The Season, Reason for Campaign Ads

Bio spots, inoculations and positioners have hit the airwaves, but they have nothing to do with medicine. They’re a new batch of presidential campaign commercials, and the specialized lingo used to describe them--those inoculations, for example--hint at their role in promoting or protecting candidates.

Vice President Al Gore, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain and magazine publisher Steve Forbes all unveiled new radio and TV spots in the last two weeks. While jaded American viewers may look away, and Madison Avenue and Hollywood types scorn them as low-end and deadly dull, political analysts and consultants insist they are still a must if you want to sway voters.

“The reality is that while most people want to be conscientious voters, they don’t have the time to go watch debates. They have busy lives, and the only way to get information about the candidate out is through these ads,” said Mark McKinnon of Austin-based Maverick Media, who is crafting Bush spots.

So what’s airing this early presidential season?

Conventional wisdom for decades has held that the first round of ads should be the “bio spot”--a warm, friendly biographical sketch. Candidates also want to develop a positive baseline with viewer voters before going on the attack.

“Everybody’s been taught to do this since running for student body president,” said Rich Galen, a cyberspace columnist who formerly worked for former Vice President Dan Quayle and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “You’ve got to define yourself before your opponent defines you. So you run the softest, nicest spots you possibly can.”

It’s hard to tell anyone’s life in half a minute, even at a cost of $50,000 a spot, so the ads look pretty similar, experts say, projecting the candidate as a solid family man with good values, ready to lead the land.

But McCain scores big in this area, pundits say, by profiling his admirable military record, and airing an atypical family spot describing how his wife brought home an adopted child from Pakistan without telling McCain until he went to pick her up at the airport.

“I think the bio spot in its classic sense: ‘worked his way through college, married his high school sweetheart,’ makes voters’ eyes glaze over. But in the case of Sen. McCain, those are compelling incidents,” said Don Sipple of Sipple Communications in Santa Barbara, a veteran Republican consultant.

One of the biggest surprises of the early ads is Bush, who is skipping the biographical phase, and moving straight to inoculation, or shoring up an area of his record vulnerable to attack from opponents.

“Due to the great name that the family has, and due to the fact that we have had a tremendous amount of attention as front-runner, we don’t have to waste a lot of time about where the governor comes from,” explained McKinnon.

Some say it would be tough for Bush to make a bio spot because of youthful indulgent behavior.

What Bush and company have done is air three issue pieces, including a 30-second TV spot on his fiscal record, which has already been slammed by Forbes.

There’s a risk to starting off that way, some say.

Darryl West, a Brown University professor who wrote “Air Wars,” a history of television advertising in campaigns, said, “By its very essence, to inoculate yourself you have to put out some negative information, and run some risk that people will remember that.”

The strategy could also backfire if opponents bring it up.

In fact, Forbes’ campaign manager said the ad was “misleading” and publicly demanded that it be yanked off the air, or fixed. At issue was Bush’s claim that he held the line on government spending in Texas to an unprecedented 2.7%, the lowest rate in 40 years.

Independent analysts say both sides are right, in a way. Eva DeLuna, a budget analyst with the nonprofit Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin, ran the numbers and found growth during his tenure was perhaps even lower than 2.7%. But the lowest rate of growth in 40 years wasn’t under Bush, she said, it was under one of his predecessors.

Bush also scores points--or scorn--for running a Spanish language radio piece in, of all places, Iowa. In the spot, Bush intones in Spanish, “It is a new day.”

The piece was done to attract national media attention as much as to reach the 2% Latino population in Iowa, some experts said.

“It’s a dart in the dart board to get noticed by mushy liberal journalists,” said Sipple. But West of Brown University said he thought the ad was effective, demonstrating “he is a tolerant Republican who wants minority votes.”

The Bush staff, in turn, charges that Gore aired a “phantom” ad only to gain media attention, not to reach voters. The ad, which said Gore would ban oil drilling off the California coast, only ran for three days, and sparingly, in Monterey and Santa Barbara. If Gore really wanted to advertise, the ad would have run longer and in more markets, Bush advisors said. As it was, the ad was reported on nationwide.

Traditionally, after the early bio spots comes the issue or positioner pieces. “These are not speeches to inform you,” said Galen. “You need to say ‘health care’ or ‘education’ or ‘national defense’ enough times over pretty pictures that people think you care, that’s it.”

Left for the last are attack ads. Some experts said Clinton gave attack ads a new spin in 1996.

“Clinton in ’96 was the innovator of the positive attack ad,” said West, pointing to spots against Bob Dole, the GOP presidential candidate, and Gingrich in which the first 20 seconds were devoted to saying they would end Social Security, but the last 15 seconds were a positive, reassuring plan.