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C H A P T E R O N E Campaign Advertising The Whipping Boy of American Politics A MERICAN-STYLE DEMOCRACY may or may not ultimately take root in Iraq, but Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Mike Luckovich has a point in any case, and it’s an important one: For most people, the idea of exporting to an emerging democracy the kind of campaign ads Americans have come to know—and supposedly loathe—is a joke (see cartoon on page 2). The notion that American-style campaign advertising might find a place in a democratic Iraq is simply laughable. Campaign advertising, according to conventional wisdom, is a corrupted form of democratic discourse—something we would be better off without, and something which we need to be on guard against. In the election of 2004, when all was said and aired, more than three million political spots for candidates up and down the ballot had been broadcast in the nation’s 210 media markets.1 More than $800 million was spent on television advertising in the race for the White House alone, more than in any presidential campaign in history (Seelye 2004). In all, the presidential candidates and their party and interest group allies broadcast more than one million ads in the 2004 election, well more than twice the number aired four years earlier. What kind of impact did this campaign advertising have when it came to what citizens thought and knew and how they acted during the course of an election campaign? What difference did the disparate patterns of advertising in 2000 and 2004 make? Did people know more or less about the candidates and their positions as a result of how many ads—or which types of ads—they saw? Did they feel more or less connected to the campaign and the political system in general? And were they more or less likely to vote on Election Day as a result of what they saw? Our objective in this book is to provide answers to these types of questions , making sense of campaign advertising using data from the 2000 and 2004 2 C H A P T E R O N E By permission of Mike Luckovich and Creators Syndicate, Inc. elections, and, in the process, evaluating campaign advertising in the larger context of democratic citizenship. To be clear, this book is not about how campaign advertisinginfluencesvoters’opinionsofcandidatesortheoutcomesofelections. It’s about how campaign advertising affects citizens’ grasp of the alternatives in a campaign, their evaluation of the electoral process, and their inclination to participate in it. Damned Spot! Nobody, it seems, has a kind word to say about the thirty-second spot. Television advertising is a favorite whipping boy of American politics. Campaign ads, according to their many critics, are misleading, manipulative, and mean-spirited. The typical campaign ad—nasty, brutish, and short—is thought to produce citizens who are alienated, poorly informed, and disengaged from the political process. “Campaign ads dumb down the terms of political debate and reduce nuanced policy positions to buzzwords and slogans,” complains a recent critic (Macek 2004). Particular scorn is reserved for negative or “attack” ads, which are thought to debase politics, degrade democratic citizenship, and turn off potential voters.2 Many of these suspicions are enshrined in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), the most recent effort to reform the federal campaign finance system . The legislation, signed into law in 2002 and upheld in 2003 by the Supreme Court, requires candidates for federal office to “stand by their ads,” stating explicitly that they approve the ad’s message (just as Luckovich’s Sheik Abu does). Yet no such disclaimer is required for other campaign communications such as print ads or political mail.3 BCRA’s other main provisions were also driven by concerns about television advertising. The law bans parties from raising soft money (contributions not C A M PA I G N A D V E R T I S I N G 3 restricted by source or amount) and prohibits interest groups funded by corporate or union money from airing any television ad mentioning a candidate for federal office within sixty days of a general election (and thirty days of a primary) unless the spot is paid for with regulated “hard money.” BCRA says nothing about the content of direct mail or newspaper advertisements. So there would seem to be something wrong, something suspect, something inherently troubling about TV political advertising, which Madison Avenue pioneer David Ogilvy once called...

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