All the President's Marketing Men

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“The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal … is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.” —Adlai Stevenson

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower approached the advertising genius Rosser Reeves for help with his election campaign. Reeves, who was renowned for the success of his painfully repetitious Colgate and Anacin ads, not to mention the ageless mantra for M&M’s chocolate candy— “melts in your mouth, not in your hands”—had begun to theorize about his vocation, identifying the need for each product to have a “unique selling proposition.” The USP, as it came to be known, is a feature that promises the buyer a specific and unrivaled benefit.

At that time, political advertising on television was still basic in the extreme. Campaign speeches were broadcast in 30- or 60-minute segments and attracted few viewers outside the party faithful. Reeves thought that Eisenhower, who was not a great public speaker, should instead appear in 30-second television “spots” shoehorned into the normal television schedule. The spots, titled “Eisenhower Answers America,” were filmed in an empty studio with no visual distractions, mimicking the relentless full-frontal product shots of Reeves’s own advertisements. The camera was placed slightly below Eisenhower, giving him the illusion of authority, and the voters asking him questions were all shown staring up at him. The result was the image of a patriarchal, almost godlike figure. Eisenhower’s USP? Authority.

His rival, Adlai Stevenson, was appalled at the slick marketing strategy. “This isn’t Ivory Soap versus Palmolive,” he declared. But whatever the objections, there was no denying it worked. Eisenhower triumphed in 1952 and again in 1956, and advertising and politics swiftly became joined at the hip.

By the late 1960s, the Richard Nixon brain trust was perfecting how to control a candidate’s image not just during 30-second slots but throughout the entire campaign. As Joe McGinnis explained in his 1969 book The Selling of the President 1968, Nixon had lost the infamous televised debate with John F. Kennedy eight years before, in which he had sweated and looked shifty, because he had allowed his true self to be revealed: “America took its Richard Nixon straight and did not like the taste.” By 1968, Nixon realized that just as television had revealed his true nature, it could, through careful editing and stage managing, also conceal it.

Nixon’s campaign was explicit in abandoning “substance”—issues, policies, manifestos— in favor of perfecting an image. “Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort to understand what we’re talking about,” wrote William Gavin, an adviser to the campaign. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand.”

Gavin was suggesting that something other than Nixon’s knowledge of facts and figures was needed. Something less. Nixon was to be replaced by an image of Nixon, one that was handcrafted to appeal viscerally and immediately rather than intellectually and deliberately. The Nixon who ran for president in 1968 was no longer Nixon the man. He was Nixon the brand.

Brands are the poems of consumerism. They are simple symbols or phrases, but within them is an array of interlinking emotions and aspirations. A brand bypasses logic and goes to our core emotions of identifiation. It makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves—part of a lifestyle or a community whose values we share. Brands persuade us to align ourselves with them, to pledge our allegiance to either Pepsi or Coke, Nike or Adidas, Manchester United or Arsenal. In short, brands create a fake tribalism.

Such branding has been ever present in politics, even before it was known by that name. Two exhibitions of election memorabilia currently on view in New York (“If Elected: The Game of American Politics” at the New York Historical Society, and “Campaigning for President” at the Museum of the City of New York) show how, for more than a century before the arrival of television and radio, names and slogans were slapped on any and every product with a scattershot incoherence. Buttons, badges, cigars, cigarettes, thimbles, ties, ribbons, razors, dresses, doorstops, stockings, suspenders, piggy banks, and pocket watches were all co-opted by campaigning presidential candidates in an attempt to create a public image for themselves.