Everyone complains about negative TV campaign ads, but I LOVE THEM!!! I think they are hilarious! They make sure to pick out the most ridiculous photo of the opponent, play evil music in the background, while a deep voiced announcer says:
"Mike Jones says he’s for New Jersey seniors. So why did he put his 80 year old father in a home where there were allegations of elder abuse?
Mike Jones.
WRONG for New Jersey."
Then they play piano music, and there you see the guy who paid for the ad, in dockers and a dress shirt, walking with his kids and talking to construction workers.
What’s your favorite negative ad? The ones Bush used on Clinton in '92 were some whoppers.
The most negative campaign ad which I recall was when I was a child living in Atlanta. Lester Maddux was running for Governor, and one of his adds called for “shipping Africans back to Africa”*. A few years later, in a subsequent campaign, he was featured in a bow tie riding his old fashioned bicycle backwards. I guess the consultants must have thought he came across as a bit harsh in the earlier ads. :rolleyes:
If you only want someone trying to portray someone else, then I would guess the Willie Horton ad was pretty bad.
*As noted I was young at the time, so this is probably not a direct quote but does convey the message which came across.
The best negative ad was one that ran for only a day or two before the 1986 PA gubernatorial election.
Bob Casey, the former Auditor General whose gubernatorial aspirations were summed up in the phrase “the three-time loss from Holy Cross” was running against Bill Scranton, the lieutenant governor under two-term incumbent Dick Thornburgh. Bill was young (in his late 30s or early 40s). He had somewhat of a reputation as a young buck in the Republican party and was known as a sort of shoot-from-the-lip kind of guy. In one interview during the campaign, he let slip that he practiced Transcendental Meditation.
Cut to the ad: Some droll voiceover about Bill Scranton and his general wackiness, then a gong sounds. Fade in on a pic of Bill Scranton retouched to show him sitting in a lotus position with a crown of flowers on his head, surrounded by clouds of incense as plunky sitar music plays in the background. The announcer intones a line to the effect of, “Do you want this guy to run Pennsylvania?” and fade to black.
Casey served as governor of the Commonwealth until 1994.
The commerical was dreamed up by an obscure campaign consultant named James Carville. Wonder whatever happened to him?
My all-time favorite campaign commerical is Jerry Springer’s (yes, that Jerry Springer) Ohio gubernatorial commercial from the early '80s where he deals with the issue of his visiting hookers. He was found out because he paid one lady of the evening with a check. :eek:
“I spent some time with a woman I shouldn’t have. And I paid her with a check. I wish I hadn’t done that.”
You don’t say.
Zap!
Who needs to cook up a nice juicy scandal before he runs for governor. Hey Geobabe, whatcha doin’ this weekend?
I’ve never seen the Casey-Scranton commerical, but that and the Goldwater commercial are all time classics.
There’s another one in PA (this is a nasty state) during the Arelen Specter-Lynn Yeakel 1992 Senate race where Specter’s people played a video of Yeakel answering a question acting like a completely confused ditz.
ZAP!!!
I love the 1988 Bush commerical showing Mike Dukakis looking like a total goof in a helmet in a tank.
I have a few. The first were two ads that ran just before the 2000 New York primary, that said that John McCain hates trees and wants people to get breast cancer, created by “Republicans for Clean Air”, which was a front organization for Sam Wiley, a Dallas businessman and Bush backer.
The third ad is running right now, by Jerry Kilgore, candidate for Va. Attorney General, saying that he put drug dealers behind bars while his opponent, Donald McEachin, never prosecuted a single drug dealer. It also took McEachin 5 times before he backed a law protecting Virginia’s families, according to the ad.
A third I only know about from hearsay, heard from a friend in Michigan. George Romney was governor of Michigan, until he resigned to run for President in 1968, and pretty well liked. Recently, his son’s ex-wife ran against Sen. Carl Levin for his senate seat. According to my friend, who was there for the campaign, one of the Democratic talking points was, “Rita Rommney isn’t even a real Rommney”, which I just thought was amusing. For her part, she always ended her negative ads against him, “Carl Levin-too liberal for too long.”
