THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 25, 1994 TAG: 9409230589
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: KEITH MONROE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
Modern political campaigns are electronic wars. Most voters never encounter the candidates in person and so are forced to form their impressions of them largely on the basis of TV images that rain down from the sky like so much shrapnel.
Naturally candidates try to get as much TV coverage as possible without paying for it - so-called free media. This includes campaign appearances that insinuate sound bites into the local evening news, appearances on talk shows and call-in programs and even risky debates and forums.
Despite the attractions of free media, however, much of a modern campaign comes down to paid media. That is, ads. Dueling ads. Even the language used reminds us that TV politics is a martial art. Candidates take part in campaigns, of course. But they also target various segments of the electorate for saturation with the latest ad. They shoot attack ads and run them in flights.
The ads are made by experts in the art of video persuasion who have a media strategy and campaign tactics. Each ad is a carefully wrought exercise in political warfare aimed at winning hearts as often as convincing minds. And a single picture is often worth a thousand votes.
Until this week, Republican Senate candidate Oliver North has owned the airwaves. He has run $1 million in ads unanswered by return fire from his opponents. North likes to say that money is the ammunition of politics, but really ads are. Money just buys the bullets candidates try to fire into the brains of viewers. So far, North has fired four shots or spots.
At first, they seem quite different in technique and content. Two are testimonials. The first features North's wife, Betsy, telling viewers not to believe the negative things they've heard about her husband. He's an exemplar of patriotism and family values. The second features a man who says North saved his life in Vietnam.
The third is in the venerable form of the product comparison. Two silhouettes are shown and their positions on various issues given. One is for taxes, the other against. One takes only extreme positions. The other takes only mainstream crowd-pleasing positions. When the faces are filled in by commercial's end, North is the good guy. His opponent, the bad.
Finally, North has run a spot that paints him as standing up for freedom and democracy and opposing tyranny and evil in Vietnam, in Grenada, in the Achille Lauro hijacking and in Nicaragua.
Despite the difference in approach between the two folksy, first-person testimonials, the comparison of Brand X and Brand Y and the minidocumentary of heroic moments in North's career, the underlying message is always the same.
The theme of these ads is the candidate's character. North has tried to seize the high ground and define the race in terms favorable to himself. Not the kind of senator he would be, but the kind of person he is. North hopes to reduce the race to the family man vs. the philanderer, the bold patriot vs. the business-as-usual pol, the mainstream man of the people vs. the extremist tool of special interests, the independent leader vs. the slavish follower.
If North can succeed in persuading voters of the truth of those images, he may win this race. And because North has a robust campaign treasury, he has been able to fire at will. Wilder dropped out of the race in part because he couldn't afford to enter a shooting war of campaign ads. Coleman is also armed with too little money to buy more than token exposure.
Unaccountably, the well-funded Robb campaign held its fire until last week. Spokesman Bert Rohrer says North has been running ads and campaigning in person all summer while Robb was forced to attend to senatorial business, but that merely begs the question. If Robb's duties forced him to stay in Washington, why wasn't he shooting back on the air? Rohrer says that North's spending of $1 million on media has left his standing in the polls virtually unchanged, so maybe he was firing expensive blanks.
The North campaign disagrees. They claim the race is now neck and neck and that their ads are a large part of the reason. Mark Merritt, North's campaign manager, says the minimal advertising by Robb is evidence that his campaign is either broke or crazy. But now Robb has fired back. Like North, however, he is not yet taking direct aim at his foe.
Instead Robb's first two spots extol his virtues and only attack North by implication. In one, Robb's record on education is lauded. In a second, Robb is painted as a politician of integrity courageous enough to take unpopular stands on controversial issues: the Clinton deficit reduction plan, choice and the death penalty. Robb was for all three.
Since there are serious questions about the character of each candidate in what is now shaping up as a conventional two-way race, it is not surprising that each is using his early ads to burnish his own image rather than tarnish the other fellow's. But that state of affairs is unlikely to prevail until Nov. 8. Sooner or later, each campaign is going to try to drive up the negatives of the other guy. To bloody the opposition.
At present, we appear to be in a kind of phony war. The final days of this campaign are likely to turn into an unprecedented barrage and counterbarrage of ads in which each side seeks to destroy the character of the other candidate. That is, the battle is most likely to be fought out on the question of who is least unfit to represent Virginia in the U.S. Senate. War is hell. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
In their recent ad spots, U.S. Senate candidate Oliver L. North,
left, and incumbent Senator Charles Robb have focused on extolling
their own virtues.
KEYWORDS: U.S. SENATE RACE VIRGINIA CANDIDATES CAMPAIGN
ADVERTISING by CNB