This one's not complicated, folks. The big knock against John Kerry was that he was a "flip-flopper", in sharp contrast to his opponent, a "decider" so stubborn in his devotion to even his most disastrous views that he wouldn't backslide on his opposition to having a fire extinguisher in the Oval Office if his hair caught on fire. And John Kerry liked to windsurf, the elitist French-faced bastard. When you windsurf, sometimes you go in one direction and sometimes you go in the other. Using footage of the windsurfing John Kerry demonstrating this very principle (to the accompaniment of that proven knee-slapper "The Blue Danube Waltz"), Bush adman Mark McKinnon composed an iconic image of John Kerry as someone trying to go in all directions at once. Of course, John Kerry is also said to enjoy a good game of football from time to time, and in football, one also finds oneself running first in one direction, and then in the other. But there was never any chance that McKinnon would make a version of this ad showing Kerry on the gridiron, because the real idea here was that nobody was going to vote for Kerry with a straight face after they'd seen his legs in shorts.
promotion
14. "Bio", 1976
13. "Journey", 1992
The short-bio form is catnip to candidates with hardscrabble backgrounds, preferably in a rural setting, with a support network of family members to contribute simple, homespun humor. (Rosalynn Carter: "People ask me every day, how can you stand for your husband to be in politics, and everybody know everything you do. And I just tell them that we were born and raised, and still live, in Plains, Georgia, it has a population of 683, and everybody has always known everything we did!") The Carter ad dates from a post-Watergate election when an appearance of truthfulness cut more ice than such issues as experience. In its insistence on the folksy things in life, you can see what made Carter appealing as a candidate, and more than a hint of what, once he was installed in the Oval Office, made him strike many as a lightweight, in way over his head (and yoked by blood to the cast of Hee Haw, for good measure).
The Bill Clinton ad was adapted from The Man from Hope, the longer filmed profile that played to great applause at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. In some ways, it brings the short history of political advertising full circle, by linking Clinton to John Kennedy, the first real TV-age president. It's also instructive to compare Clinton's ready-for-prime-time manner and delivery to the deer-in-the-headlights looks and wooden speech patterns of the politicians who cut commercials just forty years earlier. This may be a testament to Clinton's slickness, but it may also say something about a nation where much of the populace spends the work day silently rehearsing what they someday hope to say to Oprah.
12. "Really", 2000
In this anti-Gore spot, an unseen woman who, from the sound of it, can't look at the vice-president without thinking of her scumbag ex-husband, plays Mystery Science Theater 3000 with news footage of Gore on TV, sneering at him in a thickly sarcastic tone of contempt that really leaves a stain on the wall. "Re-inventing himself on television again," she gurgles, as if about to choke on the absurdity of it all, "like I'm not gonna notice!" Like a lot of attacks on Gore, the charges here levied include his "taking credit for things he didn't even do." And like a lot of those attacks, it singles out as an example Gore's taking credit for things he did do, such as the fact that, as the principal author of and spearheading force behind the Senate bill that ultimately led to the creation of the World Wide Web, he could rightly claim to having "taken the initiative in creating the Internet."
Misrepresenting an opponent's accomplishments was nothing new, of course. What made this ad so much a part of its time, and made it so much nastier than you could guess at from simply reading a description of it or examining the written text, was the sheer, ugly power of the voice-over, which could make you feel stupid for not thinking of Gore as a mealy-mouthed charlatan even if the accompanying footage showed him boasting of being a carbon-based life form. The whole point of the ad is not to attack Gore's positions or even his character, but to direct such a heavy dose of incredulous revulsion in the direction of this thing called "Al Gore" that susceptible viewers will feel like boobs if they ever give Gore the benefit of the doubt about anything at all. Consequently, it deserves to be regarded as the first real attack ad of the Fox News era.
11. "Willie Horton", 1988
You might think that the ugliest, most disgusting attack ads are created when two candidates with deeply held beliefs face off against each other in a heated contest for America's soul. Surprise! The most infamous case of a presidential campaign scraping bottom came in 1988, when George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, a pair of non-ideological career politicians and dullards — two guys who, in terms of temperament and probably also in terms of what they actually believed when neither was trying to appeal to a base of true believers they secretly regarded as nuts, had a lot in common — took it upon themselves to help voters tell them apart, perhaps by painting the other fellow as someone who likes to spring black rapists from prison and keep the car warm for them while they're terrorizing the countryside.
We have Al Gore to thank for first bringing the Massachusetts prison furlough program to the attention of Republican spinmeisters. Gore, who had read in a Wall Street Journal editorial that criminals had taken the program as an opportunity to run amok, used it to attack Dukakis in a debate during the Democratic primaries. Figuring there might be something there, Bush campaign trolls Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater started digging and decided that William Horton (as he was known before Ailes determined that "Willie" was a better fit for the image they were after) was just the mascot they wanted to tie to Dukakis. Horton, a convicted murderer who had raped a woman and pistol-whipped her fiance while on weekend furlough, became the star of an ad, produced by Ailes confederate Larry McCarthy through a Bush-connected PAC. The whole point of the ad was to flash Horton's feral-looking mugshot, described by McCarthy as "every suburban mother's nightmare," on the screen at the end. (Just to play it safe, McCarthy originally submitted the ad to TV stations without the picture of Horton and then added the mugshot after the stations had agreed to run the PG-13 version.)
As if to underline that the Bush campaign wanted to cash in on Horton while keeping the ad at arm's length, Ailes and Atwater also produced an "official" campaign ad, "Revolving Door", which seemed to address the same "issues" the Horton ad supposedly addressed but didn't include a close-up of a scary black man. In an almost touching display of cluelessness, Dukakis responded with his own ad, which proceeded on the assumption that there really was something going on here besides an appeal to racist paranoia. Nobody working for Bush was under similar delusions. "The only question," Ailes told The New York Times, "is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it."
