Campaign Ad Nauseam

The trouble with the latest political ads isn't that they're negative. It's that most of them are lousy TV

Growing up in Michigan, I did not exactly feel as if I were at the white-hot center of the media universe. The big Oscar movies opened on the coasts long before they hit the multiplex. New Hampshire had the sexy primary. No one set sitcoms in Detroit. (Well, there was that Martin Lawrence show, but we don't like to talk about that.)

Turns out I packed up and moved to New York City too soon. In its final days, this year's presidential campaign finally got good--which is to say it got bad. In battleground states like Michigan and Florida, with presidential and local contests tight as pre-washed jeans, campaigns and interest groups flooded radio and TV with ads and filled voters' answering machines with celebrity-voiced automated phone calls. And the best part was that they went negative, big time.

Let me explain. Elections are not feel-good exercises in which people "finish less than first." People lose elections, and negative ads serve the positive purpose of clearly arguing which candidate should. As this magazine's TV critic, I always like to see a new generation pay homage to the classics; for instance, that pro-Bush group's "remake" of Daisy, the 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson ad that targeted Barry Goldwater as a dangerous extremist. Both ads cut from a little girl picking petals off a daisy to footage of a nuclear explosion. The new version accused Clinton and Gore of making America vulnerable to nuclear attack from "communist red China" (reminding voters under 45 what "red" means). A new pro-Gore ad assailed Bush's policies in Texas, but its real message was the visuals--a clueless-looking Bush standing at a microphone--and the tag line, "Is he ready to lead America?"

In state races, the eleventh-hour attacks got even wilder. The fur flew in Georgia as an animal-rights group slammed Representative Bob Barr for opposing legislation to ban fetish videos in which women crush animals with their heels, coining a classic of American political discourse: "Bob, animal crushing is not common sense."

And that's just a taste. All told, air time for campaign 2000 TV ads may have cost $1 billion. And as TV repeated the same presidential, single-issue, House, Senate and ballot-proposal ads hour after hour, it became nearly impossible to receive vital information on which fast-food chain has the Backstreet Boys promotion. Some pitch-drunk voters say this is a bad thing. I say this: Anyone who whines about being deluged with political ads is a crybaby who does not deserve to live in the greatest country on earth. Complaining about having a disproportionate voice in choosing the leader of the world's only superpower? Being feared and courted? Cry me a river, pal. You'll get your hemorrhoid-cream commercials back on Hollywood Squares soon enough. (Those automated phone calls, though, are indeed tools of the devil--but we'll get to that later.)

That said, living in a swing state became exhausting in the last days of the campaign. Just ask Dave Shand, 45, of Saline, Mich., who was constantly pestered by pollsters, like the one he told he was a registered voter planning to go Republican. Shand is a left-leaning Canadian citizen. "You know that 3%-to-4% margin of error?" he says. "That's me."

Besieged voters complain not just about the ads' volume but about their negativity as well. In a country where trashing politicians is a staple of late-night comedy and water-cooler banter, the only people who are not supposed to disparage politicians are their opponents. There seems to be little distinction between underhanded smears and hard, defensible attacks, only a growing consensus that making the basic argument of a campaign--that I am the right choice and my opponent the wrong one--is somehow dirty pool.

When did we become such a nation of wimps? A too positive campaign can fail to explain why you should choose one candidate over another. Look at the second "debate," which Bush and Gore spent agreeing with each other and which could only have fed the Ralph Nader/George Wallace belief that there ain't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties. The Bush and Gore attack ads, though, were short, sweet and to the point: Gore is a liar who favors Big Government; Bush is a fool who favors the rich. These may not have been the most ennobling messages, but it would be snobbish to call them irrelevant.

