As a rule, ad campaigns aimed at tackling a vice president aren't usually considered worth the trouble, but in 1968, Richard Nixon introduced America to the male, Greek Sarah Palin of his time: Spiro Agnew, a butt-stupid and gleefully crooked Maryland governor whose job was to hurl raw meat to the bigots and morons who wanted to hear the kind of vicious attacks on leftist protesters and "eggheads" — that was 1968 for "elitists" — that Nixon actually regarded as beneath his dignity as a rabble-rouser. This direct, to-the-point ad is a classic expression of pure dismay that anyone would ask you to even consider a candidate so patently unfit for the office Agnew was seeking.
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4. "Eisenhower Answers America", 1952
This series of spots, in which Ike addresses the questions on the minds of average voters, is about as substantive as the commercials made for the 1952 race ever got, even though the General never got to actually make the acquaintance of the good people whose problems he seemed so interested in. He was filmed giving all his answers in one pop, reading off such lines as, "Yes, my Mamie gets on me about high prices!" After Ike was done for the day, he went home for a leisurely afternoon of listening to Mamie bitch at him about high prices, and a group of regular-looking folks were trooped in to be filmed reciting their questions to an open space. In most of the ads, Ike was all smiling jes'-folks charm no matter what horrors he was decrying, but interestingly, he adopted a stern, serious mien in the one above, where his interlocutor is a black man. We may never know whether Ike was told to seem serious in this one in anticipation of whom he'd be sharing the spot with, or if he was just grumpy after a long day's work and this was the one that was thought to go best with the black guy. But clearly somebody decided it would make sense for Ike not to smile while contemplating the situation of the American Negro. (Amusingly, John Kennedy would maintain a similar level of seriousness when he made his own version of this ad, in which the concerned black man was none other than Harry Belafonte.)
3. "Convention", 1968
The trippiest major campaign ad of the late 1960s came, surprisingly, from Richard Nixon's camp. It opens with footage of Hubert Humphrey and the psychedelic nightmare that was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, so that it at first seems to be a slightly misconceived ad from the Democrats. Then war, violent protest, poverty and assorted miseries take over the screen while the Hump's constipated-potato face begins to gyrate in the frame like a yo-yo. The ad would premiere, a week before the election, during Laugh-In, the busy, hyper-edited comedy hour that was network TV's answer to the groovy decade. NBC was reportedly deluged with complaints from viewers who mistakenly thought that the ad was part of the show.
2. "Prouder, Stronger, Better (Morning in America)", 1984
In the 1984 campaign, Walter Mondale tried to tar Ronald Reagan as a scary, threatening, unstable figure through a series of commercials filled with images of guerrilla fighters, nuclear missiles and reminders that Reagan had not yet met any of the leaders of the Soviet Union during his watch as leader of the free world. But by the time those ads hit the air, Reagan had already set the tone of the 1984 race with a series of commercials that had begun running early in the year, before Reagan even had an opponent in the primaries. While images of newspaper boys, newlyweds and happy dads off to work unfurled across the screen, the familiar, folksy-yet-authoritative voice of ad man Hal Raney assured us that all this bounty was the direct result of Reagan's first years in office: "It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?" By the end of the year, it was clear that Reagan's team had better understood how images worked in the new, complacent yuppie era: people wanted to be reassured, not told that they had cause to worry, and they rather resented Mondale for trying to give them something to worry about. These commercials may be the best evidence in support of the culture critic Tom Carson's assertion that, in the '80s, it looked as if the '60s and '70s had just been the raw materials for building "a bigger and better '50s."
1. "Peace Little Girl (Daisy)", 1964
This ad, created by Tony Schwartz of the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency for Lyndon Johnson's re-election campaign, may have done more than any other in history to raise the stakes in modern political advertising. It opens simply enough, with an adorable little snookums in a field, picking the petals off a black-eyed susan (not a daisy, as was widely reported — truly, these guys had no shame) and counting, "One... two... three... four... five... seven... six... six... eight..." Then, just when you think that the commercial is a searing indictment of our educational system and the pitiful math skills of our young, an adult voice delivers a countdown, and the camera zooms in on the girl's eye just as the world goes up in a mushroom cloud. At this point Johnson badly misquotes W. H. Auden. ("To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.")
Designed to nail Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater, with an image as a scary warmonger who couldn't be trusted not to set off World War III, the ad was run by the campaign only on a single momentous occasion: on September 7, 1964, on NBC, during a Monday night broadcast of the forgotten 1951 movie David and Bathsheba. Then, when the ad set off all kinds of hell, the campaign did something very sly: they made a big show of pulling it from future broadcasts, knowing full well that the TV networks would cover the "controversy" by airing it on their news shows, where it would be seen by anyone who'd missed it the first time but heard about it since. And for free. This routine has since become a standard ploy, though it's been a while since any ad company made even a token show of regret. The ad itself has since been imitated and parodied by everyone from The Simpsons to Moveon.org.
