Why Political Advertising Unduly Influences Us

It sometimes seems that just about everyone except Kenneth W. Starr, Latrell Sprewell and Col. Tom Parker have had a share of the lead in this year’s gubernatorial race.

At the beginning of the year, statewide polling gave the edge among Democrats to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, already a well-known political figure. When she dropped out, poll respondents shuffled over to airline mega-millionaire Al Checchi, who already had spent enough on TV commercials to ease the Indonesian financial crisis. When late-entering Rep. Jane Harman began running her commercials, photographed to give her a sort of ‘touched by an angel” incandescence, survey respondents said “Oh, I like that. I guess I’m for her.” Before long, Checchi was back on TV attacking Harman. Respondents said “Oh, oh, I guess I don’t like her that well after all.” Then in mid-April, Lt. Gov. Gray Davis started running his TV commercials. Respondents said “Hmm . . . ‘experience money can’t buy.’ I guess I’m for him.”

The common thread connecting each candidate’s 15 minutes of fame is, of course, television. Even more than usual, California’s electorate seems to be pitching to whatever trade wind blows its way through the boob tube. Harman’s decline in popularity is directly related to the instinctual reactions of voters to Checchi’s attacks on her voting record. On the other hand, the plunge in Checchi’s popularity, as revealed in last week’s Los Angeles Times poll, is the result of voters turning the tables and punishing the perpetrator of negative advertising. Steve Scott is managing editor of California Journal, an independent monthly magazine that covers state government and politics. Whether they embrace an ad’s message or recoil from it, most voters will go to the polls with their heads filled with invective, shaded truth and subliminal messages that are the meat and potatoes of modern political image-making and will be virtually clueless about most of the real decisions that lay before them.

Why are we so easily gulled by this brand of political advertising? Are media professionals that skilled at pushing our buttons? Are we responding to their commercials because we don’t have other sources of information? Or are we too lazy to do our own thinking?

To be sure, the modern science of political manipulation has played a major role in how we view politics. Whether it comes in the mail or through television, the spin masters have introduced an intricate lexicon of catch phrases and wedge issues designed to appeal to prejudices, preconceptions and subconscious fears. The phrases assault us with the relentlessness of a Northeastern storm--a stream of attacks on focus-tested bogey men. They rail against the bureaucrats, labor bosses, corporate fat-cats, liberals, the “religious right” and, of course, the dreaded career politician.

It’s all ugly and cynical--and it usually works. But that doesn’t fully explain our susceptibility to political advertising. After all, the ad people aren’t using any tricks Madison Avenue already hasn’t thought up. Coke and Pepsi take digs at each other. So do Ford and GM. The main difference between political ads and car ads is that the language is somewhat less, well, subtle.

There is a body of opinion suggesting that people bend to the wind of political advertising because they simply don’t have anywhere else to turn for information. Television, the medium from which most people get most of their information, has dropped out of the business of covering campaigns. Newspapers cover politics, but it’s too much inside baseball. If TV would just cover politics one-quarter as thoroughly as it covers slow-speed car chases, we’d ail be policy geniuses and wouldn’t have to listen to all that campaign prattle, so the argument goes.

Yes, TV has taken a powder on real news and, yes, newspaper coverage could do with less inside baseball: But anyone waiting for that torrent of hidden policy wonks to come rushing over from the Dark Side of the Force had better get a Snickers and a good book, because they’re not going anywhere for awhile. Sacramento, a city where government and politics are foundations of the local economy, gives its highest television ratings to “Star Trek,” Jerry Springer, and Jerry Seinfeld. In other words, a town that is more politically oriented than just about any other in the state virtually rushes toward the cotton candy. If Sacramento exults at televised “nothingness,” do we really think that water-policy lectures would go over any better anywhere else?

No, it’s not the bad old image makers. Nor is it the ratings-driven TV news directors. It’s us. Californians are checking out on doing any real thinking about polities or public policy and are instead surrendering themselves to instinct. Issues have become increasingly complicated, and the decisions we are asked to make increasingly involve shades of gray. Even well-intentioned voters find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer length of a ballot pamphlet that in some years has a Volume I and a Volume II.

Few institutions better reflect the consequences of our political inattentiveness than the California Legislature. At its worst, the Legislature suggests that it is possible for a representative body to be too representative. With a helping hand from term limits, the Legislature, as currently constituted, sounds like a group of people consumed by their own spin. Politicians who come to office by presenting themselves as “outsiders” see themselves as having little or no connection to the institution. After all, they are men and women of “principle.” Just follow your heart. It’ll all work out.

It seldom does. More often, the relative inexperience and political self-absorption result in a level of discourse that sounds remarkably like the shrill, vapid campaigns that brought these people to office in the first place. Committee and floor debate is often laced with personal invective, snide insult and the same cookie-cutter solutions that once enticed voters.

The coming fight over a proposed reduction in the vehicle license fee, the “car tax,” is a case in point. Regardless of its merits, don’t let anyone convince you that the issue was prompted by a spontaneous taxpayer revolt. It is the issue in California now because last year it was the issue in Virginia, where it helped Republicans win a governorship and statewide offices. Just another in a long line of debates in which the lines between policy and political spin blur into invisibility.

Of course, many say that this is simply the way of things. Isn’t the whole idea of democracy to elect people who reflect their constituents? Don’t we want leaders who are just like us? No, we don’t. We ask a whole lot more of officeholders now that we did when government by parable was even remotely possible.

The cold fact is, we only get out of our leaders what we put into selecting them. Voting is the foundation of representative government and becoming informed is the sweat equity. If we only reach far enough to choose those who are just like us, likely we’ll wind up with more than our share of low-watt space fillers who mouth faux Populism and color well within the partisan lines. But if we want our leaders to deliver what we expect of them, we have got to do more than just proclaim our disgust with negative advertising. As long as voting is little more than “short attention span theater,” government will continue to resemble theater of the absurd.