Page 118 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 97

ADVERTISING
Another negative spot by the Bush side contrasted Dukakis’s declared
‘green’ policy with his record as governor in Boston, where it was alleged he
had allowed the harbour to become polluted.
Successful in 1988 (in so far as he won), Bush’s negatives in the 1992
campaign against Bill Clinton did not prevent the latter from winning. One
ad, for example, highlighted Clinton’s avoidance of the draft in the 1960s,
asking viewers if this was the kind of man they would wish to see as US
Commander-in-Chief. Other ads referred to well-known Clinton lapses, such
as smoking (but not inhaling) marijuana and having extra-marital affairs.
Clinton won nevertheless, the voters apparently regarding such peccadilloes
as irrelevant to his presidential potential, or at the very least outweighed by
what they perceived as Bush’s poor record. This failure suggests that the fears
of some observers as to the impact of negative political advertising on the
democratic process are overstated. Ansolabehere and Iyengar, for example,
state that negative ads ‘suppress voter turnout’, are responsible for ‘record
lows in political participation, and record highs in public cynicism and
alienation’ and ‘thus pose a serious anti-democratic threat’ (1995, p. 9). We
might just as reasonably argue, however, not least on the evidence of two
Clinton election victories, won against ferocious negative advertising from
his opponents, that the effects of such messages are heavily qualified by
other features of the political environment and by the voters’ readiness to
discount them if they do not resonate. The US presidential campaign of 2004
was characterised by negative advertising on behalf of both Republican and
Democratic candidates. Most controversially, in August 2004 a Republican-
supporting group known as ‘Swift Boat Veterans For Truth’ paid for a TV
advertisement claiming that John Kerry’s account of his Vietnam war record,
a key plank of his campaign, was dishonest. The allegation was later dis-
credited, although many observers at the time believed that it contributed to
his defeat. In the 2008 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s ‘3a.m.’ spot, deployed
not against the Republicans but against her Democratic rival Obama, was
controversial in appearing to suggest that he could not be trusted to deal with
an emergency of the type Hillary Clinton had faced (albeit as First Lady)
during her years in the White House and then in the Senate. As described by
Orlando Patterson in the New York Times:

Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business suit at 3 a.m., answer-
ing the [red emergency] phone. The message: our loved ones are in
grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama
presidency would be dangerous – and not just because of his lack of
experience. In my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of
symbolism, says that Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider
within. 7

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