The Command Post - 2004 US Presidential Election

May 10, 2004

| Campaign Ads Don't Sell

President Bush’s campaign has broadcast about a dozen television ads since early March, and Kerry’s campaign another 10. The LA Times reports that advertising experts doubt the ads are effective despite polls suggesting some of the President Bush’s ads are influencing targeted voters:

Bush launched the first ads of the general election campaign March 4, two days after Kerry effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nod. The experts recently interviewed by The Times lauded two of Bush’s initial commercials.

In the 60-second “Lead,” a relaxed Bush sat with his wife, Laura, and expounded on the “entrepreneurial spirit of America.” He also declared: “I know exactly where I want to lead this country.”

Slow-dissolve shots of the president in the Oval Office were interspersed with pictures of other Americans at work, such as a waitress opening a diner near dawn.

[. . .]

Linda Kaplan Thaler, a New York ad executive who worked for Democrat Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992, applauded the 30-second Bush commercial “Tested.”

The ad showed faces of ordinary but determined Americans and a flag flying at the wreckage of the World Trade Center. It then showed people carrying on with their lives, shifting from black and white images to color as someone hoists a flag up a pole. A narrator talks about “freedom, faith, families and sacrifice.”

[. . .]

One of Bush’s attack spots struck the experts as refreshingly humorous — and therefore effective. The 30-second “Wacky” took a carnival tone as it played newsreel-like footage of the Keystone Kops and antique gas pumps to accuse Kerry of supporting higher gasoline taxes.

[. . .]

The experts said Kerry’s early efforts were forgettable, suffering from mixed messages, bland themes and boring campaign-event footage.

“As a couch potato, as soon as I see canned videotape from the campaign trail on the tube, I hit either mute or change the channel,” Sullivan said.

Kaplan Thaler said: “Kerry never, ever, ever smiles.”

In recent weeks, Kerry has intensified his advertising. But the experts found fault with the editing of two recent ads. As the Democrat is explaining his views on Iraq and domestic issues, the ads interrupt close-up footage of Kerry to pitch his website. They then switch back to the candidate finishing his thoughts.

“Inept,” Bond said.

The Boston Globe reports that these early campaign ads are competing to create a definitive public portrait of the challenger:

“President Bush is known to almost every American, and his image and record is well established,” said Terry Holt, a Bush campaign spokesman. “John Kerry is the new unknown quantity.”

William Benoit, professor of communications at the University of Missouri, said the ad wars reflect “a Bush rush to define Kerry early . . . before he gets a chance to define himself.”

The fate of these dueling strategies could hinge on what proves more persuasive: Kerry’s effort to sell himself to the electorate, or Bush’s efforts to tarnish Kerry’s image among voters.

“Voters learn more from negative spots, especially when the other guy [Bush] goes first,” said Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin.

John Franzn, a political media consultant who works for Democrats and liberal groups, said: “The conventional wisdom in this business is that it is easier to make a negative ad stick in the public’s mind than a positive ad. . . . And if you’re essentially dealing with a blank slate, they work all the more.”

[. . .]

A poll by the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey indicated that in the 18 battleground states where the television ad campaign is being waged, unfavorable ratings for Kerry have been driven up from 28 percent to 36 percent while his favorability numbers dropped from 41 percent to 35 percent since the beginning of March.

Goldstein said one way to tell whether Bush’s ads are working is to “look at what [Jay] Leno’s saying. . . . Six weeks ago, Kerry was not a flip-flopper; now he largely is.” A survey of talk-show comics by the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs, conducted for the first four months of 2004, found that Bush is the butt of more jokes than Kerry, with Bush’s intelligence being the primary target.

But Tuesday, “Tonight Show” host Leno joked about Kerry’s recent bicycle accident, noting that “when the police arrived, Kerry was well enough to give conflicting reports to the officers about what happened.”

