"Negative Advertising Moves Numbers." And Then We Elect CRAP!

In political ads, candidates put their rivals' worst faces forward
By JOEL WALSH

Ominous music rumbles, and a shadowy figure emerges.

It could be a Halloween horror film — or a scene from any number of recent campaign ads. It’s a sure sign the election season is in full swing.

Roy Blunt wears a mask-like scowl in a Robin Carnahan ad. Carnahan appears almost like a crypt keeper in a Blunt spot in Missouri’s U.S. Senate campaign.

In the California governor’s race, an extreme close-up of Jerry Brown shows every vein in his 72-year-old face. His opponent, Meg Whitman, has comatose eyes and talon-like fingers in a Brown ad.

Throughout the history of American politics, candidates have used ghastly images of their opponents, and this year offers a bumper crop.

“An unflattering photo is kind of icing on the cake,” said Shari Bax, an associate professor of political science at the University of Central Missouri. “(Campaigns) look for the most unflattering photos they can find.”

But there’s a science behind deciding how and when to use homely photos of a political opponent.

For example, Rep. Ike Skelton, running for re-election as a Missouri Democrat, stands in one ad at an imaginary crossroads. The photo shows Skelton almost off-balance, looking askance.

The Republican National Congressional Committee, which ran the ad, said not to read too much into the ad’s message, which sought to show Skelton had lost his way in Washington.

“It’s a TV ad,” said Tom Erickson of the GOP committee. “That’s all it is.”

But Bax saw a deeper strategy.

“I think they’re trying to subtly get across that he’s older,” Bax said. “And then you’re supposed to subconsciously connect all the negative connotations with that: that he’s lost, that he’s confused.”

Finding photos for campaign advertisements isn’t difficult. It can be as simple as searching a candidate’s own Web site or television commercials, doing a quick Google image search or even using a candidate “tracker” — someone who follows an opponent around with camera rolling.

Doctoring a photo — making it black and white or changing the contrast — is OK.

But only to a point.

Media specialists acknowledge a line that campaigns can cross if they distort a photo too much.

Where is that line?

Jason Klindt, a Republican media consultant, compared it to the definition of pornography.

“I don’t know that I can give it to you,” he said, “but you know it when you see it.”

A wildly distorted photo could create empathy for the subject and actually erode the credibility of the candidate airing the ad.

“Voters have a very low tolerance for that type of change,” said Klindt, who works for Kansas City-based Axiom Strategies and consults with Republican congressional hopefuls Kevin Yoder, Billy Long and Sam Graves.

“For the most part, voters know what candidates look like, and they can tell instantly when there’s something wrong with an image.”

Ad makers also pay special attention to where they place the unattractive photos, thanks to digital video recorders, which let viewers breeze through commercials.

“You’ve got to get that image up there before a person flips the channel or pushes the fast-forward button on the DVR,” Bax said.

That’s why, she said, campaigns often save the most negative images of their opponents for the beginning or end of an ad — when viewers are most likely to resume watching.

This technique has been used in Blunt and Carnahan commercials, whether it’s a haggard photo of “Wrong Way Robin” in the opening scene or a wide-eyed Blunt as “the very worst of Washington” to close an ad.

Photos don’t have to be ugly, though, to be effective, media specialists said.

Indeed, Martin Hamburger has found other ways to use flattering photos, such as a smiling image of an opponent he is trying to cast as corrupt in a Michigan race.

“I’m trying to portray his glee in becoming a multimillionaire,” said Hamburger, who has worked for Democratic campaigns in Kansas and Missouri, including Tom Holland in the Kansas governor’s race.

Ads also can create guilt by association with attractive photos, said Pat Gray, a Democratic political consultant in Kansas City. For Robin Carnahan, that might be her standing beside Barack Obama; for Blunt, it might be an image linking him to a big oil company.

For viewers, Gray said, such negative associations tend to stick more than positive ones.

Bottom line, he said: “Negative advertising moves numbers.”


Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/10/10/2296775/in-political-ads-candidates-select.html#ixzz123tUftgs