Emotions Add Up to Political Potency : Television: New York video exhibit shows how candidates use TV ads to sell themselves and attack their opponents.

Before the Willie Horton spot, before Lyndon Johnson’s notorious “Daisy” ad, the first paid political TV commercials arrived during the 1952 battle between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson and forever changed the way we choose our President.

The first ads were crude, even laughable by today’s standards: an anonymous chanteuse in a black dress sang, “Adlai, we love you madly”; a Disney-animated parade of families, farmers and businessmen marched toward Washington to the singsong chant, “We Like Ike.”

But these primitive, black-and-white sales tools heralded a new age in which most presidential elections have been won or lost on issues of personality rather than legislative substance, on raw emotion instead of rational thought.

David Schwartz, the curator of “The Living Room Candidate--A History of Presidential Campaigns on Television 1952-1992,” a video exhibit of hundreds of political ads now on view through January at the Museum of the Moving Image here, says that no single TV commercial has determined the outcome of a presidential election. But he adds that if you did not know the results of any particular race, you could figure out who won just by sitting and watching the candidates’ commercials from that year.

Guiding a visitor through 11 monitors set up at the museum to show the pivotal commercials from every presidential year since 1952, he recommends taking note of which candidate’s ads appeal most blatantly to the emotions, whose attacks ring true, whose counterattacks reveal a candidate scrambling to salvage a campaign in turmoil.

Political commercials, Schwartz suggests, have worked best not when they attempted to create new impressions about a candidate, but rather when they capitalized on pre-existing views or prejudices--such as the idea in 1964 that the ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater could not be trusted with the nuclear button.

Political ads generally do not create public opinion. But in distilling a presidential hopeful’s campaign themes down to a few powerful images, Schwartz adds, they often have served to reinforce fears and opinions--even unfounded or malicious fears and opinions--that significantly influenced the final vote tally.

In 1968, presidential candidate Richard Nixon, who had revived his political career via television with his “Checkers” speech in 1952 and then lost the 1960 presidential race to John F. Kennedy in part because of his rival’s telegenic appeal, was waiting to appear on “The Mike Douglas Show.” He complained to Roger Ailes, then a producer on the talk show, that “it’s too bad a guy has to rely on a gimmick like television to get elected.” Ailes--who helped Nixon win the 1968 election and 20 years later was the mastermind behind President Bush’s 1988 media plan--responded: “Television is not a gimmick, and nobody will ever be elected to major office again without presenting themselves well on it.”

The 160 commercials spliced together for this exhibit prove Ailes was right. In 1952, for example, Stevenson probably could not have beaten his war hero competitor no matter how he presented himself. But Stevenson’s disdain of television--evident in such statements as “I think the American people will be shocked by such contempt for their intelligence. This isn’t Ivory Soap versus Palmolive”--didn’t help.

On the other hand, Eisenhower was the first to recognize the power of television, which, while available in only 400,000 homes in 1948, had mushroomed to 19 million homes just four years later. He hired the Madison Avenue executive responsible for the M&M; “melts in your mouth, not in your hand” campaign, who placed spots in time slots normally reserved for soap and cigarettes ads on such popular TV programs as “I Love Lucy.”

Ever since, presidential elections have been waged in between the laugh tracks of America’s favorite sitcoms. By 1956, Stevenson, who again ran unsuccessfully against Eisenhower, realized he had to do battle on television and created the first presidential “attack ad.” He simply showed a 1952 clip of Eisenhower promising to lower food prices while pointing out that prices were higher than ever.

That is downright wimpy compared to what has followed.

On Sept. 7, 1964, during a break in the “NBC Movie of the Week,” an ad was broadcast showing a young girl counting to 10 as she picked the petals off a daisy. The camera zoomed in to a close-up of her face as an announcer began counting down from 10 to zero. Suddenly, the screen exploded with a nuclear blast. The ad never actually mentioned Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, but it exploited the prevailing public fear that the right-wing, communist-basher might instigate a nuclear war.

The commercial aired only that once (President Johnson and the Democrats withdrew it following Republican protests), but it was repeated countless times on news programs, and the daisy girl was pictured on the cover of Time magazine. Coupled with other innovative, conceptual ads produced by a top ad agency, it put Goldwater on the defensive and helped propel Johnson to a November landslide.

Schwartz said that attack ads have worked only when the attacks ring true for the public--as they did against Goldwater. And the attacks must also be balanced by ads or staged photo opportunities that present an extremely positive and presidential image of the man making the attack, he added, so that voters can feel good about the alternative.

“The main thing I hope for someone browsing through this exhibit is to help demystify the political process for them,” Schwartz said. “I hope they will see that political advertising on television is both an art form and an artifice. It will help them see that these campaigns are carefully scripted, that these ads are carefully calculated to appeal to emotions--sometimes ugly or base emotions. And maybe, by seeing how it all works over and over again down through the years, the public will be a little bit more informed, a little bit more skeptical, when confronted with the same thing this presidential year and in the years ahead.”