That’s the infamous “Daisy” ad. It starts with a young girl picking daisies in a field, counting down the petals. The camera zooms in on the girl, then cuts away to a nuclear explosion. Over the exposion, a narrator reads “These are the stakes: 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. Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay at home.”
It only ran once, but it’s the only ad people still remember from the 1964 race, and one of the few political ads from any race that people still remember vividly.
It is the negative ad by which all other negative ads must be measured. Willie Horton’s got nothin’ on the Daisy ad.
You can see the Daisy ad, and other political ads, including the 1988 Bush “revolving prison door” ad (not the Willie Horton ad, which wasn’t actually promulgated by the Bush campaign per se, but by non-afilliated Bush supporters) and a 1980 Reagan ad suggesting the Ayatollah prefers Carter (paid for by “Democrats for Reagan” :eek: ), here:
I don’t remember any actual facts of this anecdote, because I’m extremely weak on history; but didn’t an old-time politician cream his opposition by going around to small towns and telling people “My opponent’s sister is an admitted thespian and his brother practices spelunking, and is rumored to be bilingual.” or something hilarious like that? This obviously predates television by quite a bit, and might have involved someone who eventually became president.
(Just bursting with hard facts and detail today, aren’t I?)
I remember a Buchanan commercial where a fat guy (Buchanan?) is eating supper. He starts choking and fumbles his way to the phone. He dials 911 but can’t get anyone who speaks English, so he dies. Then it cuts to an ominous black screen as a narrator ominously explains that immigration has gone too far. Then it cuts back to the dead guy on the floor, where he’s being sniffed by his dog.
My favorite ad featured a guy doing flips (with quick-reverse tape too) while a voice-over explains the opponent’s flip-flopping on positions for political expediency. Probably some Jersey race.
The “Daisy” ad is the pinnacle of negative, as has been described.
I believe at the time that Johnson had an ad that ended “In your heart, you know he’s right.” The Johnson camp then amended that in reference to Goldwater and it became “In your heart, you know he might.”
Who can forget (the senior) Bush’s commercial against Michael Dukakis, where Dukakis is poking his head out of a tank? It made him look like a supreme doofus.
This is outside the bounds of the OP, but one of the best (in the sense of “most effective”) examples of negative campaigning was the Nixon crew’s absolute destruction of Edmund Muskie in 1972. The highlight was, of course, the anonymous letter in the conservative Manchester Union, two weeks before the New Hampshire primary, accusing Muskie of using the term “Canuck” in a derogatory manner to describe French Canadians. This, of course, led to Muskie’s speech in the snow in New Hampshire in which he appeared to be crying, and he was driven out of the race. Compared to that, the Nixon campaign against McGovern looked like a sack race.
Yep. And Bush was also running the “Willie Horton” ad, showing “convicts” walking through a revolving door, talking about Dukakis’ weekend furlow program.
I think that Clinton had a great ad in 92 against Bush. It had black and white pictures of a wasteland and a voice ominously intoning about the “worst economy in fifty years”. It was great.
The dem candidate for attorney general in virginia has a great one that just came out. It’s got a black and white video of his opponent walking in slow motion. Its got a gun pointed at the screen because his opponent is against some gun control measure and then a shot of a woman getting a mug shot because of her right to choose. Its the best I’ve seen this year.
There was a great one that I don’t think was ever aired for the 2000 presidential race. I saw it on an MSNBC special about focus groups. It had the 92 speech by Gore about how he promised his dying sister that he would fight tobacco for the rest of his life and then footage from his 1988 campaign bragging to some tobacco farmers about how he grew up on a tobacco farm and ends with a slow motion shot of Gore saying something to the effect of “I’ve planted it, I’ve cut it, I’ve hoed it”. It was hilarious.
On the other end of the spectrum there is a pathetic ad by the democrat candidate for governor in Va this year about what a horrible, rotten guy his opponent is because he is being negative. He whines like a little girl, he should take lessons from the attorney general candidate.
Warner is going to whine himself right into the Governor’s Mansion on Tuesday. I’d rather listen to him whine than live under Earley’s fundamentalism. But I digress…
