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CAMPAIGN '92
Political Ads
Decoding Hidden Messages
Mark Crispin Miller teaches media studies at The Johns Hopkins University, where he also heads the Forum for the Study of Campaign Propaganda. He is presently completing a study of the gulf war as media spectacle.
In 1988 the presidential race was wholly dominated, and its outcome probably determined, by the explosive Bush-Quayle propaganda. Indeed, there was little else going for the Republicans; and, in terms of propaganda, there was nothing going for the Democrats, whose every stumbling effort at mass suasion -- e.g., the image of a helmeted Dukakis looked wee and goofy in that aimlessly zigzagging tank -- was an outright gift to the much smarter propaganda team of Ailes-Atwater and their legions of devoted cadres.
And along with those hard professionals and their inept counterparts, there was (of course) a third communications entity that made a signal contribution to Bush-Quayle's propaganda: the news divisions of the major media, primarily (but not only) television. Typically, each correspondent would address the latest ad with some very obvious comment on the candidate's general tactical intentions. Rarely would he or she do what journalists ought to do with any piece of propaganda: expose its sly half-truths and outright lies, and then correct them.
In that gross campaign, the passive collusion of the press and the Ailes-Atwater dynamo had become so apparent that, soon afterwards, journalists and media handlers (for different reasons) both began to call for a new reportorial attentiveness to the content of political advertisng. That call had some effect. Starting with the off-year campaigns of 1990, a number of newspapers and TV stations began to sift political ads for their untruths. This new effort tends to rely on a particular method. First, the ad is rebroadcast or (in print) roughly paraphrased; then the reporter sets the record straight, marshaling the facts so as to rebut the ad, which is thereby treated as a statement that can be verified or disproved. Whether on TV or in print, in other words, this approach is wholly rational and verbal. It is concerned primarily with public data: the gray minutiae of PAC contributions, tax records, congressional achievement (if any, or if none), and so on.
Such sober correction is of course invaluable, a real civic necessity; but that approach is, in itself, far too limited to help the public see, and thus see through, the subtleties of propaganda. For, at their best, the TV spots work cinematically, through ingenious audiovisual implication; and they appeal to primal fears and longings, thereby moving us -- all of us -- much more deeply, and with a lot more violence, than we could ever be affected by the dull details of some ancient shift in policy or purely technical malfeasance.
What follows is a basic analysis of four Bush-Quayle campaign spots from 1988. This exercise is meant not as a comprehensive reading, but to demonstrate the kind of critical approach that today's propaganda really calls for.
Whatever it ostensible topic (taxes, crime, disarmament), each Bush-Quayle ad was also meant to realize a larger propaganda strategy -- a strategy determined not just by certain issues of the day, but by deep-seated cultural and psychic biases. Simply put, the aim of all the ads was to promote a devastating mythical dichotomy: Bush-Quayle was cleanness, newness, unity, and -- therefore -- power; Dukakis-(Willie Horton)-and-the-Democrats was filth and darkness, fragmentation, chaos, and -- therefore -- weakness. Bush-Quayle shone high and bright, as pure and mighty as a brand-new Diet Coke or bar of Coast; whereas Dukakis-(Willie Horton)-and-the-Democrats appeared to represent a toxic, stinking, bottomless morass, as inchoate and threatening as the primordial ooze -- and/or as threatening as the realms of crude not yet wiped away by Drano and Tide, the multitudes of crawly vermin not yet wiped out by Raid and Combat.
But first, one of the "positive" Bush-Quayle ads:
1) Backed by a soothing blur of trees, and to the soft sound of a guitar plunking out a bit of gentle Muzak from (it seems) old Mexico, Columba Garnica Bush, the candidate's low-key and attractive daughter-in-law, tells Hispanics (in Spanish) that George Bush cherishes Hispanic values and traditions -- and "I believe him."
As she speaks in close-up, the camera slowly backs away until the frame includes her quiet daughter, and a great white column on the left. Note who the clothing and the architectural details make up a partial frame-within-the-frame, a bold right angel of protective whiteness: white balustrade, the white maternal skirt, the girl's white dress -- and that large, stately column, which is, so far, the ad's strongest visual element. The quiet child appears well sheltered (or contained) at the crux of that right angle, safe between the column and her mama -- but then the camera keeps on moving, gliding back and rightward, until the speaker is no longer centered and the tableau is destabilized.
As the camera keeps on moving to the side, a gap forms at the center of the frame -- and there, at right, appears the very tall, patrician-looking Bush himself (red shirt), facing her expectantly across the leafy space that now divides them, and with a little grandson (blue shirt) perched beside him, opposite the mother and, like his grandad, looking at her: waiting for her.
