Friday, Jul 4, 2008
The men who would be president launch their TV campaigns, with -- Surprise! -- lots of smiling kids in the background.
Nov 22, 1999 | Some say the trouble really began in 1966, when a Madison Avenue ad executive by the name of Harry Treleaven moved to Texas to help a 42-year-old son of a senator run for Congress.
Treleaven (pronounced TRELL-eh-ven) had been with the J. Walter Thompson ad agency for almost 20 years, helping to sell Lark cigarettes, Ford automobiles and Singer sewing machines. But his task in Houston was more daunting: Treleaven was to sell George Herbert Walker Bush -- the losing 1964 Texas Senate candidate, a prep-school and Yale University grad whose dad had been a senator from Connecticut -- to Houston voters.
Against a popular incumbent Democrat named Rep. Frank Briscoe.
In a district that had never before elected a Republican.
Treleaven liked his chances, though, not only because he thought Bush was a better candidate, but because Bush performed better on television. Treleaven was a devotee of Marshall McLuhan's writings, especially as they pertained to politics.
As McLuhan wrote, and Treleaven memorized, politics were now about "the icon, the inclusive image. Instead of a political viewpoint or platform, the inclusive political posture or stance ... In the TV image we have the supremacy of the blurred outline ... Policies and issues are useless for election purposes, since they are too specialized and hot. The shaping of a candidate's integral image has taken the place of discussing conflicting points of view."
In a memo about the Bush-Briscoe race, Treleaven, referring to himself in the third person, wrote, "that what he saw [of Bush] he liked -- and, more importantly, he recognized that what he liked was highly promotable. Political candidates are celebrities, and today, with television taking them into everybody's home right along with Johnny Carson and Batman, they're more of a public attraction than ever ... Bush ... must be shown as a man who's working his heart out to win."
Treleaven made sure that 89 percent of Bush's budget went into advertising, and almost 60 percent of that to TV. Come Election Day 1966, Bush defeated Briscoe soundly, 58 percent to 42 percent.
Treleaven next was called to sell Richard Nixon. As documented in Joe McGinniss' superb "The Selling of the President 1968," Treleaven set about creating "a Nixon image that was entirely independent" of Nixon's beliefs. "Nixon would say his same old tiresome things but no one would have to listen," McGinniss wrote. "The words would become Muzak. Something pleasant and lulling in the background. The flashing pictures would be carefully selected to create the impression that somehow Nixon represented competence, respect for tradition, serenity, faith that the American people were better than people anywhere else, and that all these problems others shouted about meant nothing."
Or, as a Nixon staffer wrote in a Nov. 27, 1967, memo about campaign strategy, "The TV medium itself introduces an element of distortion, in terms of both its effect on the candidate and of the often subliminal ways in which the image is received. And it is inevitably going to convey a partial image -- thus ours is the task of finding how to control its use so the part that gets across is the part we want to have gotten across."
The rest, of course, is History Channel. Nixon wasn't the first presidential contender to look to Madison Avenue -- President Dwight Eisenhower kept Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn on retainer -- but as Advertising Age noted in 1994, "Nixon shaped presidential campaign advertising ... with a sense of organization that spawned the all-star ad teams used by White House wannabes since 1968."
And now, 33 years after Treleaven temporarily relocated to Houston to use the skills he'd learned selling Lark cigarettes to elect a man named Bush to Congress, Bush's son is among those hitting the airwaves with carefully crafted propaganda to sell you, dear viewers, a better brand of president.
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