Essay: Campaign Advertising is Destroying America

I wrote this for English class and even took it a step further and created an online petition that you can sign. It is intended for residents of the State of Arizona. Feel free to copy the petition for your own state/local and make changes to improve the representation. Give credit though!

The essay itself can be somewhat boring but the concept of forcing an evolution on Democracy because we are able to is exciting. Concepts and ideas are born everyday, but how often do you see a good one that will work?

If you would like to read the petition click here

 If you would like to read the essay

 

Campaign Advertising is Misrepresenting America

Campaign Advertising and elections have become too much of a celebrity contest and too little about representation. For too long, voters have felt they are voting for the lesser of two evils and not for someone who even partly represents their ideals. Campaign Advertising should have a predetermined start date, prior to that a public forum held where the public puts forth questions they want answered by the candidates. In order to begin a campaign, a candidate should first answer all the public’s questions and, if elected, abide by their answers or be impeached. This law would bring better representation to the people and move our government further away from the theatrical show it is today.

“Fully half of all political commercials emphasize the weaknesses of the opposing candidates rather the strengths of the sponsors.” (Going Negative, 90). The effect of this negative campaigning is polarizing the electorate and slowly drawing us away from our democratic principles. A study of campaign ads during the Bush vs Kerry campaigns of 2004 found that “Advertisements are informative and not manipulative, but they are dividing voters into more and more partisan camps.” This means that less of what the general public wants is being stood up for and more of what party leaders want is being represented. The authors also state “negative advertisements…are shrinking the electorate, especially the non-partisan…As the independents in the middle stop voting, the partisans…dominate electoral politics.” (Going Negative10)

This is definitely a problem for America, a nation partly founded on the invention of ideas. Each camp has its own goals in mind and with big money to back them up, smaller Independent candidates have less of a chance to invigorate and infuse new ways of thinking into our political system. This habit of negative campaigning “alienates people…and actually depresses intentions to participate in the electoral process.” (Going Negative 101)

Without intervention from the public this practice will continue. It is condoned and encouraged by campaign managers and in books written to assist potentials in winning elections. In Winning Politics there is a whole chapter dedicated to attack strategy. The author, William Roper, states the principle that “The average man does not vote for something, but against something…every candidate needs a whipping boy…a target of the voter’s wrath” (Roper 69). He even goes so far as to eloquently paraphrase the practice as a “well-documented expose based on truth”. Are we, as voters, electing representation or are we simply picking sides in a fight?

The nature of these ads creates disparity between parties, divides the electorate, polarizes voters, and even affects voter turnout. This is a direct, domestic threat to the democracy of our society. The ‘bipartisan’ have become a ‘biarchy’. The old saying “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” stands true. Human civilization has existed in many forms and sizes for well over 10,000 years, what does it say about us if we still have corruption and greed in our ‘civil servants’ to this day?

To propose a proper solution, a deeper analysis of the anatomy of an ad is in order. According to Ingrid Reed of the NJBIZ Journal, there are three main types of campaign ads; attack ads, advocacy ads and contrast ads (Reed). Attack ads are too well known for shooting at the opponent. Advocacy ads show the support a candidate has from other officials. Contrast ads highlight the difference between two candidates points of view on a subject. Campaign Ads serve the purpose of selling the Candidate, the product, to the people so when Election Day comes; they purchase or in some cases not vote at all.

Since marketing is a war fought on many fronts, campaign ads, like product advertising, come in different flavors. One of the focuses is to promote integrity in the candidate so individuals feel the candidate is a product they can trust. Many campaign ads attack the integrity of the opponent, called ‘Negative Campaigning’; they aim to win the vote by exposing the negative aspects of the opponent rather than focus on one’s own character.

In Twenty Ads That Shook the World, James B. Twitchell wrote about the evolution of contemporary advertising from its religious beginnings. Now, we are led through images of happy, healthy people enjoying their day to believe that new car or even a fast food restaurant is going to change our life for the better. “What we really crave is not just material, but material with meaning. The process of instilling meaning into…goods is called commercialism. Advertising is at the heart of commercialism.” (Twitchell 10).

 “You can still see the religious roots of commercialism in advertising. Buy this object and you’ll be saved…You are in good hands. Trust in us.” (Twitchell 11). It began with the selling of holy or blessed objects to common people, who purchased these objects to create a better feeling about themselves, their life, or the afterlife. Campaigns treat the candidate as a product and the voter as the consumer.

All the elements of typical product advertising can be seen in campaign advertising; incentives are offered, deadlines, even the ‘what do you have to lose’ guarantees (Klein 63). One of the first well-known attack ads was run for Lyndon B Johnson against Barry Goldwater. The commercial starts with a little girl picking petals off a flower while she counts backwards, the camera zooms in closer to her eye until the screen blackens as her voice fades to that of mission control “3…2…1…” then the unforgettable mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion fills the screen followed by the words “Vote for President Johnson…or else” (Twitchell 154).

