Politics for the day

Jeremy Peters has an article in The New York Times about campaign ads:

Modern campaigns are often scientifically plotted operations that leave little to chance. Nowhere is this more obvious than with advertising, which is carefully fashioned from polling, focus groups and demographic research. But sometimes even the best-laid plans go awry. Consider the story of Ben Stein, George W. Bush, and the commercial that never aired.
Late in the summer of 2000, Bush’s campaign strategists saw their position in the polls improving and got a little cocky. They arranged for Stein, a comedian and former speechwriter for Richard M. Nixon, to reprise his breakout role as the economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for a commercial mocking Al Gore. “Who said he and Tipper were the models for Love Story?” Stein asked his “students”, repeating one of several tales about Gore that helped stoke his reputation as a serial embellisher. “Who said he created the Internet? Anyone? Anyone?”
The commercials, which were never released, were cut and ready to be broadcast. But then Gore started to surge in national polls. The Bush campaign killed the ads, fearful that the timing was wrong. “The campaign had lost its confident footing,” said Mark McKinnon, who directed Bush’s advertising efforts in 2000 and 2004. A risky ad that could backfire, he said, was the last thing most Bush strategists wanted. “Maybe they were right,” he said. “After all, we won. But as the creative guy, it killed me.”
Every presidential campaign has commercials that are relegated to the dustbin before they are broadcast. Sometimes, after a second look, the message seems not quite right. Other times, new developments can intervene, forcing a shift in political tactics. And occasionally, the boss just says no.
Gore’s senior strategists vetoed a mock music video titled The Ballad of George W. Bush. The campaign had been having difficulty gaining traction in the South, so it decided to try a country song lampooning Bush as a privileged loafer. Mark Putnam, who worked on Gore’s ads at the time, wrote the lyrics. “Life is pretty easy when your dad’s the man/Beats working for a livin’, it’s the George Bush plan,” went one verse. The campaign signed off and production began. Filming it was an enormous undertaking for a political ad. Twenty cast and crew members, including Martin Delray and the Tennessee Rockers, twenty vehicles, and a camel were gathered at a Texas ranch. The video was edited and ready to go on the air. Then some on Gore’s team got cold feet. “I’ve always said if we could have swung five hundred votes in the Florida Panhandle with this thing, Al Gore would be President of the United States,” Putnam said.
Tremendous amounts of research can go into making and refining political ads. Many campaigns show them to small audiences before they are broadcast, revising and tweaking language that people object to. Sometimes the testing is done in focus-group settings, in which a moderator leads a discussion about what people found appealing or unappealing. Other times the testing is more anonymous, with voters given a dial that they flip back and forth to signal approval or disapproval as they watch.
Then the content of the ads is meticulously checked for accuracy. If a campaign is using man-on-the-street interviews with random voters, it will research the backgrounds of those voters. If there are red flags— which are hardly unheard of— the ad may have to be scrapped. “Sometimes the facts don’t check out, or the person you filmed to do a spot had some issues in their past,” said Chris Mottola, who has created ads for the campaigns of Bush and McCain. “Sometimes what you think is a good story turns out to be not such a good story.”
It is fairly routine for ads to get spiked in the research and fact-checking processes. But an ad can also be shelved after all that work is done and it is ready to go on the air. The media team working for Edward M. Kennedy, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, had that experience when it created a series of ads attacking Kennedy’s challenger in 1994, Mitt Romney, who at the time was known primarily as a prominent Massachusetts businessman. One of the harshest spots, which does not sound all that different from what Romney’s opponents in the Republican presidential race are saying about him today, was never broadcast. “Mitt Romney says he saved Bain & Company,” the announcer says. “But he didn’t tell you that, on the day he took over, he had his predecessor fire hundreds of employees. Or that the way the company was rescued was with a federal bailout.”
The ad includes a point-by-point— if highly selective— recitation of events in the company’s past. A government loan, failed repayment, a $4 million Bain profit. It concludes: “Mitt Romney, maybe he’s just against government when it helps working men and women.” The spot was prepared as part of a series of negative commercials intended to raise Kennedy’s falling poll numbers. But the other ads had evidently done their job, and Kennedy regained his lead. His campaign decided the Bain ad was no longer necessary. “It was going to run at the end” of the campaign, said Tad Devine, a Kennedy strategist and veteran Democratic consultant. “But we were like eighteen points ahead, so we said: ‘Forget it. Close positive.’ ”
Debates inside campaigns about whether to go negative and how aggressively to do so have killed some ads deemed too harsh for the airwaves. During the 2008 campaign, McCain’s advisers debated attacking Barack Obama for his association with the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., the Chicago pastor who had uttered remarks hostile to America. Some thought such an attack on the first black nominee from a major party would be too racially charged. But Fred Davis, a seasoned adman who has made commercials for Bush and many other leading Republicans, went ahead and produced a thirty-second spot that used Wright’s infamous rant— God damn America!— juxtaposed with tales of McCain’s war heroism. Hoping to convince McCain that the commercial would present a clear contrast with Obama, Davis paid for the ad out of his own pocket. “I kept pushing, but I didn’t get anywhere,” Davis said. “He said no way.”

Rico says he's surprised no one has dredged up that old anti-Romney ad to rerun...