Page 127 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

with appropriate verbal accompaniments, become powerful
signifiers of authority 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 character-
istics (other than, of course, the fact that Johnson was not
Goldwater). While, as Kathleen Jamieson noted earlier, ‘simplifi-
cation, 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

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