Page 117 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 96

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
against a challenger whose administrative experience may be limited to the
governorship of a small state.
In 1988 George Bush made effective use of this device. Although not
himself an incumbent president, he deployed his considerable experience as
vice-president, and former head of the CIA and Congress, to market himself
as practically a president already. One spot showed him in a protective
embrace with Ronald Reagan (signifying the trust and endorsement of the
still-popular president), meeting Gorbachev and Thatcher, and signing
treaties – all images of ‘presidentness’ to which Michael Dukakis had no
response. Bush tried to appropriate to himself the symbolic power of the
presidency, a tactic which may have contributed to his win in 1988, although
it failed to prevent his defeat four years later.

Negatives

Another controversial or ‘attack’ trend in US political advertising has been
towards the ‘negative’ spot, i.e. advertisements which focus on the alleged
weaknesses of an opponent rather than on the positive attributes of the
candidate him or herself. In the context of American television, negative
advertising has played a part in campaigning from the outset, taking on a more
important role from the 1964 presidential election onwards. Tony Schwarz’s
‘Daisy’ spot was a negative, highlighting Goldwater’s alleged propensity to be
confrontational towards the USSR. The spot was structured around
Goldwater’s ‘negative’, rather than Johnson’s positive characteristics (other
than, of course, the fact that Johnson was not Goldwater). While, as Kathleen
Jamieson noted earlier, ‘simplification, sloganeering, and slander’ (all usually
important elements in a negative spot) were not invented by televisual political
advertising, the perception of most observers has been that negatives have
become more prevalent with the growing centrality of television in
campaigning. Kaid and Johnston argue that the 1980s in particular were a
decade in which negative campaigns and ‘mudslinging’ came to predominate.
In the presidential election campaign of 1988, they calculate, between 60 and
70 per cent of all political advertising consisted of negatives (1991).
Indeed, 1988 was the year of the best known negative of all – the ‘Willie
Horton’ spot produced by supporters of George Bush in his presidential
contest against Michael Dukakis (Diamond and Bates, 1992; Jamieson,
1992). The spot accused Dukakis of being ‘soft’ on crime during his tenure
as governor of Massachusetts, citing the release on weekend leave of
convicted murderer Willie Horton. Horton, the ad informed viewers, took
the opportunity of his break from jail to sexually assault someone else.
Dukakis’s liberal approach to law and order in Massachusetts became a
negative, used against him with what most observers of the 1988 campaign
considered to be devastating effect.

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