Cross-posted from California Yankee

Posted by Dan Spencer at May 10, 2004 05:59 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Amazing just how much f—king money we’re spending…. TV execs must be creaming themselves

Posted by: typhonus at May 10, 2004 08:09 PM

Speaking of presidential campaign ads, you might want to check out www.readmylipz.com. It is a non-partisan web site sponsored by some college and a research company that actually polls people about the presidential campaign ads! Let’s the general public participate and it has a forum and some other stuff. Good way to see what the public thinks about the different ads.

Posted by: Randy R at May 10, 2004 10:44 PM

Firt of all we must consider the source. Anything appearing in the LA Times must be consumed with a healthy dose of NACL.

Next, the “effectiveness” of most ad campaigns can be called into question yet advertisers continue to advertise.

I’m lucky, since I don’t watch TV I miss all these ads, so I get to make my mind up based on other aspects of the campaign. Currently I’m on the fence (not!)

Posted by: skip at May 11, 2004 10:27 AM

My election year strategy for voting is to ask a liberal who they would vote for and for what issues they would vote for and then I’d just go down the list voting the opposite. Works like a charm! :-)

Campaign Ads are effective and the fact that everyone knows about John Kerry’s legacy, ‘It would be irresponsible for any senator to hold back money for the troops… I voted for the 87$ billion before I voted against it.’

And the lib Rank and File still ‘cringing’ in ‘anquish’ that John Kerry is the best their ideological nonsense can provide.

Posted by: Jeff MacMillan at May 11, 2004 11:46 AM

MoveOn is single-handedly crushing the Bush campaign by getting more people to vote! Awesome news!

Posted by: x at May 11, 2004 02:21 PM

umm, x, how does getting people to vote ‘crush’ the Bush campaign?

Or are you saying that you believe that everyone registered in a Moveon drive will vote, and vote Democrat.

Actually, given the rampant vote fraud of the Democrats, I guess that’s not entirely unlikely.

Thank the gods for Diebold, eh?

Posted by: jack at May 11, 2004 02:57 PM

x
some days the only redeeming feature of CP is one of your trouble-making posts. Keep up the good work…thanks

jack
don’t you think that most people attracted to a MoveOn voting drive would vote against aWol? And speaking of voter fraud…run the reports of Kathie Harris and Jeb in Florida. I especially like the part about taking people off the voting rolls if they are from certain counties with certain tip-off names, even though the wrong person is removed.

Good point on Diebold…that wouldn’t have anything to do with fraud? ReThuglicans would never do voter fraud the way the Dems do. The Rs will just buy the votes was the Flashing-Bluelight-Legislator is actually seated.

Posted by: buttons at May 11, 2004 05:33 PM

David Duke is a malignant narcissist.

