Dollarocracy (20 page)

In
Chapters 2
and
3
we describe who is providing the lion's share of the money for political campaigns and the legal and political structures that have been put in place to encourage their shenanigans. The next logical question is: What does all this money buy? The short answer is that the majority of the money goes to political advertising, and within political advertising the vast majority goes to television ads. The percentage of campaign spending that goes to TV ads has increased sharply over the past forty years. As a rule, the closer a race, the more money will be spent on the campaigns, and the higher the proportion will go to paid TV political advertisements. “We spent the vast majority of our money last time on broadcast television,” Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod told attendees at a 2011 cable convention. “It's still the nuclear weapon.”
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This chapter chronicles the rise and nature of TV political advertising and explains why, under the commercial model that dominates U.S. television, it was destined to assume the forms it has taken.

For Americans born after 1950, and for those born before 1950 but with faltering memories, the televised commercial deluge that now defines American political campaigns is the “natural order.”
⁹
But American campaigns were significantly different in the 175 years before political advertising, specifically television political advertising, came to dominate the discourse. Indeed, for
politicians and much of the public, the initial response to the use of broadcast candidate advertising was hostile, even contemptuous, regarding the practice as antithetical to American democratic political traditions.

The story has a history going back to the 1930s and 1940s, when moneyed interests learned they could effectively use motion pictures, radio broadcasting, and, what was then used in a nonpejorative sense, propaganda techniques to win elections they might not otherwise.
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But political advertising only begins to be considered at midcentury when academic researchers like Paul Lazarsfeld and David Riesman observed that advertising and marketing techniques could be successfully applied to political campaigns and that voters shared many attributes with consumers.
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Legendary Madison Avenue ad man Rosser Reeves approached Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey in 1948 and proposed a series of radio spots. Dewey rejected the idea as “undignified.” Reeves was later convinced that Dewey's decision cost him the election.
¹²

By 1950, advertising people were brought formally into congressional campaigns, at least on the Republican side. This led the Republican-leaning
New York World-Telegram
to bemoan in a large headline the way in which “The Hucksters” had taken over the GOP campaign.
¹³
Despite the
World-Telegram
's dignified dissent, Republicans tended to be more open to employing the evolving talents of Madison Avenue, if only because the major advertising agencies were well known for their Republican sympathies at the time. By the early 1950s, the party had the huge Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn firm on retainer as its permanent agency.
¹⁴

The 1952 Eisenhower presidential campaign was the turning point. For the first time, television political ads were deployed in a meaningful, attention-grabbing manner. Reeves took a six-week unpaid leave to develop what would become a series of forty TV spots for the campaign. He conducted market research to determine Eisenhower's strengths and weaknesses with uncommitted voters and what issues they were most concerned with. The top issue was the war in Korea, so the campaign slogan became “Eisenhower, Man of Peace.” Reeves then developed a campaign whereby in each ad spot Eisenhower would appear to be answering a question from a voter. In fact, Reeves had scripted both the question and the answer.

Eisenhower was reluctant to participate and not at all happy to spend time recording his “answers.” “Why don't you just get an actor. That's what you
really want,” he protested. But he went along with the advice of his campaign advisors.
¹⁵
As Lizabeth Cohen put it, “Ironically, it was the campaigns of down-home, grandfatherly Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and again in 1956 that brought mass marketing fully into the political arena.”
¹⁶

Some Democrats protested mightily. Republicans “have created a new kind of campaign,” a speechwriter for 1952 and 1956 presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson said, “conceived not by men who want us to face the crucial issues of the day, but by the high-power hucksters of Madison Avenue.” Stevenson “hated the idea of using advertising in the political process,” David Halberstam noted. “This is the worst idea I have ever heard of,” Stevenson told a CBS executive.
¹⁷
“The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal . . . is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.”
¹⁸

Former president Harry S. Truman went before the New York Advertising Club in 1958 to implore “the advertising profession” not to “take over the profession of politics.”
¹⁹
By then it may have been too late. “Both parties will merchandise their candidates and issues by the same methods business has developed to sell goods,”
Nation's Business
observed.
²⁰
As Cohen wrote, the 1960 Kennedy campaign embraced commercial marketing tools in a manner Stevenson never could and advanced the use of market segmentation.
²¹

Nonetheless, political campaigns in the 1950s and much of the 1960s appear positively anticommercial compared to what would soon follow. The emerging role of television is a recurring theme in Theodore White's epic
The Making of the President
series, especially for 1960 and 1964, but TV political advertising is barely present in either volume. By White's account, Nixon paid virtually no attention to his Madison Avenue advisors throughout his unsuccessful 1960 presidential campaign.
²²
In 1964, the campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater spent money on TV political ads, but campaign managers “rejected the counsel of their advertising agency” for short, stylish spots with modish production values in favor of ads that had all the flair of an old ad from the early 1950s.
²³
According to Joe Klein's research, in the 1950s and 1960s candidates routinely hired advertising experts and pollsters, “but these were peripheral advisers; they didn't run the campaigns.”
²⁴

This quickly changed. The success of Lyndon Johnson's 1964 “Daisy” ad—which was broadcast only once—took the understanding of how powerful televised political commercials could be to a new level. The spot was put together
by Doyle Dane Bernbach, the agency that developed the legendary Volkswagen campaigns that made it a major automobile in the United States by the 1960s. The spot simply had an innocent young girl picking the petals off of a daisy until she was engulfed in a mushroom cloud. It was followed by a voiceover of LBJ saying, “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

