Eye of the Beholder: Defining
Negative Campaigning
1
Since the 1984 presidential race was a snoozer that would result in Ronald
Reagan’s 49-state landslide reelection victory, much of the political world
turned its gaze to North Carolina. There, a brawl of a Senate race had begun
more than a year and a half before Election Day; the incumbent senator, Republican
Jesse Helms, was locked in a bitter fight with Governor Jim Hunt, a
rising Democratic star.
Helms did not usually like to debate opponents, relying instead on television
advertisements that blanketed the Tar Heel State during election season.
But the famously conservative senator saw that he faced a formidable challenger
who indeed was threatening to end his 12-year career. So Helms engaged
in several head-on clashes with the governor, whom he had repeatedly
called a flip-flopper lacking core ideological convictions and a “limousine liberal”
in his television ads. During their second debate, in Wilmington, Hunt
challenged Helms to join him in prohibiting negative ads on television, so
they could focus more on what the candidates would do to improve the lives
of North Carolinians. Helms’s response? “We haven’t put on any negative advertising.
We just told the truth about you. It’s sort of like Harry Truman said
1
one time. He said the Republicans think I’m giving them hell. I’m not giving
them hell. I’m telling the truth on you.”1
Candidates routinely offer similar explanations to defend aggressive campaign
tactics, in races from president of the United States to county assessor.
Few, if any, of them openly admit to negative campaigning. To office-seekers,
criticizing an opponent’s voting record is comparative advertising, while spotlighting
a rival’s marital infidelity or woeful personal finances is perfectly appropriate
because it raises character issues for voters. What constitutes
negative campaigning is usually a matter of perspective; tactics that to one
voter seem misleading, mean-spirited, and immoral can impart to another
important and relevant information about how the candidate would perform
under the pressures of public office. Negative campaigning, like beauty, is in
the eye of the beholder.
Still, general outlines of what constitutes negative campaigning can be defined,
whether or not the candidates and their campaign staff members mentioned
in this book would agree with those descriptions. This book traces the
modern history and evolution of negative campaigning tactics, primarily
from the beginning of the television age in politics, in 1952, to the present; for
purposes of discussion, the term “negative campaigning” refers to the actions
a candidate takes to win an election by attacking an opponent, rather than
emphasizing his or her own positive attributes or policies.
First, I want to distinguish negative campaigning—charges and accusations
that, while often distorted, contain at least a kernel of truth—from dirty tricks
or cheating. Examples abound of campaign dirty tricks, most famously the
tactics of Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 Committee to Reelect the President
(CREEP), which were exposed in the Watergate proceedings of 1973 to 1974.
Perhaps the most notorious dirty trick was a letter planted in a New Hampshire
newspaper alleging that a leading Democratic presidential candidate,
Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, had approved a slur that referred to Americans
of French-Canadian descent as “Canucks.” On a snowy New Hampshire
day, standing outside the offices of the newspaper, Muskie gave a rambling denial
in which tears seemed to drip from his eyes (some contend they were actually
melting snowflakes). His emotional conduct, replayed on television,
caused him to drop in the New Hampshire polls shortly before the presidential
primary. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, considered a weaker
candidate by Nixon political strategists, eventually won the 1972 Democratic
2 C H A P T E R 1
nomination and lost the general election to the Republican president in a
landslide.
In this book, I’ll touch on a few cases of dirty tricks when they directly affected
the operations of a campaign. As detailed in chapter 11, “push polling”
(more accurately push calling) was used against Senator John McCain in the
2000 Republican presidential primaries when scurrilous smears against his
character were advanced over the telephone, along with false rumors in the
South Carolina Republican primary that the senator from Arizona had fathered
a black baby. (In reality, McCain and his wife had adopted a girl from
Bangladesh.) But because dirty tricks are not considered legitimate campaign
tactics by most political professionals, and are often illegal,2
I’ve largely excluded
them.
WHY CANDIDATES MUST GO NEGATIVE
Yet even beyond dirty tricks, many people still recoil at legitimate negative political
ads on television, radio, the Internet, and in other forms. Negative campaigning
has become a catchall phrase that implies there is something
inherently wrong with criticizing an opponent. Negative campaigning is one
of the most bemoaned aspects of the American political system, particularly
by academics and journalists who say it diminishes the level of political discourse
and intensifies the divisions among voters.3
These complaints emerge each election cycle, partly because political spots
are so different in content, style, and form than ads for commercial products.
Anyone peddling breakfast cereal needs to be careful about criticizing competitors
too overtly or else run the risk of turning off consumers so much that
they’ll start their day with another form of breakfast food. Rarely do product
advertisements include hard-hitting direct comparisons to competitors. (And
when they do, the contrasts are usually mild and fleeting.)
The goal of political marketing is entirely different, whether in a Republican
versus Democrat match or a tough party primary. Unlike product campaigns,
political campaigns do not mind at all turning off some “consumers,”
the voters. In fact, political operatives often prefer to keep voter participation
down among those inclined to vote for the opposition. They are perfectly
happy to drive down turnout, as long as those who do show up vote for them.4
And then there’s the timing. The stakes of elections are higher than everyday
consumer purchases. Consumers do not have to live with the same cereal or
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beer for the next few years, but they do have to live with the same president,
governor, or member of Congress.
Challengers in particular must, almost by definition, go negative on the
lawmaker they are trying to beat. Challengers must demonstrate flaws of the
policies put in place by the incumbent and show how they would do things
differently. Going negative on the opponent is the best way to draw clear differences
and run on the issues the challenger favors. There are exceptions to
that rule. During the 2004 presidential race, the majority of President George
W. Bush’s ads against his Democratic rival, Senator John F. Kerry, were negative.
This was a marked departure from Bush’s campaign in 2000 when his ads
were generally more positive, painting the then Texas governor as a “compassionate
conservative.”
CANDIDATES’ COMPREHENSIVE PLANS FOR NEGATIVE CAMPAIGNING
The most familiar forms of negative campaigning are the hard-hitting television
ads that flood the airwaves each election cycle. These often feature grainy
black-and-white photos of the opposition, looking as if he or she just rolled
out of bed in the morning, tasted a sour pickle, or had a root canal about an
hour before.
But television ads by themselves are often only one element in a comprehensive
negative campaign strategy. An effective approach revolves around
painting an unlikable portrait of the opposition through many different forums,
including speeches, candidate debates, press statements, and appearances
on talk shows. And, as will be demonstrated in chapter 12, direct mail
and more recent technological innovations such as blogs and Web video commercials
have become very important tools to use in criticizing opponents.
Often, negative campaigning means telling a damaging story about the opponent
over and over again. In 2000, Republicans said repeatedly that Vice
President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, was an exaggerator
who would say whatever it took to get elected. Four years later Senator Kerry
was portrayed as a flip-flopper lacking the resolve to prosecute the war on
terror. Democrats did not come up with equally compelling messages about
the potential perils of a Bush presidency, and the party’s nominees lost both
elections.
Negative campaigning also means honing in on an opponent’s gaffes, verbal
or physical. Senator Barry Goldwater’s politically unconventional state-
4 C H A P T E R 1
ments, many of then joking or before friendly audiences, became fodder for
some of the hardest-hitting and funny television ads of his era. The 1964 presidential
race, in which President Lyndon Baines Johnson crushed Goldwater
61 percent to 39 percent in the popular vote and took 44 states in the Electoral
College, set the standard for using candidates’ own words against them. As described
in detail in chapter 3, the Republican’s words included suggestions
that the eastern seaboard be sawed off and that the nuclear bomb was merely
another tactical weapon.