He invents and then projects a false, fictitious, self for the world to fear, or to admire. He maintains a tenuous grasp on reality to start with and the trappings of power further exacerbate this. Real life authority and David Duke’s predilection to surround him with obsequious sycophants support David Duke’s grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience.
David Duke’s personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement. Most narcissists are paranoid and suffer from ideas of reference (the delusion that they are being mocked or discussed when they are not). Thus, narcissists often regard themselves as “victims of persecution”.
Duke fosters and encourages a personality cult with all the hallmarks of an institutional religion: priesthood, rites, rituals, temples, worship, catechism, and mythology. The leader is this religion’s ascetic saint. He monastically denies himself earthly pleasures (or so he claims) in order to be able to dedicate himself fully to his calling.
Duke is a monstrously inverted Jesus, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that his people - or humanity at large - should benefit. By surpassing and suppressing his humanity, Duke became a distorted version of Nietzsche’s “superman”.
But being a-human or super-human also means being a-sexual and a-moral.
In this restricted sense, narcissistic leaders are post-modernist and moral relativists. They project to the masses an androgynous figure and enhance it by engendering the adoration of nudity and all things “natural” - or by strongly repressing these feelings. But what they refer to, as “nature” is not natural at all.
Duke invariably proffers an aesthetic of decadence and evil carefully orchestrated and artificial - though it is not perceived this way by him or by his followers. Narcissistic leadership is about reproduced copies, not about originals. It is about the manipulation of symbols - not about veritable atavism or true conservatism.
In short: narcissistic leadership is about theatre, not about life. To enjoy the spectacle (and be subsumed by it), the leader demands the suspension of judgment, depersonalization, and de-realization. Catharsis is tantamount, in this narcissistic dramaturgy, to self-annulment.
Narcissism is nihilistic not only operationally, or ideologically. Its very language and narratives are nihilistic. Narcissism is conspicuous nihilism - and the cult’s leader serves as a role model, annihilating the Man, only to re-appear as a pre-ordained and irresistible force of nature.
Narcissistic leadership often poses as a rebellion against the “old ways” - against the hegemonic culture, the upper classes, the established religions, the superpowers, the corrupt order. Narcissistic movements are puerile, a reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon David Duke like (and rather psychopathic) toddler nation-state, or group, or upon the leader.
Minorities or “others” - often arbitrarily selected - constitute a perfect, easily identifiable, embodiment of all that is “wrong”. They are accused of being old, they are eerily disembodied, they are cosmopolitan, they are part of the establishment, they are “decadent”, they are hated on religious and socio-economic grounds, or because of their race, sexual orientation, origin … They are different, they are narcissistic (feel and act as morally superior), they are everywhere, they are defenseless, they are credulous, they are adaptable (and thus can be co-opted to collaborate in their own destruction). They are the perfect hate figure. Narcissists thrive on hatred and pathological envy.
This is precisely the source of the fascination with Hitler, diagnosed by Erich Fromm - together with Stalin - as a malignant narcissist. He was an inverted human. His unconscious was his conscious. He acted out our most repressed drives, fantasies, and wishes. He provides us with a glimpse of the horrors that lie beneath the veneer, the barbarians at our personal gates, and what it was like before we invented civilization. Hitler forced us all through a time warp and many did not emerge. He was not the devil. He was one of us. He was what Arendt aptly called the banality of evil. Just an ordinary, mentally disturbed, failure, a member of a mentally disturbed and failing nation, who lived through disturbed and failing times. He was the perfect mirror, a channel, a voice, and the very depth of our souls.
Duke prefers the sparkle and glamour of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishments. His reign is all smoke and mirrors, devoid of substances, consisting of mere appearances and mass delusions. In the aftermath of his regime - Duke having died, been deposed, or voted out of office - it all unravels. The tireless and constant prestidigitation ceases and the entire edifice crumbles. What looked like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble. Loosely held empires disintegrate. Laboriously assembled business conglomerates go to pieces. “Earth shattering” and “revolutionary” scientific discoveries and theories are discredited. Social experiments end in mayhem.
It is important to understand that the use of violence must be ego-syntonic. It must accord with the self-image of David Duke. It must abet and sustain his grandiose fantasies and feed his sense of entitlement. It must conform David Duke like narrative. Thus, David Duke who regards himself as the benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elite - is highly unlikely to use violence at first. The pacific mask crumbles when David Duke has become convinced that the very people he purported to speak for, his constituency, his grassroots fans, and the prime sources of his narcissistic supply - have turned against him. At first, in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction underlying his chaotic personality, David Duke strives to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment. “The people are being duped by (the media, big industry, the military, the elite, etc.)”, “they don’t really know what they are doing”, “following a rude awakening, they will revert to form”, etc. When these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology fail, David Duke becomes injured. Narcissistic injury inevitably leads to narcissistic rage and to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression. The pent-up frustration and hurt translate into devaluation. That which was previously idealized - is now discarded with contempt and hatred. This primitive defense mechanism is called “splitting”. To David Duke, things and people are either entirely bad (evil) or entirely good. He projects onto others his own shortcomings and negative emotions, thus becoming a totally good object. Duke is likely to justify the butchering of his own people by claiming that they intended to kill him, undo the revolution, devastate the economy, or the country, etc. The “small people”, the “rank and file”, and the “loyal soldiers” of David Duke - his flock, his nation, and his employees - they pay the price. The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated - is drawn-out. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of David Duke. This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.

Posted by: Karl Ludwig Nietzsche at May 12, 2004 03:52 AM