Negative Messages Expected to Knock the Other Candidate : Campaigns Fire First Blasts of TV Ad Barrage

Somewhere between “Jake and the Fatman” and the movie “I Married a Centerfold,” the most expensive and potentially powerful element of the presidential campaign began in earnest this week.

Silky, warm, fuzzy, sweet with music and full of pictures of children, George Bush’s first national television ads aired, two of them, seemingly designed to root out the so-called wimp factor by depicting Bush as both caring and strong.

Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis’ ads also began this week. In part, they attack the Republicans, another sign that the campaign will be as negative as widely predicted, and evidence of Dukakis’ role as the man trailing in the polls.

Over the next 60 days the two campaigns will probably spend more than $50 million on ads, roughly half their federally provided budgets, and the two political parties will spend several million more. Ads will be the primary way a significant number of voters, including many still undecided, learn about the candidates.

“I can hit pretty much everyone who walks and talks with an ad,” said Republican media consultant Eddie Mahe, “and that is tens of thousands more than watches the news, let alone reads the newspaper.”

Vitriolic Sales Pitch

What Americans can expect to see this year, media consultants suggest, is a sales pitch full of vitriol about the other guy: “We can’t afford the Republicans,” charges a Democratic ad about the deficit; “I remember yoooou,” goes the song in a Republican ad, accompanied by pictures of gas lines during the Carter Administration.

The reason is that in a close race, particularly one in which neither candidate is especially popular, attack advertising can change people’s minds in a hurry.

More ads than usual will try to be funny this year, for practitioners of attack ads have found that a political punch in the nose is less likely to offend voters if delivered with a laugh.

“What’s another trillion between friends?” says a character bitingly in the Democratic ad about the budget deficit.

This also could be the year of the political poster child, experts predict. Children, according to political polling on both sides, are a potent symbol of the future, particularly in an election year that finds the huge baby-boom generation reproducing en masse. Already, Bush’s two ads feature little ones captured in dreamy slow motion, running through a field, chatting with the candidate or being delightedly lifted by Bush into the air.

And many ads this year will actually be designed as subtle maneuvers to thwart the other side’s ad strategy. Consider a new Bush ad, which is taken from the vice president’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, and quotes the vice president as saying: “I am a quiet man, but I hear the quiet people others don’t.”

It is designed, say experts, not only to evoke Bush’s best campaign moment--that speech--but also to inoculate Bush against attacks that he is out of touch with average people and that he is a wimpy character.

Simpler to Analyze

Dukakis’ ads are simpler to analyze. One, technically produced by the Democratic Party, attacks Republicans for the deficit. Another, airing only in Texas, criticizes the Administration for opposing a plant-closing notification bill. A third hawks Dukakis’ record of economic prosperity in his home state of Massachusetts.

As these ads begin, everything in the campaign changes.

To begin with, it becomes important that the candidate’s appearances on the stump look and sound and feel like his ads. Political life has to imitate videotape.

For cardinal among sins in the temple of political imagery is creating ads that contradict the images of a candidate seen on the nightly news. If the images in ads and on the news differ, the ads may seem false, or worse, dishonest.

Both candidates are vulnerable here, media experts believe, because neither is particularly well defined in people’s minds.

Bush, indeed, may already have been stung by the problem.

For two weeks, Bush has staged campaign events to show him with average people, an idea that his ads would thus reinforce. But it backfired last Tuesday when angry shipyard workers in Portland, Ore., roundly booed the vice president for Adminstration economic policies.

Generally, however, the Bush ads produced by media consultant Roger Ailes have received high marks.

“Our basic themes are leadership and the future,” said Ailes in an interview, “and the first ads are more to recap the very successful acceptance speech.”

But media analysts say they do far more.

For one thing, there is the visual imagery. The use of children is designed to evoke concern for the future. Images of working people from all around the country, which Ailes used in some earlier Republican party ads last month, are designed to protect against the Democratic charge that the Republicans are the party of the rich.

Personal Warmth

The new Bush ads also work hard to emphasize that Bush has personal warmth and character, showing him in casual clothes at a family gathering. One ad ends with the tag line: “The President, the heart, the soul, the conscience of the nation.”

The Republicans “understand that their weak spot is stature,” said Democratic media consultant Robert Squier. “If they don’t make him presidential they are a stone loser.”

Kathleen Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Texas who specializes in political advertising, also thinks the Bush spots are carefully designed to preempt anticipated criticism about Bush’s weak character.

Another Bush ad quotes him as saying he wants “a kinder, gentler nation.” That implicit distinction from Reagan, Jamieson said, helps protect Bush from Dukakis criticism against the Administration.

For his part, Dukakis is employing a combination of attack and biography ads, a classic mix in a negative campaign, for one cannot attack an opponent safely, media consultants caution, without asserting somehow something positive about oneself.

The ads are produced by a consortium of political consultants and Madison Avenue ad men, led by political consultant Scott Miller of the Sawyer Miller Group and Madison Avenue ad man Gary Susnjara, president of Saatchi & Saatchi, North America.

One attack ad, technically produced by the Democratic Party, shows a close-up of a man asking for a loan and laughing:

“Hey pal, how ‘bout a couple hundred billion? I’ll pay you right back.”

“1980, National Debt $900 million,” says the text on screen.

“This is what the Republicans call managing the economy,” says an announcer.

As the ad progresses, the deficit numbers grow bigger until the man asking for the loan says: “Hey pal, just a few more years, that’s all I need.”

In 1984, said Jamieson, the Democrats “tried every means they could think of to make the deficit salient to voters and failed. This time they are trying humor, because typically humor gets people to talk about the ad, and that will push the deficit back into conversation.”

Emphasizes Record

Dukakis’ other national ad emphasizes his record:

“He turned around a 10-year economic slide and created a boom that has made Massachusetts one of the hottest economies in the country,” intones the offscreen announcer.

To Jamieson, the ads suggest Dukakis’ essential political problem. Both these arguments may not work, no matter how good the ads are, if people believe the economy is sound.

Republican consultant Mahe had another criticism. Competence alone is not a compelling issue, he said. Unless Dukakis starts talking about his own character he will have troubles.

“I want to know what you will do first before I know how well you’re going to do it,” Mahe said. In the absence of that, Dukakis will end up having to attack, to show that “somehow Bush personally isn’t up to the job.”

Among the areas where Dukakis can attack, media consultants suggested, is on Bush’s cooperation as CIA director and later as vice president with Panamanian leader Manuel A. Noriega, who has been indicted by two U.S. grand juries on drug-trafficking charges.

The Republicans, for their part, will likely be ready with ads attacking Dukakis for lack of experience on defense and foreign policy, the economy and on social issues.