Sometimes a campaign just drops a big ol' birthday present in its opponent's lap. In 1988, inspired by a photo op involving Margaret Thatcher and a Challenger tank, Dukakis visited a Michigan General Dynamic plant, strapped on a helmet, and tooled around the site for a while in an M1 Abrams. The idea was that he would look all manly and shit and lay waste to the by-then traditional Republican attacks on Democrats as not being macho enough to defend this great land, but he was widely accused of looking like Snoopy, and the footage of the tank barreling awkwardly about the grassy space with its turret spinning looked like an outtake from the strangest DUI arrest in the history of Cops. Greg Stevens, who produced this ad for the Bush campaign — presumably after seeing the footage on the news and picking himself up off the floor when his laughing fit had subsided — had only to tape together the choicest bits and tack on a deep-voiced narration listing all the reasons Dukakis was "soft" on defense. The "serious" voice-over is a beard for the real message of the ad, which is, of course, "Sweet mother of mercy, get a load of Governor Douchebag driving a tank!"
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9. "Surgeon", 1996
This ad for Bill Clinton's re-election is an especially adorable example of a time-honored practice: using a bunch of cute kids to suggest that your opponent is Satan himself. "I know, I know," the ad says in the softest tone imaginable, "you don't really mind if nobody ever has the funding to find a cure for cancer — if you felt differently, you wouldn't be a Republican. All we ask is that you man up and look little Billy here right in his starry-eyed kisser and tell him yourself that you want to gut the education bill, and that instead of going to college, he's going to be spending his life asking people, 'You want to super-size that?' Go ahead, tell him!" The ad doubles as an effective attempt to destroy an opponent by linking him, as if by marriage, to a universally despised figure whom the opponent himself wouldn't cross the street to puke on. It must have been a banner day for Bob Dole when he woke up one day in 1996 and discovered that his first name was now "Gingrich." Dole himself had actually made great strides in his efforts to appear halfway human and even likable since the day when, twenty years earlier, as Gerald Ford's running mate, he'd snickered into the camera and calculated the number of lives lost to "Democrat wars." But as soon as the Clinton campaign turned him into "Gingrich-Dole", joining him at the hip to a fellow Republican whom Dole himself probably would have strangled if only he could have located his neck, he was done.
8. "Wassup 2008", 2008
This independently produced Obama ad is perhaps the most memorable, and certainly the funniest, spot anyone has come up with for the current election cycle. By using a much-loved eight-year-old beer commercial as its base, it pulls off a real comic coup while at the same time triggering viewers' memory synapses to make them feel, yes, things were a lot better eight years ago. And by connecting Obama to black-identified popular culture of the most mainstream kind, it humanizes him, and introduces just a trace of funk to his image, but in a way that only the most uptight racist bastard could object to.
7. "Nancy Reagan", 1980
When Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980, his handlers were intent on protecting his affable, aw-shucks image. They didn't want to risk it by having him personally respond to Carter's insinuations that he was, in actuality, a mean old thing whose idea of a fun night out would be to set fire to the orphanage and use a scope rifle to pick off any survivors. So instead, they unleashed Nancy Reagan to stick her disapproving head into America's living rooms and give us all a good tongue-lashing. She bawls Carter out for talking trash about her husband — "He is not a warmonger. He is not a man who is going to throw the elderly out on the street and cut out their Social Security." — and then, in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation, suggests that if Carter is so hard up for things to talk about, why doesn't he explain "why the inflation is as high as it is," and the thinking behind his "vaciliating, weak foreign policy." The ad, sprung on an unsuspecting world unused to seeing candidates' wives fight their battles for them, was smartly calculated to leave anti-Reagan viewers bobbing and weaving. It tells you everything you need to know about how the Reagans came to be the most effective good-cop, bad-cop act in American politics.
6. "The Bear", 1984
This commercial for Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign is something of a wonder. It manages to play up the Gipper's strong-against-the-Soviets image without actually invoking images of weaponry or soldiers or scary Russians, all of which had a tendency to muddy the old boy's grandfatherly appeal. My own favorite part of it, which nobody else remembers, is the disclaimer at the very end: "...If there is a bear." Given the fact that this part is read over a final image of a man staring right at the big hairy brown son of a bunch, it gave the whole enterprise, when encountered on late-night TV (perhaps after having had a few beers), a tenor more surreal than most Twilight Zone re-runs. Nostalgic reactionary George W. Bush just couldn't resist doing his own version of it, "Wolves", during his own re-election campaign in 2004.