Here is a moment of pictorial imbalance -- and, therefore, of subtle tension, as we await the happy instant when that gap will be closed up, that imbalance rectified, the frame restabilized. The males' leftward gazes seem to urge the mother forward, toward what is now the enter of the scene. The candidate's sheer size (the composition makes him look enormous) also seems to beckon her, as some great planet will draw lesser bodies toward itself. And so -- inexorably -- she moves away from her now-marginal position and cleaves herself unto George Busy, the tableau's "natural" center.
And so the gap is closed, the scene restored to symmetry, as the family comes to rest as a quiescent triangle, broad-based (visually), headed by a patriarch (literally), and therefore very "stable." Bush has now replaced that white protective column, taking on its aura of stability -- an aura reinforced by the ad's careful color scheme. Certainly, the plain red-white-and-blue of the family's vernal wardrobe deftly advertises "patriotism." Aside from such clear symbolism, however, the colors also formally enhance the concluding scene of order. Note that all three Bush dependents wear bright white below the waist, a sameness that further bolsters the triangle's base (and the protective frame of balustrade-and-column). The dark blue of grandson's shirt and mother's blouse, moreover, props the candidate appealingly on either side, while the man himself seems all the more outstanding by virtue of the red that only he has on.
A family man, but clearly in control of his menage: the daughter is above all deferential, the children eerily immobile, as if tranquilized. Thus the candidate appears as an old-fashioned, Mediterranean Dad-type, strict as well as loving: i.e., not a wimp. At the same time, the ad depicts (or would depict) George Herbert Walker Bush not as a stilted, hyper-active Yankee, but as a solid man of Latin warmth, filled with affection both for his own offspring and for all the other "brown ones" in the Western hemisphere. "As president," he says at the end, "I have a lotta reasons to help Hispanics everywhere -- because I'll be answering to my grandkids, not just to history." .The hint of Latin warmth is also visually conveyed by the (unlikely) redness of the candidate's shirt. In (as it were) reality, the old preppy favors drabber colors, but here he wears the red of chili powder and tomato paste -- a red much like the red that glows before him in those potted blossoms placed beside his awkward foot, "anchoring" the triangle with their soft oval mass and presidential hue.
2) Throughout the "positive" ads, George Bush is thus visually characterized as the smiling apex of the family unit -- standing tall and closing gaps and keeping everybody steady. In this shot (which ends an ad praising Reagan-Bush for nuclear disarmament), the candidate is again the headpiece of a familial mass, the homogenous whiteness of both his pullover and the baby's outfit combining tot and politician into one dazzling patriarchal monad. The swing, moreover, provides the necessary hint of insecurity, making George Bush seem all the more desirable as kindly overseer and big tall stabilizer. Here again the candidate appears as strong-but-kinder/gentler. In this case, the man's Soft Side is manifest in the maternal posture and the excessive (some might say fiendish) smile. Bush was often thus heavily pseudo-feminized in his advertising, as a way to woo (some might say fool) those women who suspected that he might, say, start a war or pack the Supreme Court to get Roe v. Wade repealed.
3) Whereas the pro-Bush spots end with a reassuring image of the-candidate-as-pillar-of-strength, the major attack ads begin with some towering object, but one that, unlike the "stable" Bush, is somehow teetering; and from that image of tenuous eminence the images proceed to drag us downward. Thus, in the first shot of "The Harbor," a dingy reddish marker ("12") bobs -- clumsy, useless -- in the snot-gray waters overwhelming Boston's dismal skyline. As the camera glides rightward past that dubious object, the voice-over makes it a damning symbol of Dukakis: "As a candidate, Michael Dukakis called Boston Harbor . . ." -- we then dissolve to another latterally floating shot (the camera jerking leftward) of a rotting wharf -- ". . . 'an open sewer,'" the voice-over concludes, as the shots, linked by dissolves, appear to force us down, down, ever closer to the floating scum, as if the camera were about to pull us under.
The ad works by threatening us not merely with "pollution," but with something like, or worse than, death: radical disintegration, terminal regression. The electronic score see-saws murkily, a sound as clogged and turbid as those waters; seagulls yelp, and there's a nauseating undertone of thick, toxic bubbling. We feel we're floundering, precambrial, amoebic -- helpless, like the (evidently) futile governor of Massachusetts. The ad's technique, however, has a still more visceral effect. Whereas the pro-Bush shots progress intelligibly, here the unceasing back-and-forth disorients you, even makes you feel a little sick -- an appropriate reaction, given the ad's deliberately stomach-turning subtext.