Or consider Fred Heineman, a one-term Republican congressman from
North Carolina, who rode the national GOP tidal wave in 1994 to a narrow
victory over veteran Democratic Representative David E. Price. After losing by
a scant 1,215 votes, Price returned to teaching political science at Duke University,
but quickly geared up for a 1996 rematch against Heineman, a longtime
New York City police officer who moved to Raleigh to become the city’s
police chief.
During the 1996 campaign, Heineman told a reporter for The (Raleigh)
News & Observer that his congressional salary and police pensions (totaling
more than $180,000 annually), made him “middle class,” a claim likely to be
disputed by many workers who toiled long and hard and earned considerably
less. Heineman’s comments provided an opening for Price in his comeback
bid to label the incumbent as out of touch with regular folks. The campaign
aired an “Earth to Fred” ad, featuring a mock conversation between “Mission
Control” and the commercial’s announcer, with visuals of planets, stars, and
space flights. The announcer said, “Heineman claims his $180,000-a-year income
makes him, quote,‘middle class.’” Mission Control then responded with
“Earth to Fred. Come in!”5
With the help of the humorous “Earth to Fred” television
ad, Price won back his old seat, 54 percent to 44 percent.
Heineman’s defeat also illustrates the importance of humor in negative
campaigning. In fact, some of the most effective negative ads barely seem negative
at all; shrouded by humor or irreverence, the stinging message is delivered
in a less-than-harsh manner. The familiar “scorched earth” negative ads,
with a scolding voice-over, unflattering pictures of the opponent, and ominous
sound effects, have become less effective because viewers are cynical
about political ads already. So they just hit the remote.6
“Humor . . . can be a
very effective way to make a point, and connect on an emotional level, which
. . . has more impact than sort of a tic-list of failures,” said Jim Margolis, a
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veteran Democratic ad maker, whose work has help elect many U.S. senators
and governors.7
GOP Senator Mitch McConnell (Ky.) helped set a standard for humorous,
effective political ads during his first Senate campaign in 1984 against twoterm
Democratic incumbent Senator Walter D. Huddleston. McConnell’s
campaign persistently criticized Huddleston’s voting record and attendance at
roll-call votes. Most memorably, McConnell’s campaign featured a television
ad in which bloodhounds tracked the absentee senator (played by an actor),
who fled down a city street before being driven up a tree. The bloodhounds
also followed the senator to the lawn on the east side of the U.S. Capitol. The
spot noted that while Huddleston was missing votes, he was giving speeches
for $50,000 a pop. In conclusion, the narrator of the ad said, “We can’t find
Dee. Maybe we ought to let him make speeches and switch to Mitch for sena-
tor.”8
McConnell won by about 5,000 votes out of more than 1.2 million cast.
Tony Schwartz, creator of the 1964“Daisy Girl”ad for Lyndon Baines Johnson,
produced one of the most biting—and memorable—ads of the 1968
presidential campaign. The commercial for Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic
presidential nominee, called into question the abilities and qualifications
of Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro T. Agnew. The spot
simply showed “Agnew for Vice President” on a television set, while an offscreen
viewer laughed hysterically. The tag line at the end was,“This would be
funny if it weren’t so serious.”9
Campaigns can also go negative by playing the victim. Nancy Reagan
played the role to perfection in a commercial for her husband’s successful
1980 presidential campaign. In a one-minute commercial, the wife of the former
California governor sat in a nondescript office and looked into the camera.
“I deeply, deeply resent and am offended by the attacks that President
Carter has made on my husband,”she began.“The personal attacks that he has
made on my husband. His attempt to paint my husband as a man he is not.
He is not a warmonger, he is not a man who’s going to throw the elderly out
on the street and cut off their Social Security. That’s a terrible thing to do and
to say about anybody. That’s campaigning on fear.”
Without missing a beat, she then attacked Carter’s record, while still seemingly
playing the aggrieved spouse, the victim of negative campaigning by her
husband’s opponent. “There are many issues that are at stake in this campaign.
I would like Mr. Carter to explain to me why the inflation is as high as
6 C H A P T E R 1
it is, why unemployment is as high as it is. I would like to have him explain the
vacillating, weak foreign policy so that our friends overseas don’t know what
we’re going to do, whether we’re going to stand up for them or whether we’re
not going to stand up for them. And the issue of this campaign is his threeand-a-half
year record.”A narrator then concluded with,“The time is now for
strong leadership.”10
In the space of 60 seconds, Mrs. Reagan had offered a
strong defense of her husband and then got in the campaign’s main line of attack
against the opponent.
Campaign attacks that don’t seem harsh can come in other forms, such as
interspersing optimism about one’s own candidate with troubling information
about the opponent. President Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign
turned the tactic of “positive negative” ads into high art by trumpeting his
own accomplishments while at the same time linking the Republican nominee,
former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, with unpopular House Speaker
Newt Gingrich, a development examined in depth in chapter 8. The president’s
campaign against Dole wasn’t the meanest, shrillest, or hardest-hitting
White House race in memory. It wasn’t particularly competitive either, because
Clinton romped to a solid, near-landslide level Electoral College victory.
Yet, like other contests mentioned in these pages, the race was instructive because
it amplified existing tactics in negative campaigning that later became
commonplace in campaigns, including going after opponents early, before
they have a chance to define themselves for voters.
Whatever the format, any winning effort needs to convince voters they
should vote for one candidate and against the other. It’s that simple, said Chris
Lehane, spokesman for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign and leading
practitioner of comparative politics. The Harvard Law School graduate
learned his craft working in the Clinton White House during the mid-1990s
as part of a rapid response team created to deal with Whitewater and the
growing number of other investigations into the administration. He then
moved onto the campaign trail for Gore, scoring kudos from members of his
party and scorn from Republicans for his hard-charging ways; at one point
amid the post-Election Day legal wrangling in 2000, he compared Florida’s
then secretary of state, Katherine Harris, to “a Soviet commissar.”11
Unless the race is a sure bet, Lehane said, a negative message about the opponent
should be driven home every day. This keeps the opposing campaign
off balance and wears down its resources. Even if a campaign’s positive ratings
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are up and things seem to be going well, sometimes it is worthwhile to continue
hammering the opponent. It’s a method he compares to boxing. Begin
with the basic jab, then a series of body shots, to drain the opponent’s energy.
Next comes a series of “hooks” to the head, which can inflict serious damage,
and finally, the knockout punch. “You’re either throwing a punch, or being
punched,” he said.12
Late in the 2000 presidential race, Lehane executed a tactically brilliant plan
to string out for several days a series of negative news stories about the Bush
campaign. The Gore campaign focused on one of Bush’s television spots that
seemed to subliminally flash the word “rats” across the television screen. The
spot’s words and standing images criticized the vice president’s plan to expand
health insurance coverage for prescription drugs as one that would needlessly
involve federal “bureaucrats.” A retired machinist volunteering for the Gore
campaign in Washington State saw the words “rats” flash across the screen for
a split second. After further research, Gore’s people suspected that subliminal
advertising was at work, with the word “rats” appearing for about a 30th of a
second. So Lehane and Mark Fabiani, the deputy campaign manager, offered
the story as an exclusive to the New York Times, along with supporting legal
documentation on subliminal advertising and how the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) had declared it deceptive.
The Times accepted the pitch from the Gore campaign and on September
12 published a lengthy story that was posted on the paper’s website around
midnight. Lehane then notified several television correspondents that the
story was breaking. Gathered in an Ohio hotel, he allowed the television reporters
to watch the tape individually, and each prepared a separate piece,
providing further amplification of the negative story about the Bush campaign.
