/ 13 October 2004

Telling it straight and narrow

More than 60-million viewers saw the first presidential debate; the second also drew a mammoth audience, up 50% on the debates of 2000. But this election’s most intense political communication has bypassed the vast majority of the American public.

The Bush and Kerry campaigns, together with their surrogates, have aired more than 600 000 TV ads since the end of primary season in March. But most of those have been aimed at a narrow slice of America, in swing states. As we enter the final phase of this presidential race that slice is getting narrower, though the money spent on advertising keeps soaring.

When the dust settles on November 3 about $1-bilion will have been spent on campaign ads, making this election easily the most expensive in history — yet over 60% of all Americans will not have seen a single political commercial.

Eight of the top 10 cities where the most advertising dollars are being spent are in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Topping the list is Cleveland, Ohio. Christmas has come early for local TV stations in the capital of America’s industrial rust belt.

Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, ranks second: $25-million will be spent in this city, two hours away from New York. So while New Yorkers have been spared the advertising avalanche, the good burghers of Pennsylvania and South Jersey have been bombarded with the candidates’ messages for months.

In third place is Miami, Florida, as balanced on a knife edge today as it was four years ago. To gauge how this election is playing out you need to keep up with the campaign ads running in these three battleground states.

Bush is running three new ads in tight rotation. The most commonly repeated of these attempts to condemn Kerry as the poster child of tax-and-spend liberalism. The narrator intones: “John Kerry and the liberals in Congress’s record on the economy: higher taxes 350 times … an average of once every three weeks for 20 years … like clockwork.”

This ad is the reason John Kerry kept warning viewers in the second debate not to pay heed to the labels Bush is trying to stick on him: his warning was not aimed at the debate viewers so much as at the few thousand people who could tip the election in those key swing states, who have been inundated with Bush advertising.

The most recent ad, released after the second debate, attempts to win back ground Bush has lost to Kerry on Iraq. Kerry has successfully killed the “flip-flop” argument against him and turned the attention on to Bush’s record.

The Bush advert tries to paint Kerry as soft on terrorism. “Kerry said defeating terrorism was really more about law enforcement and intelligence than a strong military operation,” declares the voiceover, using Kerry’s comments from the second debate against him. “How can Kerry protect us when he doesn’t understand the threat?”

Bush is again trying to pin a “shopsoiled liberal” label on Kerry. The ad lacks power, however, because viewers immediately connect the phrase “strong military operation” with Iraq and the negative images of mayhem they see on the TV news.

The third ad in heavy circulation tries to tarnish Kerry with the “trial lawyer” reputation of his running mate, John Edwards, arguing that the healthcare crisis is a result of nuisance lawsuits. This advert is the weakest of the three because most people rightly lay the blame of their sky-high premiums at the door of the healthcare management companies, part of the big-business monolith they feel gets deferential treatment from the current administration.

The fundamental problem with these Bush ads is that they try to attach current problems to a hypothetical future performance. Kerry’s 20-year record in the Senate only gives the president so much ammunition; once we get to the last four years, Bush has to take responsibility for his own record — and he is on shaky ground. However much he would like to blame Kerry for it, it’s a tough, if not impossible, sell.

Kerry’s latest ads work better because they focus on the president’s actual performance, or lack of it, in three key areas: homeland security, jobs and social issues.

The newest clearly points out what has not happened in George Bush’s war on terror. It states that 95% of all containers coming into America go uninspected, and that this president would prefer to protect his tax cut for the rich before the nation’s security.

The president’s dismal economic performance provides the fuel for another ad. “Only Herbert Hoover had a worse record on jobs,” concludes the announcer. The bald, irrefutable fact of the first net decrease in jobs in 70 years speaks for itself.

A third ad draws on the star power of the extremely popular and Parkinson’s-afflicted Michael J Fox. Talking straight to camera, Fox questions Bush’s decision — informed by the religious right — to limit stem cell research. “George Bush says we can wait,” states Fox calmly. “I say lives are at stake and it’s time for leadership.”

While the final presidential debate is likely to draw a huge TV audience, it will not be these voters who decide the outcome: that honour will fall to a bleary-eyed, ad-addled few. The rest of us can only hope they get it right. – Guardian Unlimited Â