Although there's a lot of common garbage in the water, and a sign (flashed briefly) warns of radioactivity, the harbor's real repellant -- according to the ad's dream-logic -- is not toxic waste or any other industrial by-product, but mere excrement -- the primal horror of"an open sewer." At the end, the camera finally stops on a tableau of half-beached trash, repulsively suggestive: two big dead fish, a lot of little stones, and a trash-can lid that looks exactly like a toilet seat. By now, moreover, it isn't just Boston Harbor that's become a sea of shit. As the camera falls still, the voice-over indignantly concludes: ". . . America what he's done for Massachusetts." Under this threat of scat-apocalypse, the score electronically mimes the sounds of plumbing after someone's flushed: a burbling turbulence, a damp pause, and then a high chord sighingly fades in, fades out.
4) Again, a futile colossus, and then the camera takes us down; and here too that useless object is "Michael Dukakis."
A dim boom! extends into a slowed-down screaky roar as, peering between huge bars, we see a tiny martial figure trying to hurry up the spiral staircase of a watchtower. Those aren't bars after all, but the watchtower's massive legs, now appearing smaller, smaller, as the camera zooms inexorably back in troubling little jerks. The dawn (sunset?) is in black and white, the elements all etched in silhouette; and that anonymous would-be guardian (prisoner?) can't get up there to protect himself (us?) fast enough -- because he's moving in slow motion. Nervously sped-up, the voice-over starts "explaining": "As governor, Michael Dukakis vetoed mandatory sentences for drug dealers." The zoom stops on the now-much-smaller, starkly isolated tower, that guard still making for the top. "He vetoed the death penalty," as the lone tower dissolves to (another) lone rifle-toting figure, also moving in slow motion, warily on patrol outside a daunting chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire.
The opening induces, all at once, a sense of claustophobia, a rush of vertigo, a panicky uncertainty. Here (suggets the ad) you're stuck, you don't know what's behind you -- and there's no protection. The poignant image of that lone guard dissolves to what became the best-known Bush-Quayle visual: "His revolving-door prison policy," intones the voice-over, "gave weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers not eligible for parole." As the guard fades away, he is at once replaced and overwhelmed by a slow horde of much-larger-looking men, impassively filing (in slo-mo they appear to lurch) through -- there it is! -- a revolving door of prison bars; that high-angle medium shot dissolves in turn to a longer, higher shot of the same zombified procession, so that (again) we're looking down at an endless stream of "filth," apparently Dukakis-generated.
The sequence (like the whole ad) is exquisitely misleading. After the line about "weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers," there appears alongthe bottom of the frame a terse caption: "268 Escaped." "While out," continues the voice-over, "many committed other crimes, like kidnapping and rape -- and many are still at large." Along with that last clause, another caption, seemingly redundant: "Many are still at large." Those deft juxtapositions of print and speech imply that 268 first-degree murderers escaped from the furlough program, that "many" rapists and kidnappers "are still at large" -- and/or even, if we take the captions serially, that many first-degree murderers are still at large. In fact, most of those escapees were petty offenders, but the deliberate audio-visual confusion helped the Bush-Quayle team to broadcast an alarmist fiction without having to utter bald-faced lies.
And yet the power of this notorious image lay not in such sly conjunctions, but in the careful visual arrangement. That phrase "revolving-door prison policy" implies, of course, that Massachusetts criminals could, thanks to Governor Dukakis, slip out of jail as easily as commuters streaming from a subway station. But the image makes an even more inflammatory statement. Note the racial composition of the prisoners: white men entering on the right, blacks and Hispanics exiting. In the next moment (below) there is the same racial pattern, albeit complicated by the whites placed at the frame's far left. Those figures, however, would function only to allow Ailes-Atwater some deniability: "Racist? But there are white men in there too!" Such a claim would be disingenuous, because those remote Caucasians are, literally, beside the point. The eye is drawn not to the margins of the frame, but to the center -- the vanishing point where the two human lines converge, and the point toward which the leftward movement of the entering whites also attracts our gazes. In other words, the "revolving door" effects an eerie racial metamorphosis, implying that the Dukakis prison system was not only porous, but a satanic source of negritude -- a dark "liberal" mill that took white men and made them colored.
There is one last dissolve, as the "revolving door" itself is metamorphosed into the bad Dukakis-tower, now seemingly (and thank God!) under guard. As the dissolve begins, the voice-over speaks a variant of the "Harbor" tag-line: "Now Michael Dukakis says he wants to do for America . . .," and then, with the dissolve complete: ". . . what he's done for Massachusetts." The same plumbing-sigh fades in, fades out, as -- unconsciously -- we face the prospect of our nation turned into a continental version of "Massachusetts" -- i.e., an overflowing sewer, a fortress overrun, a nigger-factory. To those "persuaded" by the images, the final voice-over makes lots of sense: "America can't afford that risk."
