NYTimes.com Article: Scary Ads Take Campaign to a Grim New Level

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Scary Ads Take Campaign to a Grim New Level

October 17, 2004
 By JIM RUTENBERG





SANTA FE, Oct. 16 - In one of President Bush's latest
advertisements, a clock ticks menacingly as a young mother
pulls a quart of milk out of a refrigerator in slow motion,
a young father loads toddlers into a minivan and an
announcer intones ominously "weakness invites those who
would do us harm."

In one of Mr. Kerry's recent commercials, a man shoots a
machine gun into the air, a car bursts into a huge orange
fireball and a group of Iraqi men carry what appears to be
an injured person on a stretcher as an announcer says, "Now
Americans are being kidnapped, held hostage - even
beheaded."

In the final days before the election, the campaigns and
the outside groups supporting them are taking an already
unusually intense and confrontational advertising war into
grim new territory, with some of the most vivid and
evocative images and messages seen in presidential
commercials in a generation, political analysts and
historians say.

At work, they say, are direct appeals to fear, with Mr.
Bush's campaign and supportive groups making a case that a
vote for Mr. Kerry is a vote for insecurity at home, and
liberal groups and Mr. Kerry using commercials to make the
case that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy has caused needless deaths
that will continue if he stays in office.

"I'm not sure we've really seen a campaign with so many
explicit plays to emotion," said Darrell M. West, a
professor of political science at Brown University. "What
we're seeing this year are direct plays to fear and
anxiety."

Local races are following suit. Here in Santa Fe, State
Senator Richard M. Romero, a Democrat running to unseat
Representative Heather A. Wilson, a Republican, has a
commercial showing Osama bin Laden's face and an airplane
taking off as an announcer criticizes her for voting
against required air cargo inspections for passenger
planes, "a favor to terrorists."

The national political advertising war shattered spending
records almost as soon as the general election campaign
began. But in these last weeks, the level of spending has
exceeded even the most bullish estimates, in part because
of new campaign finance laws that seem to have flooded the
system with more money.

The presidential commercials continue to hit a range of
issues. And as Election Day nears, they are increasingly
provocative and hard-hitting no matter the subject, from
Mr. Bush asserting in a commercial that Mr. Kerry is
proposing a government takeover of health care (widely
judged to be a gross exaggeration by nonpartisan analysts
and journalists), to Mr. Kerry's recent advertisement in
which a female announcer says brightly, "There are many
reasons to be hopeful about America's future," before
delivering the punch line, "and one of them is that
Election Day is coming."

"Looking back at the last three weeks of 2000, there was
nothing like what's on now," said Evan Tracey, chief
operating officer of T.N.S.M.I. / Campaign Media Analysis
Group. " 'Al Gore's going to bust the deficit' was the
strongest thing hurled out there. The level of discourse in
this thing is wild."

It is the advertisements that deal with terrorism and the
war in Iraq that go the farthest in pushing the boundaries
of emotion and would have been almost unimaginable in 2000.
Some of the most blistering and graphic spots have come
from outside groups.

An advertisement from the veterans group, Operation Truth,
has a young soldier angrily holding forth the stub of his
right arm, blown to pieces by a grenade and recounting how
he went to Iraq wrongly believing Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction.

In a commercial created by family members who lost loved
ones in the Iraq war called Real Voices, which the Moveon
political action committee paid to run in several
battleground states through Friday, Cindy Sheehan, the
mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, recounts the unbearable
pain of losing her son and all but implicates the president
in his death.

A recent commercial from the voter fund of a new Republican
group, Progress for America, showed pictures of Osama bin
Laden and a phalanx of masked terrorists as an announcer
says, "These people want to kill us," and asks, "Would you
trust Kerry against these fanatic killers?" In Wisconsin,
Tim Michels, a Republican running against Senator Russell
D. Feingold has an advertisement that shows a mustachioed
character casing a nuclear power plant and a moving train
through binoculars. The spot criticizes Mr. Feingold for
failing to vote for the Patriot Act.

"In terms of hyperbole and the level of fear that's being
evoked, the closest comparison is 1964," said David
Schwartz, co-curator of The Living Room Candidate
(livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us), an online exhibition
of presidential campaign advertisements dating back to 1952
and sponsored by the American Museum of the Moving Image in
New York. "That was the year of the daisy ad, which had a
very strong formulation that if you vote for the other guy,
the world will come to an end."

The "daisy ad" to which he referred , was one by President
Lyndon B. Johnson in his campaign against Barry Goldwater
in which a little girl was shown picking the pedals off of
a daisy before the screen was overwhelmed by a nuclear
explosion and then a mushroom cloud and Mr. Johnson
declared, "These are the stakes."

Strategists for both sides said a wide array of factors had
led them to push the limits, apparently without so far
paying any negative price among voters, who seem unusually
open to campaign messages in an election year when interest
is running so high.

Not only are the issues involved in this election unlike
any the nation has seen since the Vietnam and the cold
wars, but, some of these strategists say, extreme measures
are called for when the television environment is so
cluttered with advertising and voter opinion is so
stubbornly held.

"To the extent that it's more incendiary than ever, it's
because people are more dug in," said Steve McMahon, a
Democratic political advertising strategist now working for
a liberal group, the Media Fund. "I've never seen a
presidential race this polarized. It's a little like trying
to break through solid rock. You've got to use really
strong dynamite to get in there."

Mr. McMahon said he was speaking in his capacity as a
freelance Democratic strategist, not for the Media Fund,
for which he has produced an advertisement highlighting
connections between Mr. Bush and the "corrupt" Saudi
Arabian royal family and goes on to point out that 15 of
the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept, 11 attacks were from
Saudi Arabia.

Aides to Mr. Bush contended that the Democratic commercials
were not having much of an affect with voters, calling them
"defeatist" and overly negative about the state of progress
in Iraq.

"I think they're telegraphing a pre-9/11 view of the war on
terror,'' said Nicolle Devenish, a spokeswoman for Mr.
Bush. "These Democratic images and efforts to attack the
war on terror are going to backfire.''

Democrats and aides to Mr. Kerry argue that they are not
being defeatist, just pointing out problems in Iraq and
asserting that Mr. Kerry will find a solution. "We say, we
can be safer," said Stephanie Cutter, a spokeswoman for Mr.
Kerry. "They're trying to scare people into electing George
Bush - it's the politics of fear."

What both sides agree upon is if the level of advertising
spending was impressive in the spring, it is downright
astounding in these final days of the campaign.

A few weeks ago, the candidates, their parties and outside
groups were spending a combined $25 million on a heavy
7-to-10 day period. From Oct. 7 to Oct. 17 they were to
spend up to $40 million, according to one Republican
estimate.

The campaigns, the parties and outside groups will have
spent about $500 million by Election Day, more than twice
that of 2000, according to projections by the Campaign
Media Analysis Group, a media monitoring service.

Here in Santa Fe, viewers saw 4,644 presidential campaign
spots between Sept. 24 and Oct. 7, according to a new study
by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project and
Nielsen Monitor Plus, which lists the Albuquerque
television market that envelops this town as the nation's
second-most saturated with political commercials as of Oct.
7. The area most saturated with political advertising was
Miami.

"You have to wonder," Mr. Tracey said. "If this is where we
are now, fast forward ahead four years, where can we go?
They're going to have to start buying time on HBO."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/politics/campaign/17ads.html? 
ex=1098951481&ei=1&en=d3a6cbff48d633c4


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