The next day, in Orlando, Florida, Bush was bombarded with questions
about the “Rats” ad, which gave the story more traction. The day after that,
several Democratic senators asked the FCC to investigate, keeping the matter
alive even longer.13
JUST THE FACTS
Considerable criticism of negative campaign tactics comes from the media,
particularly columnists and editorial pages. Yet much of the consternation is
misplaced, when editorialists and opinion mavens confuse negative campaigning
with healthy debate about contentious and divisive issues. Take the 2004
8 C H A P T E R 1
presidential campaign, the first since the terrorist attacks of September 11. Naturally
much of the debate in the White House race centered on which candidate,
President Bush or Senator Kerry, could best protect the United States
from future attacks. Bush contended his opponent was not up to the task during
wartime. Democrats naturally took umbrage with the Republican president’s
charges. During one campaign stop in Florida, Senator John Edwards
(N.C.), the Democratic vice presidential nominee, accused Bush of “exploiting
a national tragedy for personal gain.” Edwards went on to declare, “George
Bush today is making one last stand to con the American people into believing
that he is the only one who can fight and win the war on terrorism.”14
Media outlets echoed the criticism, portraying Bush as the purveyor of unprecedented
negative campaign attacks. During early fall 2004, the New York
Times editorial page scolded Bush and his Republican allies for suggesting that
Kerry would be less competent protecting the nation from terrorist attacks.
The editorial, “The Un-American Way to Campaign,” took issue with comments
by Vice President Dick Cheney, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (Ill.)
and Senator Orrin Hatch (Utah) that suggested a Kerry presidency would lead
to more terrorist attacks, because he would not be as aggressive in confronting
the nation’s enemies. “This is despicable politics,” the Times wrote. “It is absolutely
not all right for anyone on [Bush’s] team to suggest that Mr. Kerry is
the favored candidate of the terrorists.”15
The American people, however, disagreed. To many voters the juxtaposition
of facts was not negative campaigning but the telling of a difficult truth.
The national audience found the predictions about Kerry to be quite “American,”
in that they continued the long, important tradition of contrasting candidates’
stances and positions—with significant exaggeration to be sure—and
letting the voters sort out what was and was not negative campaigning. Bush
won the first majority (51 percent) in a presidential race since 1988.
Surveys repeatedly show that voters like to hear about the differences between
candidates, as long as they are presented in a factual manner. For instance,
one of Reagan’s most effective ads in his 1980 presidential run asked
starkly, “Can we afford four more years of broken promises? In 1976, Jimmy
Carter promised to hold inflation to 4 percent. Today it is 14 percent. He
promised to fight unemployment. But today there are 8.5 million Americans
out of work.” Those were the facts presented in a straightforward way, undoubtedly
an important element in Reagan’s landslide victory.16
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While candidates and their campaign consultants usually shy away from focusing
on personal problems of an opponent’s family, such as a wife’s drug
problem or a son’s arrest for drug possession, most agree that criticizing an opponent’s
voting record and policy proposals should be fully open to examination.
“It’s completely fair game,” said Chris LaCivita, a leading Republican
political consultant based in Richmond,Virginia.“If the candidate is not willing
to define their opponents and their differences, they’re wasting their time.”17
Others contend attacks on voting records are usually distorted, because legislators
must often vote on amended bills that contain many provisions they
oppose.“It is one thing to take an even-handed look at one’s voting record and
another to twist the facts to make it appear as something that it isn’t,”said Bob
Garfield, AdAge columnist and co-host of National Public Radio’s On the Media.
“It’s nominally true, but it’s fundamentally a lie.”18
Some of the nation’s most accomplished public servants do not subscribe
to negative campaigning, suggesting voters deserve to hear what candidates
would do for constituents, not how terrible the opponent is. “A campaign
should primarily be about a candidate having ideas about what the state or the
nation or the local district ought to be doing,” said Jim Hunt, who narrowly
lost that 1984 Senate race to Helms, before returning as North Carolina governor
for two more terms in the 1990s. “A campaign ought to be a time in
which a candidate talks to people, listens to people, discusses ideas with them,
and at the end of the day, when elected, has a mandate about what they want
done.”19
He added, however, that the 1984 Senate race taught him a candidate
should not sit on his hands in the face of campaign attacks, adding there is
nothing wrong with responding in kind, and even turning up the heat higher
on the opponent.
Congressman Jim Leach (R-Iowa) simply declines to criticize opponents,
focusing instead on his own record and accomplishments. A moderate Republican
first elected in 1976, Leach has consistently refused to go negative on
opponents on television, radio, the Internet, in person, or in any other way,
even when it has jeopardized his own reelection chances in his Democraticleaning
district.20
Leach also does not accept political action committee
money or campaign contributions from people out of state, putting him at a
potential financial disadvantage to challengers. Campaigns should focus on
ideas, he said, not slash-and-burn tactics.“How one runs a campaign is as important
as what one stands for. How a game is played does matter.”21
10 C H A P T E R 1
In 2002, Leach faced one of the most serious threats to his political career,
yet did not engage in negative campaigning. The cerebral Princeton-educated
former Foreign Service officer faced Dr. Julie Thomas, a pediatrician from
Cedar Rapids. She assailed Leach over issues related to health care, Social Security
and prescription drugs, and many others. Because of his self-imposed
restrictions on negative campaigning and fundraising, the congressman found
himself in an unusual position. “We’ve almost reversed roles,” he said at the
time. “I’m running the challenger’s campaign.”22
Leach asked the House GOP campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional
Committee, to stay out of the race so it could be fought on the local
level. But Republican leaders, working frantically to keep their narrow
House majority, ran ads anyway knocking Thomas. Leach won the race 52
percent to 46 percent.
Other veterans of the political wars contend deeply negative campaigns are
harmful to lawmakers’ ability to govern once they are in office. Former GOP
Senator Bill Brock (Tenn.) (whose aggressive 1970 campaign against Democrat
Albert Gore Sr. is recounted in chapter 5) lamented how much television
is now relied upon in political races. He said 30-second spots are not enough
to discuss complicated issues. “It has tended to create the impression that solutions
are simple,” Brock said. “It also leads to polarization in politics.”23
While tough and harsh political commercials frequently draw criticism,
some political professionals and academics extol the virtues of negative campaigning.
In a 1996 essay, Northeastern University political science professor
William G. Mayer wrote, “No candidate is likely to provide a full and
frank discussion of his own shortcomings. Such issues will only get a proper
hearing if an opponent is allowed to talk about them by engaging in negative
campaigning.”24
Positive ads, featuring candidates with family members in orchestrated
camera shots, listing off their accomplishments, and proclaiming their “family
values,” do not provide voters enough information to make informed decisions.
Many consider positive television campaign commercials to be more
deceptive than negative ones. Some feel the practice of negative campaigning
should be encouraged and expanded, for the good of the electorate. “Campaigns
have always been about differences,” suggested Carter Wrenn, who, as
a leader of Senator Helms’s political machine, the Congressional Club, from
the 1970s through the early 1990s, helped pioneer many direct mail and
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polling techniques now familiar on the political landscape. “I think negative
campaigning is good. . . . With negative ads you have the virtue of a real de-
bate.”25
Moreover, tough races can sometimes increase turnout. For the vitriolic
Helms-Hunt 1984 Senate race in North Carolina, voter turnout reached
68 percent of registered voters.26
For better or worse, aggressive campaign tactics have been a vital part of the
American political system from the very start. As will be seen in the next chapter,
the tenor of modern political campaigns is actually considerably milder
than that of old. And, as will become apparent in the following chapters, negative
campaign tactics have been constantly reinvented, to adapt to the latest
technologies and to fit the prevailing mood of the electorate during different
eras of American history.
