effect.

"Willie Horton"- The National Security PAC on Behalf of George H.W. Bush (1988)
The Willie Horton ad is easily one of the nastiest ads of all time in terms of playing on the fears of Americans. It accused Michael Dukakis on supporting weekend passes for first degree murders like Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who was given a weekend pass, only to commit a double murder and repeatedly rape a woman. Pictures of Horton, by all accounts a "frightening" looking African-American man, were shown throughout the commercial. The intent of the commercial was to cause Americans to associate Dukakis with Americans' irrational fears of being the victim of minority crime. Overall, this ad is the best example of implicit "race baiting" in political advertising history.

"Any Questions?", Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on Behalf of George W. Bush (2004)

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were an independent political group of individuals who claimed to have served alongside John Kerry in Vietnam. In the "Any Questions" ad, several members of that group outright accuse Kerry of having lied about his military record, lied to the U.S. Senate about what went on in Vietnam, and generally being an untrustworthy soldier. Any ad that attacks a 4-time Purple Heart recipient and Vietnam Veteran on his military record certainly falls into any definition of a nasty ad.

The "Daisy" Ad, Lyndon B. Johnson (1964)

Because President Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater, had previously made several statements painting himself as a national security extremist, this ad did not even have to mention Goldwater's name to convey its message. Despite only being aired one time, the ad is considered the most infamous political ad in television history.

The ad opens with an adorable little girl standing in a field, counting as she picks petals off a flower. When her count gets to nine, a
male voiceover begins a countdown from ten to one, and as the
male voice gets closer to one, the camera zooms in on the child's eye, and the sounds and images of a nuclear mushroom cloud appear on the screen. The ad ends with another voiceover which states "vote for President Johnson on November 3, the stakes are too high for you to stay home".



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