It was unprecedented and extraordinarily powerful, conveying the concern that Goldwater was far more comfortable with nuclear war than any sane person should be. As one scholar noted, “It was the first presidential television spot to contain no real information and no rational argument.” David Broder interviewed Johnson staffers after the landslide election victory and noted the “lip-smacking glee” they exhibited for “the way in which they had foisted on the American public a picture of Barry Goldwater as the nuclear-mad bomber who was going to saw off the eastern seaboard of the United States.” “The only thing that worries me, Dave,” one of the staffers told Broder, “is that some year an outfit as good as ours might go to work for the wrong candidate.”
²⁵

The 1968 presidential election proved to be a watershed. In 1969, Joe McGinniss published his groundbreaking
The Selling of the President
to chronicle what he termed “a striking new phenomenon—the marketing of political candidates as if they were consumer products.” The book, which involved McGinniss spending time with Nixon's television advertising advisors, including current Fox News chief Roger Ailes, during the 1968 presidential campaign, seemed a shocking and sharp departure from the political-driven campaign narratives provided by the likes of White. McGinniss documented how Nixon came to rely upon TV political commercials, based on Madison Avenue marketing principles, as the foundation of his campaign. In the book, Ailes presciently concluded immediately after Nixon's November victory, “This is the beginning of a whole new concept. This is it. This is the way they'll be elected forevermore.”
²⁶

It is ironic that when read today, the book's description of Nixon's campaign seems downright quaint, even homespun, by comparison to subsequent elections. The liberal McGinniss was able to wander through the corridors of power in Nixon's campaign like a serendipitous hippie roaming around at Woodstock looking for a roach clip. Similarly
The Candidate
, a sober 1972
film about a young idealistic California candidate for a U.S. Senate seat, starring Robert Redford, seems Atlantean today. The film, with a screenplay by a former Eugene McCarthy speechwriter, dealt with the phoniness and superficiality that marketing and television had brought to political campaigns. At the time, it was provocative and controversial, and it contributed to subsequent debates about the role of money in politics. TV political advertising plays an important role in the film and is cast in a negative light. But what is ironic is that the TV ads Redford's character airs in the fictional campaign are not nearly as bad in tone and substantive content as the dreck that typifies political ads of more recent vintage. Ads of that caliber today would have political scientists and pundits shouting from the mountaintops that we have nothing to fear. But in 1972, such ads were considered highly suspect and part of the problem.

As it was, by 1972 the total amount spent on television political advertising for all races—from the presidency and House and Senate to governorships, mayoralties, state legislatures, referendums, initiatives, and city councils, the works!—had increased threefold from 1960 to reach $37 million.
²⁷
That would amount to approximately $200 million in 2012 dollars, so when we factor in inflation,
the 1972 election spent around 3 percent of what was spent on TV political ads in the 2012 election cycle.

Even at those 1972 levels, the American public seemed to have had enough. Research in 1973 by the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB) determined that Americans “continued to be disenchanted with political advertising,” and found it less credible than commercial advertising, which was not exactly a high bar to meet. An FCB 1971 poll determined that three-quarters of Americans wanted controls to reduce the amount of TV political advertising. Only 19 percent of Americans wanted to keep the amount of TV political advertising at then-existing levels. The notion that anyone might want
more
TV political advertising was so laughable that it was not even an option in the survey.
²⁸

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, the demand for campaign-finance reform grew so intense that by 1974 candidates for the Senate as diverse as Democratic former attorney general Ramsey Clark, who was running in New York that year, and Maryland senator Charles Mathias, a Republican stalwart, were refusing contributions of more than $100 and talking about the “crisis” of campaigns defined by thirty-second attacks ads. Mathias said he wanted to “avoid the curse of big money that has led to so much trouble.”
²⁹

The “curse” had actually been recognized decades earlier. As television political advertising became prominent in American campaigns, the common refrain was that political advertising was bad because it was advertising, that it substituted the hustle and chicanery of a Madison Avenue sales job for the meat and potatoes of political debate and democratic governance. Lincoln and Douglas were replaced by Procter & Gamble. “Madison Avenue sells politicians like soap,” the lament went. The very term “Madison Avenue” provided a shorthand critique of advertising's lack of ethics, sincerity, and integrity, and it encapsulated much of what people felt they were subjected to with TV political commercials. In 1960, for example, Richard Nixon so feared the tag Madison Avenue that he moved his campaign's television advisers—according to White, “the finest brains of New York's advertising agencies”—from their ad agency offices on that (in)famous street to new offices on nearby Vanderbilt Avenue.
³⁰

Despite the warm embrace of political advertising by Rosser Reeves and numerous other major figures on Madison Avenue, there was also a dissident element of the advertising industry offended by the comparison of political advertising to commercial advertising, as these admen regarded the latter as having vastly greater integrity and social value. The towering Madison Avenue opponent to political advertising was David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, and, ironically enough, the brother-in-law of Reeves. Ogilvy thought political advertising “represented the worst abuse imaginable of the advertising man's skills,” as Halberstam put it. When Reeves showed his brother-in-law his TV spots for Eisenhower in 1952, Ogilvy wished him luck but remarked that he hoped “for the country's sake it goes terribly.”
³¹
Years later, Ogilvy called political spots “the most deceptive, misleading, unfair and untruthful of all advertising.”
³²
At another point, he stated, “Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest.”
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