NOTES
1. William D. Snider, Helms & Hunt: The North Carolina Senate Race, 1984 (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 164.
2. Dirty tricks and illegal campaign tactics have been the subject of several worthy
books, including, most recently, Andrew Gumbel’s Steal This Vote! (New York:
Nation Books, 2005). Such deceptions can take many forms and range in severity
from the outrageous, like breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s
Watergate building headquarters in Washington, D.C., to more common acts like
stealing yard signs in city council and other local races.
Attempts to tamper with voting machinery and voter suppression also fall under
the category of dirty tricks and cheating. For instance, a Republican political
consultant ended up serving five months in jail for his role jamming phone lines in
New Hampshire that Democrats were using for get-out-the-vote operations on Nov.
5, 2002, Election Day. The effort involved making so many calls at the same time that
the Democratic phone lines jammed just when voters were expected to call for rides
to the polls in Manchester, Nashua, Rochester, and Claremont. The more than 800
computer-generated calls lasted about 90 minutes, as voters decided races for
governor, U.S. senator, and hundreds of other offices.
3. Academic research has drawn varying conclusions about the effectiveness of
negative campaigning and voters’ attitudes toward the practice.
Voters often decry negative campaigning in theory—82 percent of Americans
said they believed that “negative, attack-oriented campaigning is undermining
and damaging our democracy,” and a majority believed that unethical practices in
12 C H A P T E R 1
campaigns occur “very” or “fairly” often (58 percent), according to a November
1999 survey conducted by Lake Snell Perry & Associates for the Pew Charitable
Trusts and the Institute for Global Ethics, and from a September 2000 survey
conducted by Yankelovich Partners, Inc., for the Center for Congressional and
Presidential Studies.
Yet other studies have shown voters find negative campaigning helpful in drawing
distinctions between candidates. Consider a study by the Pew Research Center for
the People and the Press in November 2004, which surveyed voters’ attitudes toward
the just concluded presidential race between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry,
widely considered among the most negative in modern times. More than eight
in ten (86 percent) said they learned enough about the candidates and the issues to
make an informed choice. That was similar to the results from 2000 (83 percent). At
the same time, 72 percent said there was more mud-slinging or negative
campaigning in the 2004 election than in previous campaigns.
Other studies have similarly found that despite decrying “negative campaigning”
in general, voters still appreciate a full airing of the issues and personalities in
campaigns. Data from the 1998 and 2002 California gubernatorial races found that
voters generally do not consider all negative advertising unhelpful or uninformative,
according to a 2003 study by John Sides of the University of Texas, Austin, and
Keena Lipsitz, Matthew Grossman, and Christine Trost of the University of
California at Berkeley.
That study of voters’ attitudes toward the California gubernatorial races also
found that the more voters knew and care about the political process, the more
desensitized to negative campaigning they had become. More informed and
interested voters tend to be less outraged by campaign practices and generally more
sanguine about political attacks.
In an exhaustive study of U.S. Senate races from 1992 to 2002, Negative
Campaigning: An Analysis of U.S. Senate Elections (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004), Rutgers University political scientists Richard R. Lau and Gerald
M. Pomper found “previous literature on negative campaigning provides no clear
evidentiary base for either the unusual effectiveness of the technique or its presumed
deleterious effects on the political system.” The authors also found that negative
campaigning is less prevalent than commonly believed, and varies by campaign
situation, party, and gender. In addition, the political science professors concluded,
“negative campaigning does not generally reduce turnout; when combined with high
levels of spending, it may actually increase turnout” (p. 91).
4. Joshua Green, “Dumb and Dumber: Why Are Campaign Commercials So Bad?”
The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2004.
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5. David E. Price, The Congressional Experience, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Westview Press, 2004), 38–40.
6. Gary Nordlinger, “Negative Ad Survey Results Consistent with Experiences in
the Trenches,” Campaigns & Elections, October/November 1999.
7. Interview with author, Washington, D.C., Feb. 18, 2005.
8. Tape courtesy of the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive at the
University of Oklahoma Political Communication Center.
9. Victor Kamber, Poison Politics: Are Negative Campaigns Destroying Democracy?
(New York: Insight Books, 1997), 225–26.
10. Ad courtesy of The Living Room Candidate, a collection of campaign
commercials sponsored online (http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage
.us/index.php) by the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens,
New York.
11. Joe Garofoli, “The Spinner: How Chris Lehane, Revered by Some and Reviled by
Others, Gets the Campaign Consultant Job Done,” The San Francisco Chronicle,
Oct. 24, 2004.
12. Interview with author, San Francisco, Nov. 29, 2004.
13. Joshua Green, “Playing Dirty,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 2004. (In March 2001
the FCC concluded that no action was warranted in the matter. In a letter to the two
Democratic senators requesting the investigation, Ron Wyden of Oregon and John
Breaux of Louisiana, the FCC noted that its Enforcement Bureau had tried to
communicate with the licensees of 217 stations specifically alleged to have aired the
ad. Of the 179 stations that responded they had aired the advertisement, 162
indicated they were not aware it contained the word RATS! in it. Representatives
from the other stations said they realized the word was present on the screen, and
therefore it was not subliminal.)
14. Liz Sidoti, “Edwards Accuses Bush of Exploiting 2001 Terrorist Attacks,” The
Associated Press, Oct. 18, 2004.
15. “An Un-American Way to Campaign,” New York Times editorial, Sept. 27, 2004.
16. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Shooting to Win: Do Attack Ads Work? You Bet—and
That’s Not All Bad,” The Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2004.
17. Interview with author, Washington, D.C., Jan. 27, 2005.
14 C H A P T E R 1
18. Interview with author, Washington, D.C., Sept. 13, 2004.
19. Interview with author, Raleigh, N.C., Feb. 22, 2005.
20. James Q. Lynch, “Leach Bests Thomas in Hard-Fought Race,” The (Cedar
Rapids) Gazette, Nov. 6, 2002.
21. Interview with author, by telephone, Jan. 24, 2005.
22. Robin Toner, “A Tough Race for a Moderate in the GOP,” New York Times,
Sept. 16, 2002.
23. Interview with author, Annapolis, Md., Aug. 5, 2004.
24. William G. Mayer, “In Defense of Negative Campaigning,” Political Science
Quarterly, Fall 1996.
25. Interview with author, Raleigh, N.C., Feb. 22, 2005.
26. Pamela Varley, “The Helms Hunt Senate Race (D): Case-let Sequels, Phase III,
and Post Mortem,” John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
1986.
E Y E O F T H E B E H O L D E R : D E F I N I N G N E G A T I V E C A M P A I G N I N G 15
Going Nuclear 1964: The
Rise of Television Attack Ads
3
Few candidates have needed to employ negative campaigning less than President
Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964. The assassination of President John F.
Kennedy in November 1963 ensured that the Republicans would face an uphill
battle no matter whom they pitted against the Texas Democrat. After all,
the new president had ridden a wave of goodwill after the tragic events of Dallas,
toward swift passage of much of his predecessor’s idling legislative agenda.
