TV and the Pursuit of the Oval Office

Milestones in Presidential Campaigns (when Television Changed Everything)

Political campaigns have always been about stirring voter enthusiasm.

Getting supporters to the polls on election day. Extolling your virtues.

Slamming your opponent.

With television, these pursuits reached new heights, driven by the intimate and pervasive nature of the medium. Most important, when handled right, television let politicians appeal directly to voters without being filtered by any intermediary.

Some key moments in that history.

In 1952, Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson used TV in the manner long familiar to radio listeners: He bought time in large blocks, so he could deliver full-length campaign speeches. Republicans adopted a radical notion – using Madison Avenue tactics to "sell" their candidate (General Dwight Eisenhower) like any other product, with carefully produced 30 or 60 second commercials. The ads for Eisenhower (nicknamed "Ike") were short, snappy and upbeat, and often relied on catchy animation. Like ads for household products, one of the more effective Eisenhower spots relentlessly repeated the refrain: "I like Ike. You like Ike. Everybody likes Ike – for President." From this point on, the Madison Ave. approach dominated political promotion on TV.

Later that same campaign, Senator Richard Nixon faced the real prospect of being dropped from the vice presidential slot on the Republican ticket because of negative publicity surrounding charges that he had received a series of improper donations from a group of supporters. The Republicans, anxious to return to power after 20 years and wary of the trouble Nixon’s story was causing for Eisenhower, bought television time and gave Nixon one chance to put the matter behind him. He succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, delivering a heart-tugging confessional that evoked a sympathetic and supportive response from viewers. The speech got its name from Nixon’s reference to a dog named Checkers, which he confessed was a campaign gift that he had received and that he intended to keep for his kids. Nixon’s ability to go "over the head" of the angry party bosses and win over the public by a direct appeal was a wake-up call to politicians nationwide, who could no longer take the new TV medium for granted.

For the first time ever, voters could see the respective nominees of the two major parties live, facing each other during the campaign. That had never happened before in U.S. history, even before television. The general consensus was that Nixon equaled or even beat Kennedy among radio listeners but TV viewers gave the nod to the telegenic, cooler Kennedy. From then on, image was just as important as (if not more than) content in political uses of TV. The sense that the debates tilted the close election away from Nixon meant that subsequent presidential campaigns avoided debates for the next sixteen years (until Gerald Ford faced Jimmy Carter in 1976), but since then they have become an established part of the campaign process.

The political differences between incumbent Democrat Lyndon Johnson and insurgent Republican Barry Goldwater were wider than in any presidential race in almost 30 years. Johnson’s campaign sought to portray Goldwater as a dangerous radical. The most telling effort in that regard was a deceptively simple TV ad that showed a cute little girl gathering daisies and counting to herself as she picked the petals. Her counting blended with and was replaced by the countdown to an atomic bomb explosion. At detonation, the fiery blast replaced the little girl on the screen. An announcer then urged viewers to vote for Johnson on election day, saying that "the stakes are too high for you to stay at home." The unmistakable message was that voting for Goldwater apparently would lead to nuclear disaster. Officially, the commercial aired only once before it was pulled, but it caused a stir that kept it in the public’s mind as part of subsequent news reports. This ad symbolized the start of the era of "negative" ads that sought more to demonize the opponent than to support the featured candidate.

Still stinging from his 1960 debate loss, Nixon kept total control of his

television appearances as much as possible when he ran again eight years later. He refused to participate in any television debates with his opponent (Hubert Humphrey), instead presenting a series of regional Q&A sessions "with the voters." Only, instead of being truly spontaneous give and takes, these sessions were carefully controlled from beginning to end (the campaign hired the host and pre-screened and pre-selected the citizen questioners). The point was that a presidential candidate’s appearances on TV had become simply too important to leave to "chance." They now had to be virtually scripted, to make sure the candidate kept "on message."

Democrat Bill Clinton presented himself as a fresh voice in his 1992 campaign for the presidency, the first of the "baby boomer" generation raised on TV to seek the highest office in the land. Clinton set himself apart form the pre-packaged "older" candidates by, whenever possible, by-passing the traditional news outlets and appearing on entertainment shows such as those hosted by Arsenio Hall and Oprah Winfrey. Clinton took advantage of his ease in front of the camera and aggressively packaged himself as a television-friendly personality, connecting with voters "turned off" by the formality and seriousness of traditional political discourse on TV. His most memorable appearance was on Hall’s late-night show (aimed at a "hip" audience), where the candidate donned dark shades and wailed Elvis Presley’s "Heartbreak Hotel" on the saxophone. The message this sent to baby boomers was clear: He was one of "us."

Before any votes had been cast in the 2004 Democratic presidential race, maverick former Vermont Governor Howard Dean had been anointed by the press as front-runner. However, when actual voters first had their say, in the January Iowa caucuses, Dean came in a surprisingly weak third. Pundits felt that Dean’s reputation for shooting from the hip and being somewhat abrasive troubled Democratic voters who were anxious to find a steady candidate who could defeat George W. Bush in the fall. At Dean’s "concession" speech in Iowa (on Martin Luther King Day), he concluded his high-octane

exhortation to his followers by listing all the other states where he would continue to campaign, concluding with a bizarre and elongated yell. Caught on video, the clip of Dean’s outburst was repeated endlessly in the non-stop multi-channel 24/7 echo chamber of cable TV news, and became the easy target of late-night TV comics. Within days, Dean’s national poll numbers began to drop and, within a month, he pulled out of the race. The event symbolized how the hungry appetite of all-day cable news could make a national event out of an otherwise innocuous incident, and perfectly showed how TV could define a candidate to large segments of the nation by one "symbolic" gesture.

Copyright 2004 by Walter J. Podrazik and Harry Castleman