The Campaign Spectator/Down the Tube
Ferguson, Andrew
THE CAMPAIGN SPECTATOR DOWN THE TUBE by Andrew Ferguson F or most of us, the campaign of '88 is over, and we can take a well-earned breather from the rigors of representative democracy. But the...
...For any non-professional who has watched the "Best Campaign Commercials of 1988," this is a weighty fact, for it means that out there somewhere are twenty more hours of the same sort of stuff—only worse...
...They watch videotapes...
...They pore over charts and graphs...
...I don't think it has anything to do with the vaunted "negativity" of the 1988 campaign...
...Jeffrey Easton says that the animal strategy usually emerges "when you're twenty points down with a week to election day...
...They wait for their hand-delivered weekly copy of the National Journal...
...They xerox the Campaign Industry News...
...lb keep themselves well-oiled for 1990, they faithfully read the Post, these men and women do, from A-1 straight through to the automobile ads...
...These involve, not surprisingly, a heavy emphasis on animals doing stupid things, and for people like me who are forever seeking to recover the lost bliss of childhood by watching re-runs of "The Three Stooges" and "Mr...
...They have lunch...
...Facts, of course, do not take up too much room in the political consultant's bag of tricks...
...And no wonder: he's "Senator Health Care," who "presided over a 104 percent increase in Medicare...
...To judge from his ads, in fact, Senator Durenberger of Minnesota spends the majority of his waking hours walking in parks with senior citizens...
...Is he embarrassed that we interrupt him in this session of shameless narcissism...
...This is not your usual topic for a father-daughter heart-to-heart—unless, of course, "entangling alliances" is understood metaphorically—but she struggles nobly to appear interested anyway...
...My own favorites among this cream-ofthe-crop selection are of the kind which research shows to be the least effective—that is, the kind which are purely frivolous and content-free...
...The tautology aside, the fact remains that when Senator Melcher of Montana brought out commercials starring a herd of talking cows, his opponent, Conrad Burns, was already waltzing to victory...
...Easton edited the tape, which lasts about an hour, using, he says, only 5 percent of the available material...
...And an ad for Senator John "Call Me Jack" Danforth of Missouri begins in media res: We catch Jack sitting alone in his office, the lights low, with a slide projector humming and casting pictures of him against the back wall...
...then he grabs his daughter and drags her to the Vietnam memorial on the Mall, which, the voice-over assures us, "he has visited many times...
...In Washington this is undeniable, which is why sales of the "Best of" tape have been brisk: "Four or five a day," according to Aristotle's Jeffrey Easton...
...Not at all...
...They put in calls to the Hill...
...First we see Robb as he chats with a couple of Marines and lets slip the fact that he had soldiers die in his arms in Vietnam, an experience whose marketability he might not have foreseen at the time...
...The implausibility descends to baseness in a commercial for Chuck Robb, the Vietnam vet and former party boy who now serves the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States Senate...
...Obviously that explains why the political experts have deduced that the strategy doesn't work: only sure losers try it...
...A powerful antidrug statement, perhaps, but not a scenario played out daily in Vermont...
...ir n the end," says Senator Binga1 man of New Mexico in one of his ads, "we're all family," and the videotape makes clear who precisely wears the pants in our big democratic family...
...Why are the best of the ads so bad...
...Finally he sits the girl down and lectures her on the dangers of entangling alliances...
...As perpetual senior citizen Walter Brennan used to say: no brag, just fact...
...all campaigns are essentially negative...
...I myself don't find this cause for any particular alarm, as some guardians of the public good do, but neither do I think it's too much to ask that the admen at least entertain the viewer if they insist on wasting his time...
...Heroics run in the family...
...They watch, for example, their own work (if they're lucky) and the work of their competitors on "The Best Campaign Commercials of 1988," as compiled by Aristotle Industries...
...But the machinery of campaigning—the infrastructure, so to say, of mailing-list brokers, polling specialists, computer software hackers, and well-dressed "consultants" in plush offices on Connecticut Avenue whose monthly plant-care payments are more than your mortgage—this human machinery grinds on, ever onward...
...And politicians everywhere pledged "not to turn [their] back on the people who built this country" (Leo McCarthy's phrase), or on "the ones who raised us" (Bingaman), or on "those who have given us so much" (Trent Lott), or on the bloc of voters "who will ruin a politician's career if he so much as touches a dime of Social Security" (me...
...As the tape makes clear, the effort to create a video glow around an American politician can result in all manner of implausibilities: Pete Dawkins, for example, wearing blue jeans and sauntering down a crack alley in Newark, with an all-in-a-day'swork air about him...
...Nothing gets Bernhardt angrier than the sight of all that coke going to waste, apparently, so he runs over to the bag, grabs it, and—freeze frame...
...I suspect, rather, that the answer lies in the curse of "professionalism": since TV campaign ads have become a growth business—a profession—a class of pros has arisen that thinks of its work in a high-minded way, and there's nothing lower than a high-minded TV commercial...
...Then.there's Mike Bernhardt, who unsuccessfully challenged Governor Kunin of Vermont, and who outdoes even Danforth for high-minded implausibility...
...It's enough to restore your faith in the democratic process...
...You wonder, watching the tape, whether there was an American over the age of sixty-five who didn't appear in a campaign commercial last year...
...In his commercial, Bernhardt just happens to be walking through a playground when a group of teenagers just happens to be starting up a basketball game, and when one of the teenagers just happens to drop his backpack, which just happens to cause $400,000 in cocaine to spill from the bag, Bernhardt just happens to see it...
...Ed," the gambit is a sure-fire attention-getter...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 49...
...The best commercial on the tape was aired by Bob Jordan, who challenged North Carolina's Governor Jim Martin by portraying the governor's budget staff as four chimps, dressed in business suits, sitting around a conference table...
...I was just reminiscing about my years in public office," he says, congenially, "and I thought you might like to join me...
...Whole retirement villages seem to have been emptied to meet the casting calls...
...Aristotle specializes in "political technology," and its slogan is "Democracy is a Growth Business...
...The pols scrambled after elderly votes with all the dignity of kids lunging for party favors...
...End of commercial...
...One chimp flailed his arms, another punched a calculator, a third smooched a telephone receiver, the fourth drank a can of soda and did consecutive backflips on the table—in rollerskates...
Vol. 22 • April 1989 • No. 4