Most notably, LBJ, the former Senate majority leader, muscled through a recalcitrant
Congress the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which guaranteed
blacks access to all public facilities and accommodations and banned discrimination
because of race, religion, national origin, or sex. The Vietnam
War, later to be Johnson’s downfall, was escalating. But on Election Day of
1964, it had yet to become a real liability.
The ambitious Johnson did not just want to win his own term as president;
he craved a resounding victory that would establish a new White House power
base. Then he could push forward his own legislative agenda, which included
creation of Medicare and Medicaid, aid to education, regional redevelopment
and urban renewal, and scores of other proposals to establish a“Great Society.”1
39
President Johnson did not care to take chances on his own reelection; he
had a history of tough races that sometimes required aggressive tactics. A
gangly 28-year-old Johnson had out-campaigned his nine Democratic primary
opponents to win a U.S. House seat from Texas in a 1937 special election.
He narrowly lost a 1941 U.S. Senate special election, a contest in which
his Democratic primary opponent appeared to have benefited from creative
vote-counting procedures and ballot box stuffing in certain Texas counties
where his influence ran strong. And in 1948 it looked as if Johnson would
lose his second bid for Senate. In what was then a monolithic Democratic
state, Johnson had come in second during the primary to Coke Stevenson,
though the conservative former governor did not win a majority. In the
hard-fought runoff, notable for Johnson’s pioneering use of a helicopter as
a campaign vehicle, LBJ still came up short. But a series of favorable ballots
in Boss George Parr’s Duvall County somehow materialized after Election
Day, to make Johnson the winner of the crucial Democratic primary, by the
infamous margin of 87 votes. The case was challenged all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court. There Justice Hugo Black dissolved a federal injunction
nullifying Johnson’s runoff victory, ruling that the federal government
did not have jurisdiction to interfere in the counting of ballots in a state
primary election.2
So as he looked toward a victory of historic proportions as president in
1964, Johnson approved his campaign’s launch of the first media campaign
centered on the rapidly growing medium of television, much of it an assault
on the Republican presidential nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
Johnson adviser Bill Moyers said the president “was determined to roll up the
biggest damned plurality ever and he felt that anything that could help—and
he believed advertising could help—was worth the price.”3
Goldwater himself became the focus of the election, not foreign policy, taxation,
or other issues. According to Johnson’s ads, Goldwater would destroy
Social Security, end government programs to aid the poor, and potentially
launch a nuclear war that could endanger all humanity. While LBJ’s victory
was never really in doubt, his campaign set the precedent for the television attack
ads Americans now take for granted. Many of the spots seem tame and
downright quaint compared to the commercials that followed forty years
later, but at the time the massive television onslaught of political commercials
stunned the Republican opposition.
40 C H A P T E R 3
The 1964 presidential race also offers a vivid illustration of how effectively
negative campaigning has worked when it has played into voters’ preconceived
notions voters about candidates. The Johnson ads did a masterful job of using
Goldwater’s words against him, which typecast the Republican. The vaunted
“Daisy Girl” ad that suggested Goldwater would start a nuclear war (it never
mentioned his name) was consistent with many voters’ views of the Republican
candidate. “The commercial evoked a deep feeling in many people that
Goldwater might actually use nuclear weapons,” wrote Tony Schwartz, creator
of the famous ad. “This distrust was not in the Daisy spot. It was in the people
who viewed the commercial.”4
The strategy of massive negative campaigning on television did the trick, as
the president crushed Goldwater by a 16-million-vote margin (43 million to
27 million; 61 percent to 39 percent). Johnson won 486 Electoral College votes
to Goldwater’s 52; the president fared poorly only in the Deep South, losing
Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana, along with
Goldwater’s native Arizona.
EARLY POLITICAL TELEVISION COMMERCIALS
In some ways the sitcoms of today bear little resemblance to the early television
comedies of the 1950s—in color for one thing, and the language is often
cruder and the camera angles always sharper.Yet in some respects the genre of
situation comedy has not changed significantly, as the shows center on family
situations, with parents using gentle humor to guide their growing children
through life’s travails. Similarly, while technology used in campaign commercials
has evolved exponentially, the themes expressed in candidate spots in the
earliest days are also familiar.
Political newsreels began to be played before movie audiences regularly
during the 1930s; they served as early prototypes of the hard-hitting campaign
ads that would emerge on television decades later. The 1940 Republican National
Committee film The Truth about Taxes, on behalf of GOP presidential
candidate Wendell Wilkie, showed an ironsmith slaving away over a hot furnace.
The narrator then explained that all working people had to labor for
three months just to pay for what government spent. “Everyone, whether in
the factory, shop, farm or office, pays for the cost of government.” The narrator
continued, “Let us rid ourselves of our New Deal failure, before it’s too
late. Let us end wasteful spending and return to good, old American sanity in
G O I N G N U C L E A R 1 9 6 4 : T H E R I S E O F T E L E V I S I O N A T T A C K A D S 41
economy. All Americans must unite to stop the New Deal, with its lust for
power to perpetuate itself in office for another four years. To save ourselves,
we must dismiss incompetents and radicals from high places of government.
We must elect Wendell Wilkie president.”5
These same basic themes, minus
the overt calls to dismantle the New Deal, would be present in Republican
campaigns six decades later, with increasingly sharp language.
Some of the earliest political television advertisements, too, carried arguments
that would be present in political television advertising for decades to
come. The first batches of campaign commercials made in the early 1950s, included
“the general themes of Republicans saying, ‘We’re strong on the military,
and we want to cut your taxes,’ and the Democrats saying they are for the
common people,” noted David Schwartz, curator of the American Museum of
the Moving Image in Queens, New York.6
The very first political television commercials, made for Democratic Senator
William Benton of Connecticut in 1950, were actually positive: They featured
the Democratic lawmaker’s wife and neighbors lauding him. Those
spots played a role in Benton’s razor-thin election victory over Republican
Prescott Bush, by about 1,000 votes (Benton had been appointed to the seat in
1949 when the incumbent senator, a Republican, died). Benton had come to
realize the importance of television through his work in advertising; he cofounded
the Benton-Bowles agency in New York and was so successful that he
retired at age 36.7
It wasn’t long before the television commercials featured politicians slinging
mud at each other, a reflection of candidates’ and consultants’ consistent
abilities to adapt negative campaign tactics to technological advances in
communications. By the 1952 election cycle, about 19 million homes had television
sets,8
and in that presidential race, former General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
campaign commercials criticized the Democrats relentlessly without
naming his opponent, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. The spots focused
on taxes, high prices, the Korean situation, and alleged government corruption
under Democratic President Harry Truman, whose sagging popularity
led him to decline a reelection bid. One ad featured two soldiers on the battlefield
in Korea, discussing the war’s futility. Suddenly, one of the soldiers was
killed, while the other charged the enemy. The tag line said simply, “Vote Re-
publican.”9
Stevenson’s ads generally featured the erudite governor pontificating
on issues of the day in a somewhat academic manner. But he did get in
42 C H A P T E R 3
some jabs against Eisenhower by suggesting he would be a puppet of Robert
A. Taft, the Ohio senator and anchor of the Republican Party’s conservative
wing. Eisenhower spent more than $1 million on television commercials on
his way to a sound victory, while Stevenson laid out less than $80,000.
During Stevenson’s unsuccessful 1956 rematch against President Eisenhower,
the challenger’s ads got tougher; the arsenal included a television attack
against Vice President Richard M. Nixon. The president’s heart attack a
year before raised the possibility Nixon could be elevated to commander in
chief, and Democrats tried to play on voters’ fears. The 10-second-long ad
showed a picture of the vice president looking shifty and sneering, while the
announcer asked, “Nervous about Nixon? President Nixon?” Running mates
would be the focus of criticism in television spots for decades to come, with
increasing degrees of sophistication, Republican vice-presidential candidates
Spiro T. Agnew in 1968, Dan Quayle in 1988, and Dick Cheney in 2004 being
the most prominent recent examples.
