Commemorating Candidates as Breakfast Cereal

The Living Room Candidate, a project of the Museum of the Moving Image, allows users to explore hundreds of political TV ads ranging from Eisenhower’s early efforts to ride the coattails of I Love Lucy in 1952 to to the current crop of spots featuring Paris Hilton and a rhetorical showdown over maverick and outsider status.  The site catalogs video clips by year and party, and allows visitors to browse the pieces by issue or thematic element.  The online exhibit includes extensive notes for teachers, giving classes the opportunity explore not only basic political rhetoric but also issues related to media production values, the role of television and the Internet in communications, and depictions of children in popular culture.

Although the commercials have evolved dramatically in terms of style, core themes appear time and again:  the opponent as menace to the economy, concerns over vice presidential picks, the candidate as disastrous figurehead.  The seminal Daisy ad from 1964–linking Barry Goldwater to nuclear apocalypse–parallels the surreal 2008 ad linking Barack Obama to current faddish visions of religious apocalypse; the storm of discussion that emerged after the nomination of Sarah Palin, according to curator David Schwartz, echoes television spots attacking the qualifications of Spiro Agnew and Dan Quayle.  While the ads have evolved stylistically, the tone of presentation raises questions about their role in political debate and civic culture.  The idea of advertising candidates and media’s effects on the exigencies of campaigning have caused concerns going back to the early 1800s.  Television accelerated these trends, leading to a greater identification with specific candidates as personalities during some election cycles (the cults of Kennedy and Reagan standing as the best examples) and the growing importance of single-issue voting as media downplay complexity and ambiguity.  Fears of these trends led perennial candidate Adlai Stephenson to warn that “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.”

In many ways, the ads represent the best and worst of American culture, including the ongoing tension between hope and anxiety.  A sense of unbounded optimism marks many spots, but ads playing off of popular fears (e.g., Richard Nixon’s dire warnings about crime and chaos in the 1968 election) balance this feeling of potential and opportunity.  The archived commercials represent an odd mirror, showing how the public conceptualized not only contemporary political issues but also its own values and sense of identity.