As with sitcoms, there are really only a few basic plots for negative ads, and they are made over and over. This year the Republican Leadership Council rebroadcast the scathing attacks of Ralph Nader--no Bush lover--on Gore's environmental record; in 1980 the Reagan campaign aired the anti-Jimmy Carter fulminations of Ted Kennedy, friend to supply-siders everywhere. Bob Dole lifted a clip from the Daisy ad for a 1996 attack spot against Clinton. The Gore camp bashed Bush for pollution in Houston (substitute "Bush," "Dukakis" and "Boston Harbor," and you've got 1988) and tagged Bush as the failed Governor of a Third World-like backwater (Bush, Clinton, Arkansas, 1992).

But as in a new fall TV season, each election season sees its trends and twists. Late in this campaign, for instance, we saw the anti-negative negative ad. In New York's Senate race, Democrat Hillary Clinton attacked Republican Rick Lazio for his having attacked her by tying her to Middle East terrorism. In Washington State, Democrat Maria Cantwell released a spot saying, "You know what's wrong in politics today? All the negative ads"--and then aired a hatchet ad saying her adversary "broke his promise to seniors," accompanied by the sound of breaking glass. Others put the attack in the mouths of celebrities or regular people, like the distraught elderly man in an N.R.A. ad warning, "Al Gore definitely will try to take our rights away--just like they did in Australia!" When all else fails, ads blamed the medium itself. Two Bush campaign attack ads showed Gore on a TV screen within the ad, making TV itself a symbol for mendacity.

Behind all these ads is the assumption, fostered by the constant spin cycle, that the candidate who makes an attack is himself sleazy or desperate. Certainly, misleading negative ads do a disservice; so do misleading positive ads. But ad watchdog Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, says this year's attacks have been, comparatively, a model of accuracy. "There have been some small inaccuracies on each side, and some mid-level distortions," she says, "but the press has been fairly vigilant about going after them, and then the campaign gets it changed."

The real problem with today's negative TV ads is not that they're so negative. It's that they're such lousy TV. From D.C. to Dixie, it's the same vocabulary of ominous synthesizer music, phony-sounding testimonials, graphics worthy of public-access cable and canned punch lines ("Wrong for the court. Wrong for our kids"). It wasn't always so. The 1964 Daisy ad was practically avant-garde. Today, while Madison Avenue produces some of the most sophisticated programming on the air, most political ads remain stuck in the Stone Age. Nader looked like a philosopher king simply for doing a couple of funny parodies of MasterCard and Monster.com spots. Both appealed smartly to voter cynicism about the major parties (and corporations), but neither outdid your average sneaker-company ad.

But Nike won't go out of business if it can't sell its shoes to 50% plus 1 of the market. Nader is a niche product; he's like a UPN show trying to capture 5% of the audience. Whereas for the Big Two, clever is dangerous. You can inadvertently alienate important sectors of the electorate (for instance, the stupid) or come off as slick and dishonest. Since Watergate, ads have been much more straightforward--and artless. When the media landscape is carpet-bombed with ugly, blaring ads, perhaps every ad, regardless of its content, becomes a negative one.

To cut through this clutter, campaigns relied heavily this year on prerecorded phone calls, including messages from celebrities like Norman Schwarzkopf and mother Barbara for Bush; and for Gore, Barbra Streisand, Stephen King and Ed Asner. The Democrats alone planned to make 40 million phone calls in the last 10 days of the campaign. (No word on how many smashed phones electronics stores have been asked to replace.) "Phone messages get more attention than other ads," says Jamieson. "If people agree with what they hear, they play it again and again for their friends." And you just know that folks like that must have tons of friends.

The billion-dollar question is whether the last-minute ads make any difference. Alan Brinkley, professor of history at Columbia University, says that in the past two elections, Bill Clinton did himself far more good with early ads. "The effectiveness of advertising," he says, "probably diminishes the closer you get to the election itself." As if you Michiganders didn't know that already.

--Reported by John U. Bacon/Ann Arbor, Ann Blackman and Elaine Shannon/Washington and Eric Roston/New York