Fighting dirty: The most outrageous US election advertising hit jobs
Earlier this month, millions of Americans were treated to six identical seconds of election advertising from two opposing political parties. “America demanded change,” booms a Don LaFontaine-esque Hollywood trailer-style voice over. “And change is what we got.”
The clip featured first in Donald Trump’s Super Bowl re-election TV ad on 2 February, which touted the President’s time in office as an economic success story. But just hours later, it was reappropriated by the other side, as Democratic hopeful Mike Bloomberg parodied the message.
In the former New York mayor’s own ad, clips played of white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, immigrants being brutally rounded up, and the President of the United States saluting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his officials. The message at the end reads: “America deserves better. Defeat Trump.”
Trump’s $10m broadcast and Bloomberg’s subsequent hit job have fired the starting gun on election advertising season in the US, a multibillion dollar circus which has come to encapsulate the grubbiest elements of campaigning for the presidency. As the 2020 campaign kicks off – with the likelihood of being the most vitriolic ever – it’s time to take a look back at how the personal attack came to dominate US political broadcasting.
1. Daisy Girl (1964)
A young girl counts to 10 as she picks petals from a daisy. She looks to the sky as a nuclear countdown begins. The bomb drops. It’s over.
The implication of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy” ad is clear: his opponent, Republican Barry Goldwater, is too dangerous for the White House. “Vote for President Johnson,” says the narrator as a mushroom cloud engulfs the world. “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”
The ad was broadcast only once, but in an age of wholesome political jingles the message was devastating, and has been widely credited with helping Johnson to his landslide victory two months later. It did not name Goldwater. It didn’t need to.
2. The Bear (1984)
As a grizzly bear lumbers through the woods to the foreboding beat of a battle drum, a narrator says: “Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous.”
The bear — a thinly veiled metaphor for the Soviet Union — was part of Ronald Reagan’s concerted foreign policy push ahead of the 1984 election. Reagan’s approach to the Russians, which was more confrontational than his predecessors’, became a hallmark of his presidency.
The narrator continues: “Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear, if there is a bear?” With the Cold War era drawing into its final stages, the message that only Reagan — not his opponent Walter Mondale — had the plan to stand up to the Russian threat was unmistakable. It helped the President to a landslide re-election.
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3. Willie Horton (1988)
As a central tenet of his 1988 election campaign, George H.W. Bush jumped his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis’ public opposition to the death penalty, repeatedly savaging the then-governor of Massachusetts for being soft on crime.
Bush Senior’s method? Circulating a mugshot of African American convicted killer Willie Horton, who was let out of prison temporarily on a furlough programme introduced by Dukakis — only to murder again.
Not only was Bush’s broadcast a relatively unprecedented explicit assault on his opponent’s record, but it was also designed to stoke racial tensions and appeal to people’s prejudices in a deeply divided America. It was a low blow, and has become established as a key reference point in historic dog-whistle racism in US politics. But it worked.
4. Any Questions? (2004)
Sixteen years later, George W. Bush proved he was a chip off the old block. This unofficial broadcast — tacitly supported by Bush — redeployed the attack ad and honed it to a fine art.
Over the course of a minute, no fewer than 13 Vietnam War veterans claim to have served with Bush’s Democratic opponent John Kerry on a type of warship known as a Swift Boat — and denounce him as a liar. “When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry,” scolds one.
It later turned out that none of them served alongside Kerry. But as Bush Senior had shown, sling enough mud and some of it will stick. So influential was the broadcast that it even gave rise to a new pejorative verb in American English for launching a false political attack: swiftboating.
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5. The Cheaters (2012)
By 2012, the honeymoon period was over for Barack Obama. Once the darling of liberal America, his approval ratings had slumped well below 50 per cent, and the first black President faced a mounting threat from Republican Mitt Romney. His counterattack, admittedly, was hardly a patch on Bush’s swiftboating of Kerry eight years before. But it showed that by then, the political hit job was so ubiquitous that even Obama was not above it.
The broadcast, which highlighted examples of Romney being weak on the world stage, used a tactic later borrowed by Trump of playing on the electorate’s perception that China’s growing economic might was damaging US citizens’ chances of finding employment.
Seizing upon Romney’s vow to punish unfair trade practices of foreign nations, who the he described as “cheaters”. the President’s campaign ad said: “Romney’s never stood up to China. All he’s done is send them our jobs.” Obama went on to win the second term.
6. Dangerous (2016)
No rundown of ugly political ads would be complete without an entry by Donald Trump. His attack on Hillary Clinton for a perceived lack of fortitude in the face of mounting foreign threats (the Middle East, North Korea and Islamic State) took advantage of the electorate’s concerns about her health.
Deploying footage of Clinton fainting in public and an overdub of the sound of her coughing, it was as vicious as it was effective. And with Trump vying for a second term in the White House, he will surely use similar tactics against his eventual challenger this time around.
Furthermore, in the blue corner, the Democrats are also likely to use personal attacks on a never-before-seen scale. From brazen public displays of misogyny to ever-mounting concerns about alleged Russian collusion in 2016, Trump, like no other President that has gone before him, offers rich pickings for would-be attackers.
The question is: will any of it cut through?
Main image credit: Youtube