Nixon was on the wrong end of the most memorable negative ad of the
1960 presidential campaign, when he was the Republican presidential nominee.
And the person who inflicted the verbal wound was not the sponsor,
Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. It was Nixon’s boss,
President Eisenhower. Democrats seized on an offhand comment made by the
president in response to a reporter’s request to name a“major idea”that Nixon
had proposed and the president adopted. Eisenhower replied, “If you give me
a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” To capitalize on the remark,
the Kennedy campaign built a long, explanatory ad to cause the most damage.
An announcer began by saying,“Every Republican politician wants you to believe
that Richard Nixon is experienced. They even want you to believe that he
has actually been making decisions in the White House. But listen to the man
who should know best, the president of the United States. A reporter recently
asked President Eisenhower this question about Mr. Nixon’s experience.” After
the president’s barb at his understudy, the announcer returned to say, “At
the same press conference, President Eisenhower said,‘No one can make a decision
except me.’” And as for any major ideas from Nixon, the viewer then
saw Eisenhower saying again, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I
don’t remember.” The commercial concluded, “President Eisenhower could
not remember, but the voters will remember. For real leadership in the ’60s,
help elect Senator John F. Kennedy president.”10
The spot was
G O I N G N U C L E A R 1 9 6 4 : T H E R I S E O F T E L E V I S I O N A T T A C K A D S 43
considered tough for its time, as it focused almost entirely on the opposition,
instead of listing any positive attributes of the candidate running the ad. But
this style of the slow, almost apologetic attack ad would be antiquated by the
end of the 1964 president campaign.
TELEVISION ADS OF 1964: A YEAR OF FIRSTS
During the 1964 campaign, Goldwater’s primary opponents stirred up some
of the ammunition that Johnson used against him. As the 1964 election cycle
began, Republicans were split between a base of activist conservatives and a
generally more liberal leadership. Conservatives organized early support for
Goldwater, an outspoken libertarian-leaning right-winger. Entering the race
with a lower level of grassroots support was New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller,
a liberal who had alienated conservatives by inserting moderate planks
in the 1960 Republican platform and who had wounded his public image with
a highly publicized divorce. Rockefeller, like many Republican donors and voters,
was unsure that Johnson could be defeated but was certain that Goldwater
would lead the party into an electoral massacre. His political advisor
George Hinman said as much to prospective Rockefeller delegates, hinting
that “Rockefeller would step aside for another, more electable, moderate at
the convention: They were fighting a crusade to save their party from the
infidels.”11
In the primary campaign and at the Republican National Convention,
Rockefeller and moderates such as 1960 vice presidential nominee Henry
Cabot Lodge Jr. and Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton campaigned to
stop Goldwater. They loudly attacked the front-runner’s controversial stands
on issues, publicized his often-incendiary public statements, and predicted
disaster if the party anointed him the nominee. The public and private maneuvering
sharply divided the party as it went into the convention at San
Francisco’s Cow Palace. Cameras picked up NBC anchorman John Chancellor
being roughly ejected from the floor,12
and Rockefeller getting furiously heckled
during his speech. According to political scribe Theodore H. White,“As the
TV cameras translated their wrath and fury to the national audience, they
pressed on the viewers that indelible impression of savagery which no Goldwater
leader or wordsmith could later erase.”13
Making his problems worse,
Goldwater stoked the crowd by paraphrasing the Roman politician Cicero in
his acceptance speech, saying, “I would remind you that extremism in the de-
44 C H A P T E R 3
fense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the
pursuit of justice is no virtue!” This made Goldwater appear to agree with the
most fringe elements of the American right; his campaign bought ads positively
defining “extremism” in a vain attempt to blunt the damage.14
The Johnson campaign used these events to its advantage. In March, campaign
managers had signed with Doyle Dane Bernbach, a New York firm that
had risen to prominence with ads for Volkswagen and Avis Rent-a-Car.15
The
agency had never handled a political campaign, and approached the challenge
with bracing, aggressive ads that put the Goldwater team on the defensive for
most of the race. Part of the Johnson strategy was revealed in the official slogan,
repeated in every ad: “Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3rd. The stakes
are too high for you to stay home.”That motto underscored the fact that Johnson
was already in the Oval Office and had been tested under incredibly trying
circumstances; it hinted that replacing LBJ with Goldwater would lead to
catastrophe. The rest of the strategy utilized Goldwater’s own words against
him to paint him as a dangerous extremist, and followed these up with attacks
from other Republicans collected from the primary campaign.
One ad that utilized Republican attacks was“Convention,”which presented
a cluttered floor made up to look like the scene inside the San Francisco Cow
Palace after the crowds had emptied out. As the crew picked up placards, a
narrator rolled off some of the Republicans’ harshest attacks on Goldwater.
“Back in July in San Francisco, the Republicans held a convention,” said the
announcer. “Remember him? He was there, Governor Rockefeller. Before the
convention he said Barry Goldwater’s positions can‘spell disaster for the party
and for the country.’ Or him, Governor Scranton. The day before the convention
he called Goldwaterism a ‘crazy quilt collection of absurd and dangerous
positions.’ Or this man, Governor [George] Romney [of Michigan]. In June he
said Goldwater’s nomination would lead to the‘suicidal destruction of the Republican
Party.’ So even if you’re a Republican with serious doubts about
Barry Goldwater, you’re in good company.”16
The next group of ads bolstered Goldwater’s extremist image by publicizing
statements he’d made off the cuff or in front of friendly crowds. In
1961, Goldwater had joked, “Sometimes I think this country would be better
off if we could just saw off the eastern seaboard and let it float out to
sea.” So Doyle Dane Bernbach created an ad showing a cardboard map of
the United States getting the East Coast states slowly but steadily sawed off,
G O I N G N U C L E A R 1 9 6 4 : T H E R I S E O F T E L E V I S I O N A T T A C K A D S 45
as a narrator read Goldwater’s quote. The senator from Arizona had told an
interviewer that the Tennessee River Valley Authority should be sold, and
Doyle Dane Bernbach produced an ad portraying an auction on top of a giant
dam. The spot opened with the auctioneer in the midst of rapid fire
speech, helping bidders raise the price of the commodity he was trying to
sell. As the camera panned away from the auctioneer, it was revealed that
the bidders were on top of a giant water dam. “In a Saturday Evening Post
article dated August 31, 1963, Barry Goldwater said, ‘You know, I think we
ought to sell the TVA.’” The narrator continued, “This is a promise: President
Johnson will not sell TVA. Vote for him on Nov. 3rd. The stakes are too
high for you to stay home.”17
Another spot to turn Goldwater’s statements against him opened with a
Social Security card on a table. As the narrator named media outlets in which
Goldwater said he would change the system to make it voluntary “on at least
seven different occasions,” those newspapers and magazines were thrown on
top of the Social Security card. After The Congressional Record was named, a
pair of hands appeared, tore up another Social Security card, and threw it on
the pile. “Even his running mate, William Miller, admits that Barry Goldwater’s
voluntary plan would wreck your Social Security,” the narrator said. President
Johnson was then shown, saying, “Too many have worked too long and
too hard to see this threatened now by policies which promise to undo all that
we have done together over all these years.” It was the most repeated ad of the
entire campaign, and according to Theodore H. White, “probably had greater
penetration than any other paid political use of television except for Richard
M. Nixon’s ‘Checkers’ broadcast in 1952.”18
The spot presaged a long line of
federal campaigns that would seek to scare voters about opponents’ plans for
Social Security. Rarely did a candidate make such an explicit statement as
Goldwater’s suggestion that the system could be made voluntary. But proposals
to trim benefits, raise Social Security taxes, and other unpleasant remedies
to shore up the social insurance system would be exploited, often quite successfully,
in future campaigns.
