ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 22, 1996 TAG: 9610220050
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: ELLEN GOODMAN
SOURCE: ELLEN GOODMAN
HAVE YOU noticed a certain rise in attack ads this year? Not a numerical rise, mind you. What you might call a tonal rise.
The political voices broadcast in ads across the nation have been ratcheted up as much as an octave on the scale. Assaults that used to be launched by baritones now are set off by sopranos.
Follow this musical triptik across the sound waves of the political season.
You're driving along Route 66 when a narrator warns about a moral crisis: ``The problem isn't in your house. The problem is in the White House, Bill Clinton's White House.''
You're slumped in front of the TV set when a voice intones, ``Bill Clinton said he'd lead the war on drugs and change America. All he did was change his mind.''
You're deep in Colorado or in the suburbs of New Jersey when the voice-over on television castigates a Senate candidate for opposing a flag-burning amendment: ``Some things are wrong - and they've always been wrong.''
Or maybe you're in Massachusetts when you make TV eye contact with a mother accusing a Senate candidate of being soft on criminals: ``Maybe John Kerry wants to give them another chance, but I just want to get them off the street.''
This may be standard traveling music in the world of negative campaign advertising. But this year's recruits in attack ads are increasingly women. The latest weapon is a nicely tuned set of female pipes.
The notion that a female's place is in an attack ad is not entirely new. The most famous such ad is the one that scared voters away from Barry Goldwater in 1964. It was a little girl counting daisy petals before the nuclear countdown.
If there are more women today, it may be a perverse sort of progress. Some of us remember when advertisers only used male voices, explaining that only men had the authority. As a consultant once explained to political scientist June Speakman of Roger Williams University, ``The voice of God is a male's voice.''
Women still rarely sound all-mighty in political ads. They still take minor roles. One of the lingering curiosities is that female voices are almost never used in ads for female candidates.
But when you hear them, they're probably on the attack. With the exception of Liddy Dole, who stars in a terribly polite ad reassuring Americans that she is going to vote for her husband, we're talking about ads in which a woman throws the first punch. Recently, the Clinton campaign has used three women narrators all going negative. Four of six Dole ads with female voice-overs returned the offense.
The sneaky part is that women's voices are being used to ``soften'' the attack as they mount it. This is a year in which voters get negative about negatives. It's as if the consultants all sat around asking: How do we reconcile the voter's longing for civility with the old-fashioned success of negative ads? Eureka! Let's give it the woman's touch.
As Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the University of Pennsylvania puts it more delicately, ``The perception among consultants is that a female voice softens the attack and makes it more acceptable.''
The job opportunities for women in attack ads remind me of the growth market for women lawyers to defend sleazy defendants. Remember the lawyer for the Menendez brothers? For Mike Tyson?
Today, the head of the NRA is a woman, busily softening the handgun image. And sometimes it seems that every industry with troubles hires a spokeswoman. Check the Tobacco Institute.
Once rejected for their ``femaleness,'' they are now often hired for their alleged ``femaleness'': that warm, nurturing, softening something or other. Any day now I expect to see women defending the Serb Radovan Karadzic.
Consultant Bob Shrum says, ``Voters are pretty smart and will catch on to it.'' But in the interim he admits, ``I hate to create the sense that if you are using a woman's voice it must be something sinister.'' That would be the ultimate irony. Baritones and tenors singing Mr. Nice Guy for an audience that wants civility. Sopranos and altos doing the nasty doo-wop.
This may just be a stop on the way to some rough sound of equality. But today the stereotypes survive. We have women cast as Venus doing Mars without getting any closer to playing God.
In 1996, the attack ads are striking a note that is distinctly falsetto.
- The Boston Globe
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICSby CNB