Fear a popular theme in political ads
By Jeff Greenfield | CNN Senior Analyst | October 21, 2006
If President Roosevelt were around today, he might amend that famous line from
his first inaugural address.
Apparently, the only thing we have to fear is ... political campaign ads that
play on fear.
The latest example now playing on a cable network near you, and soon to be on
the political talk show circuit, is a Republican ad as stark as a midnight winter
landscape on the Great Plains.
All we hear is a ticking ... what? A clock? A bomb?
Black-and-white graphics appear: pictures of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri
appear along with threatening quotes going back as far as eight years and spelled
out on the screen. (View the ad at the Republican National Committee Web site)
There is no mention of the president or of the Republican Party. There is just
a warning, "These Are the Stakes," and a reminder to vote.
To political junkies of a certain age, this ad will instantly bring to mind the
infamous 1964 "Daisy" ad that showed a little girl picking a daisy,
and an ominous voice counting down to a nuclear blast. The add aired only once.
(Watch the GOP's new ad compared to an old classic -- 2:05)
Similarly, the voice of President Johnson was heard intoning, "These are
the stakes:" and continuing, "To make a world in which all of God's
children can live, or to go into the dark."
The ad never mentioned GOP nominee Barry Goldwater; nor did it raise any specific
issue about Goldwater's sometimes provocative comments (It did, however, urge
the audience to vote for President Johnson).
Apparently, the current Republican ad is built on the theory that voters who have
the terror threat in mind are more likely to vote Republican.
Now it's not as though we have to go back 40 or more years to find ads that appeal
to root anxieties. In fact, it's more common than not. In 1968, the Nixon campaign
urged voters to "vote like your whole world depended on it," using images
of war and domestic violence, which, it should be said, were very much in evidence
in that year.
In 1976, when President Ford was being challenged hard by Ronald Reagan for the
GOP nomination, the Ford campaign had an ad which said, "Remember, Governor
Reagan couldn't start a war; President Reagan could."
Four years later, the Jimmy Carter campaign used "man in the street"
ads where people said, among other things, "he scares me; Reagan really scares
me."
In 1984, the Walter Mondale campaign hit challenger Gary Hart with a "red
phone" ad, showing a "crisis" phone ringing, suggesting Hart wasn't
the right person to be running things in a crisis.
And as recently as the last presidential campaign, a Bush ad showed soldiers and
weaponry literally disappearing from the battlefield, suggesting that John Kerry's
votes would have left our military weak.
These ads all feature ominous images and sounds, but sometimes the same point
can be made with a lighter touch. In 1984, the Reagan campaign aired an ad that
said, "There's a bear in the woods" to suggest the menacing presence
of the Soviet Union.
And no one who saw it can forget the image of Michael Dukakis in 1988, in what
must be the most unfortunate photo-op in history, riding in a tank with an odd
hat on his head, and bringing to mind the image of Snoopy as a World War I aviator
dueling the Red Baron.
The campaign of George H.W. Bush promptly put the video into an ad that more or
less said, "Do you really want this guy as commander in chief?"
If current poll numbers are right, this recent appeal to remember the terror threat
may not be nearly as effective as it was two and four years ago, principally because
widespread discontent with Iraq has eroded confidence in Bush and the Republicans
as stewards of the war on terror.
But in the campaign's last weeks, the GOP seems to be gambling on the card that
worked for them twice before.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/10/20/greenfields.ads/index.html