A couple of ads by the Johnson campaign aired only one time each. The
“Daisy Girl” spot, perhaps the most famous campaign ad of all time, ran
during NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies on September 7; it turned Goldwater’s
outspokenness on military action and nuclear weapons into a story
of nuclear apocalypse (he had once joked about tossing a nuclear weapon
46 C H A P T E R 3
into the men’s room of the Kremlin.)19
The 30-second ad showed a little
girl in a field picking petals from a daisy. As she counted, the camera moved
closer, finally freezing on a close-up of her eye. At the same time, an announcer
started to intone a countdown. Suddenly, the screen erupted in a
nuclear mushroom. The voiceover of Lyndon Johnson then admonished:
“These are the stakes; to make a world in which all God’s children can live,
or to go into the darkness. Either we must love each other or we must die.”
Then words appeared on the screen: “On November 3rd, vote for President
Johnson.”20
The ad served to remind American voters of Goldwater’s propensity for
warlike statements, even though the spot never mentioned the Republican or
made reference to him. More than forty years after the ad ran, its creator, Tony
Schwartz, said it was fair game based on Goldwater’s record. “He had made
two speeches” on the use of nuclear weapons, Schwartz recalled.“It was a very
effective commercial.”21
The Goldwater campaign actually filed a complaint
with the Fair Campaign Practices Committee to stop the ad, which didn’t go
through when the Johnson team made it clear the commercial would only
be run once.22
(Even Senator Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic vicepresidential
candidate, publicly disapproved of the spot.) Still, for many Republicans,
the Daisy Girl ad eviscerated whatever goodwill existed toward LBJ
after he assumed office in place of Kennedy, the martyred president. “That’s
negative campaigning carried to an unbelievable excess,” said Bill Brock, who
in 1964 was a freshman Republican House member from Tennessee and later
won election to the U.S. Senate.23
Though the ad ran only once on commercial television, it earned tremendous
airtime through repetition and discussion on news shows. In a sense, the
ad served as a precursor of the “free media” effect the Swift Boat Vets would
have forty years later, when the group’s spots, purchased on an initially small
budget, attacked the military record of Senator John F. Kerry, the 2004 Democratic
presidential nominee. In 1964 most of the Daisy Girl ad’s repetitious
playing came from three television networks’ nightly news shows. Forty years
later, the ability to post such controversial ads on the Internet and send them
by e-mail had increased their visibility exponentially.
Ten days after “Daisy Girl” aired, the Johnson campaign ran a similar ad
portraying a young girl licking an ice cream cone as a woman off-camera (the
first female voiceover ever in a campaign commercial) patiently explained the
G O I N G N U C L E A R 1 9 6 4 : T H E R I S E O F T E L E V I S I O N A T T A C K A D S 47
history of nuclear testing and radioactivity. “Do you know what people used
to do?” asked the motherly sounding narrator. She continued:
They used to explode atomic bombs in the air. Now children should have lots of
vitamin A and calcium, but they shouldn’t have any strontium 90 or cesium 133.
These things come from atomic bombs, and they are radioactive. They can
make you die. Do you know what people finally did? They got together and
signed a nuclear test ban treaty. And then the radioactive poison started to go
away. But now there’s a man who wants to be president of the United States, and
he doesn’t like this treaty. He fought against it. He even voted against it. He
wants to go on testing more bombs. His name is Barry Goldwater, and, if he is
elected, they might start testing all over again.24
This ad, also run just once, played on some of the same emotions as “Daisy
Girl,”with a slight twist—that if President Goldwater didn’t kill your children,
he would at least make them sick. Other ads showing mushroom clouds (one
based on a comment Goldwater had made about the nuclear bomb being
“merely another weapon”) or listing other militaristic statements by Goldwater
were put into rotation, with the same intent.
The Johnson campaign did run positive ads, mostly in a documentary
style that portrayed the president as a careful thinker (a contrast with Goldwater)
and a defender of the public programs that helped the poor, sick,
and elderly (another contrast). Still, the attack commercials were far more
prevalent. Goldwater Campaign Director Denison Kitchel acknowledged
that the nuclear ads had been the most devastating to the campaign. “My
candidate had been branded a bomb-dropper—and I couldn’t figure out
how to lick it,” Kitchel told political advertising scholar Kathleen Hall
Jamieson.25
The whole Johnson ad campaign was effective because voters
had not seen anything like it before on television. “They had not built up
the cynicism and skepticism that now condition their response to negative
ads,” wrote political consultant Dick Morris. “If it was on television, they
believed, it was probably true.”26
For their part, Goldwater’s ads were initially dedicated to improving the
candidate’s image. His campaign bought expensive 30-minute blocks for television
specials in which the Arizona senator sat at a desk and answered an interviewer’s
questions, and another ad that showed Goldwater chatting with
former President Eisenhower at his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
48 C H A P T E R 3
When these spots and films didn’t improve Goldwater’s poll numbers, his
people developed a new tack. Through more polling, the campaign found an
increasing number of voters were concerned about President Johnson’s “personal
honesty,” after it was revealed that an old senate staff friend, Bobby
Baker, had probably peddled influence to turn a $20,000-a-year job into a $2
million net worth. On October 11, Goldwater adviser Lou Guylay wrote a
memo suggesting Goldwater take on a perceived “shocking decline in political
morality.”27
Unfortunately, the ads crafted around this theme were clumsy and
ineffective. They opened with video of another Johnson ally who was associated
with scams, Billie Sol Estes, and a cartoon of Baker, opening the Capitol
dome and dipping his arm inside. Another spot matched these images to a hyperbolic
announcer, who sounded as if he were selling a B-movie: “Graft!
Swindle! Juvenile Delinquency! Crime! Riots!”28
All of this was accompanied
with confusing footage of street violence, before cutting to Goldwater sitting
in a quiet den, speaking to the camera. The intention was for Goldwater to
seem like a calm presence cutting through the chaos, but the effect was an
amateurish-looking campaign commercial.
Still, the campaign kept the “moral leadership” message in the rest of its
ads. A final spot featuring then-citizen Ronald Reagan of California saying,
“Let’s get a real leader and not a power politician in the White House.”29
But
that message was overshadowed by Johnson’s attack ads, and their focus on
fundamental issues of war and social welfare.
