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Inside Politics

Greenfield: Fear a popular theme in political ads

By Jeff Greenfield
CNN Senior Analyst
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If President Roosevelt were around today, he might amend that famous line from his first inaugural address.

Apparently, the only thing we have to fear is ... political campaign ads that play on fear.

The latest example now playing on a cable network near you, and soon to be on the political talk show circuit, is a Republican ad as stark as a midnight winter landscape on the Great Plains. (Full story)

All we hear is a ticking ... what? A clock? A bomb?

Black-and-white graphics appear: pictures of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri appear along with threatening quotes going back as far as eight years and spelled out on the screen. (View the ad at the Republican National Committee Web siteexternal link)

There is no mention of the president or of the Republican Party. There is just a warning, "These Are the Stakes," and a reminder to vote.

To political junkies of a certain age, this ad will instantly bring to mind the infamous 1964 "Daisy" ad that showed a little girl picking a daisy, and an ominous voice counting down to a nuclear blast. The add aired only once. (Watch the GOP's new ad compared to an old classic -- 2:05 Video)

Similarly, the voice of President Johnson was heard intoning, "These are the stakes:" and continuing, "To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark."

The ad never mentioned GOP nominee Barry Goldwater; nor did it raise any specific issue about Goldwater's sometimes provocative comments (It did, however, urge the audience to vote for President Johnson).

Apparently, the current Republican ad is built on the theory that voters who have the terror threat in mind are more likely to vote Republican.

Now it's not as though we have to go back 40 or more years to find ads that appeal to root anxieties. In fact, it's more common than not. In 1968, the Nixon campaign urged voters to "vote like your whole world depended on it," using images of war and domestic violence, which, it should be said, were very much in evidence in that year.

In 1976, when President Ford was being challenged hard by Ronald Reagan for the GOP nomination, the Ford campaign had an ad which said, "Remember, Governor Reagan couldn't start a war; President Reagan could."

Four years later, the Jimmy Carter campaign used "man in the street" ads where people said, among other things, "he scares me; Reagan really scares me."

In 1984, the Walter Mondale campaign hit challenger Gary Hart with a "red phone" ad, showing a "crisis" phone ringing, suggesting Hart wasn't the right person to be running things in a crisis.

And as recently as the last presidential campaign, a Bush ad showed soldiers and weaponry literally disappearing from the battlefield, suggesting that John Kerry's votes would have left our military weak.

These ads all feature ominous images and sounds, but sometimes the same point can be made with a lighter touch. In 1984, the Reagan campaign aired an ad that said, "There's a bear in the woods" to suggest the menacing presence of the Soviet Union.

And no one who saw it can forget the image of Michael Dukakis in 1988, in what must be the most unfortunate photo-op in history, riding in a tank with an odd hat on his head, and bringing to mind the image of Snoopy as a World War I aviator dueling the Red Baron.

The campaign of George H.W. Bush promptly put the video into an ad that more or less said, "Do you really want this guy as commander in chief?"

If current poll numbers are right, this recent appeal to remember the terror threat may not be nearly as effective as it was two and four years ago, principally because widespread discontent with Iraq has eroded confidence in Bush and the Republicans as stewards of the war on terror.

But in the campaign's last weeks, the GOP seems to be gambling on the card that worked for them twice before.


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A new Republican ad campaign is the latest to have taken that famous line from the 1933 inaugural address of President Roosevelt and run with it.

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