The ad was a direct response to Goldwater’s firm opposition of Communism and other threats. Years later, Jane Hall of the Los Angeles Times interviewed Bill Moyers, the ad’s creator, about his thoughts on the efficacy of the ad:

“I regret that we were in on the first wave of the future. The ad was intended to remind voters of Johnson’s prudence; it wasn’t meant to make you think Barry Goldwater was a war monger…It haunts me all this time that Johnson was portrayed as the peacemaker…but he committed the country to a long, bloody war in Vietnam” (Hall 1989, 4 as quoted by Twitchell 160)

In How to Win a Local Election, Lawrence Grey instructs would-be politicians to put themselves in front of people, in person or image, as positively as possible, as many times as possible. This strategy tends to tilt the vote to the candidates favor, even if the ad is not about the hopeful and is geared more towards portraying the opponent in the negative. This has proven useful to Bush in his campaign against Kerry in 2004. According to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the “more Bush ads people have seen, the more likely they are to agree that Kerry flip-flops and that Bush is strong and decisive.” (Events Overshadow).

However, what about Bush’s integrity? Strong and decisive does not make an honest man. Before Bush’s first term, he said, “I’ve never lived in Washington in my life.” In 1987, he and his family lived in DC so he could help with his father’s campaign (Waldman 3). Further, Bush Jr. described his father as “a Connecticut Yankee, but I’m a real Texan”, when in reality Bush Jr. attended a public junior high for one year before attending an “elite private school in Houston, followed by his high school years at Andover.” (Waldman 11). Bush claims to be a regular American, yet creatively, with the help of his father’s connections, managed to skip serving in Vietnam. (Waldman 23).

It should be apparent by now that candidates are pushed like products and the American Consumer buys readily, blindly. Political Candidates are not products and should not be portrayed as such. Campaign advertising should not follow the normal method of traditional consumer advertising. Campaigns should be held to a standard and as such, the candidate, if elected, should also be held accountable for any obvious or major transgressions of integrity. Democracy is about representation of the people, not the powerful.

Technology finally enables us to shift focus from the Popularity contest to a contest of the Truth. How well will Candidate A represent John Q Public? Campaign season should have a set date to start, a set period before that day public forums would be held and the public would have a chance to put forth issues that they want the candidates to respond to. In order to campaign, each candidate would first have to respond with his or her take on all the issues. These responses would be publicly available en toto. This anti-disinformation would allow the voter to be better educated on which candidate is going to better represent their way of life.

Further, negative attack ads should be limited to less than 25% of a campaign and less than half of each commercial spot. For example, in a 30 second commercial, only 15 fifteen seconds could be allotted to negative portrayal of the opponent and the sponsor would have to provide his or her own contrast to the subject. For each instance that a candidate is in breach of this would result in one day that their ads would be restricted from the media beginning one day before Election Day and working backwards. This anti-negativity act would encourage more eligible voters to take an interest in the candidates and not feel dirty for doing so.

Politics has become the Anti-Christ of Truth. Beginning with campaign advertising, candidates treat the public as consumers, wooing votes out of them by touching on a few ‘emotional issues’ and less on the dirty grit that plagues our society. By changing the standards to which we hold our representation to a higher degree we are not restricting their rights, we are squeezing the truth out of the candidates, and in the long run our society can only benefit from this change. Please sign the attached petition to propose new standards on candidates and end this insanity.

Petition to Evolve the Democratic Process.

Democracy needs to evolve. Technology enables us to do this. Currently, Candidates are pushed on the public like products and are less about representation. This petition is to support a new law governing Campaigns and Campaign Advertising.

Democracy needs to evolve. Technology enables us to do this. Currently, Candidates are pushed on the public like products and are less about representation. This petition is to support a new law governing Campaigns and Campaign Advertising.

Specific components of the new law will be:

1. Campaigns will have a set start date.
2. A limit will be imposed on the percentage of negative campaigning that can exist in a campaign.
3. Before the campaign start dates, public forums will be held where the public, eligible to vote or not, puts forth questions to be answered by the candidates.
4. A Standards Committee consisting of non-governmental citizens will be assembled via the Jury Duty process to summarize the majority of the public’s questions. The committee also sets an allowable deviation for each question.
5. In order to begin campaigning, candidates must answer all the questions forwarded by the Standard’s Committee.
6. The questions and answers will be readily accessible to the public.
7. If, after being elected, a candidate deviates, more than allowed by the committee, from their answers they are immediately held for an impeachment trial and breach of representation.

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