Lyndon Johnson’s negative campaign commercials would be remembered
for the trends they set and themes introduced. “Daisy Girl” was the first in a
long series of Cold War–era campaign commercials to focus on a candidate’s
potential for launching a nuclear conflict. Just four years after that spot aired,
the campaign of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the 1968 Democratic presidential
nominee, aired a spot—this time in color—that showed a nuclear
bomb exploding. Then, the film of the explosion was reversed to show the
mushroom cloud collapsing back into itself. “Do you want Castro to have the
bomb?” the announcer asked. “Now? Do you want any country that doesn’t
have the bomb to be able to get it? Of course you don’t. Where does Richard
Nixon stand on the UN threat to stop the spread of nuclear weapons? He says
he’s in no hurry to pass it. Hubert Humphrey wants to stop the spread of nuclear
weapons now before it mushrooms. Hubert Humphrey supports the UN
treaty now, as do the 80 countries that have already signed it.”30
G O I N G N U C L E A R 1 9 6 4 : T H E R I S E O F T E L E V I S I O N A T T A C K A D S 49
The themes of “Daisy Girl” continued to resonate long after the Cold War
ended. Many recalled the famous spot when, during the run-up to the 1996
Republican presidential primaries, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana ran a
series of spots that warned ominously of nuclear terrorists blowing up an
American city. The commercials used actors, dramatic music, and jerky camera
shots to depict the terror and chaos of a threatened nuclear attack. The
senator, a foreign policy specialist, had warned that the bombings at the World
Trade Center in February 1993 and in the federal building in Oklahoma City
in April 1995 underscored American vulnerability to terrorism. Lugar, badly
trailing his GOP primary foes, said in a letter released along with the ads that
“it is not my intent to create unnecessary anxiety.”31
Whatever the intent, Lugar
had little support among rank-and-file Republican primary voters, and he
quickly dropped from the race.
Over the years, partisans across the political spectrum adopted“Daisy Girl”
for their own ideological purposes. Images from the ad made a cameo appearance
in an election cycle thirty-two years after its one-time airing, as part
of a commercial for 1996 Republican presidential nominee Senator Bob Dole.
The issue at hand had nothing to do with nuclear threats. Rather, Dole’s television
ad, attacking President Bill Clinton, included images of crack pipes and
junkies shooting heroin. The spot opened with footage from “Daisy Girl,” as
the narrator said, “Thirty years ago, the biggest threat to her was nuclear war.
Today the threat is drugs,” before reeling off a litany of criticisms about the
president’s inadequate funding for antidrug programs and his first surgeon
general, who had raised the specter of legalizing certain drugs (Clinton repudiated
the remarks).32
Dole’s advisers thought Clinton could be vulnerable
on the drug issue, and the ad became one of the tougher, more memorable
spots of a relatively uncompetitive campaign. However, the ad ran in a vastly
different context than 1964, doing Dole no good; he lost overwhelmingly to
Clinton.
In January 2003, the far-left group MoveOn.org ran an updated version
of the “Daisy Girl” spot, as a warning against the pending U.S.-led invasion
of Iraq to depose dictator Saddam Hussein. The MoveOn commercial also
featured a little girl picking petals from a daisy, unknowingly to the sound
of a missile-launch countdown. At countdown’s end, the screen filled with
the image of a nuclear mushroom cloud, and the ad continued with the
warning: “War with Iraq. Maybe it will end quickly. Maybe not. Maybe it will
50 C H A P T E R 3
spread. Maybe extremists will take over countries with nuclear weapons.
Maybe the unthinkable.”33
No doubt “Daisy Girl” will continue to be incorporated into future candidacies
according to the issues of the moment.
OTHER INNOVATIONS
The 1964 presidential campaign increased the outlets for negative campaigning
not just through television advertising, but also with a wide wave of literature
critical of the candidates in the form of books. Works such as J. Evetts
Haley’s A Texan Looks at Lyndon painted the political veteran in the worst possible
light, as a corrupt power grabber lacking core convictions. Less than a
year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the air was thick with conspiracy
theories. Haley’s book included a detailed look at the relationship between
Johnson and swindler Billie Sol Estes. Haley pointed out that the three men
who could have provided evidence in court against Estes all died of carbon
monoxide poisoning from car engines. Other books that year were published
with the goal of defeating one of the presidential candidates, early forms of
what would become a multimillion-dollar phenomenon forty years later (described
in detail in chapter 12). In that cycle, anti-Kerry books such as Unfit
for Command: Swiftboat Veterans Speak Out against John Kerry, by John E.
O’Neill and Jerome R. Corsi, criticized the senator’s military conduct in Vietnam
and helped cement opposition to his candidacy. And a slew of partisan
books, aimed to coincide with the heat of campaign season, emanated from
the left.
Other independent attempts at negative campaigning in the 1964 presidential
race were almost comical. Perhaps the campaign’s lowest moment
came in October, when Fact magazine published the results of a pseudoscientific“psychiatrists’
poll”about Goldwater’s mental fitness to be president.
The periodical’s maverick publisher, Ralph Ginzburg, had rented the American
Medical Association’s roster of more than 12,000 psychiatrists from a broker
of mailing lists. The doctors received a questionnaire asking Goldwater’s
psychological state of mind. Despite the obvious ethics breached by offering a
diagnosis of somebody the professionals had not personally examined, more
than one in seven psychiatrists responded. Of those, two-thirds said Goldwater
was unfit to serve as president (571 replied that they could not judge the
candidate’s mental fitness at long range). Republicans suspected Democratic
G O I N G N U C L E A R 1 9 6 4 : T H E R I S E O F T E L E V I S I O N A T T A C K A D S 51
operatives were behind the “scientific” survey; Democrats said they had nothing
to do with it.34
Forty years later, Vic Gold, deputy press secretary for Goldwater’s
campaign, said the episode was the dirtiest part of the 1964
presidential campaign. “That really crossed the line,” he said.35
NOTES
1. Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1995), 210.
2. Lance Morrow, introduction to The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and
Nixon in 1948—Learning the Secrets of Power (New York: Basic Books, 2005), xiv.
3. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of
Presidential Campaign Advertising (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 177.
4. Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1973),
93.
5. Tape courtesy of the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive at the
University of Oklahoma Political Communication Center. [Known hereafter in this
chapter as the Kanter Archive.]
6. Interview with author, Queens, N.Y., Aug. 30, 2004.
7. Victor Kamber, Poison Politics: Are Negative Campaigns Destroying Democracy?
(New York: Insight Books, 1997), 29.
8. Dick Morris, Power Plays: Win or Lose—How History’s Great Political Leaders
Play the Game (New York: ReganBooks, 2002), 281.
9. Ad courtesy of The American Museum of the Moving Image’s “The Living
Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952–2004”
(http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/index.php) [Known hereafter in this
chapter as The Living Room Candidate.]
10. The Living Room Candidate.
11. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 264.
12. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 382.
13. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1964 (New York: Atheneum,
1965), 201.
52 C H A P T E R 3
14. Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 183.
15. Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 172.
16. Tape courtesy of the Kanter Archive.
17. Tape courtesy of the Kanter Archive.
18. White, The Making of the President 1964, 352.
19. Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 186.
20. Ad courtesy of The Living Room Candidate.
21. Interview with author, by telephone, Jan. 25, 2005.
22. Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 200.
23. Interview with author, Annapolis, Md., Aug. 5, 2004.
24. Tape courtesy of the Kanter Archive.
25. Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 204.
26. Morris, Power Plays, 288.
27. Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 208.
28. Tape courtesy of the Kanter Archive.
29. Tape courtesy of the Kanter Archive.
30. Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 252.
31. Howard Kurtz, “Lugar Tries a Dramatic Approach; Ads Focus on Threat of
Nuclear Terrorism,” The Washington Post, Dec. 19, 1995.
32. Howard Kurtz and Spencer Hsu, “Dole Smacks Clinton with Drug-Policy Ads,”
The Washington Post, Aug. 27, 1996.
33. Byron York, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic
Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to
Bring Down a President—and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time (New York:
Crown Forum, 2005), 28–29.
34. Bruce L. Felknor, Dirty Politics (Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse.com, Inc. [originally
published by Norton], 1966, 2000), 226–29.
35. Interview with author, by telephone, Aug. 9, 2004.
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