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.

It was not until 1840 and the candidacy of William Henry Harrison that the first glimmerings of an organized political marketing campaign could be spotted. A career soldier and member of the Whig party, Harrison was lampooned by rival Democrats for his provincial ways, and they declared that he would rather “sit in a log cabin and drink hard cider” than be in Washington, DC. It was a fatal error of judgment. Realizing that this criticism contained just the down-home qualities that would appeal to the electorate, the Whigs eagerly adopted the term log cabin. Miniature log cabins were carried at election rallies, hard cider was served at political meetings and, in a stroke of early cross-marketing genius, bottles of hard cider were made in the shape of log cabins.

This primitive form of branding is really not much different from that proposed by Nixon’s watershed campaign of 1968. The throwaway quality of early political merchandise (paper dresses, tin badges), and the forced alliteration (“We women want Willkie”) and second-grade rhymes (“With Henry Clay/We’ll win the day”) were all aimed toward creating an “impression” and conjuring knee-jerk enthusiasm rather than building support based on reasoned conviction. Furthermore, the tchotchkes established contact with the subconscious of the voter below the word level, purposefully eliding questions as to whether the candidate had the right skills for the job.

For all the talk in recent months about the modernity of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he has hardly avoided these tried-and-true, centuries-old tactics. At his website you can buy Obama brand golf balls and umbrellas (but no eco-friendly onesies—those are available at John McCain’s online store). Indeed, when it comes to building Obama’s brand, no stone has been left unturned. Take Obama’s typeface, a font known as Gotham. Drawn from the street signs of midcentury New York, Gotham was invented in 2000 for GQ magazine and combines the modern with the nostalgic, the stylish with the manly. Its very inclusiveness seems aimed at those wavering at the political center. (If you believe this is overthinking the topic, consider that McCain’s chosen typeface—Optima—just happens to be the same as that used on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.)

Obama’s campaign logo—a sun rising over a field of red stripes— appears simple yet is packed with covert symbolism. The sun mimics the “O” of Obama, of course, but the rural image, the stripes that evoke a ploughed field, hark back to the 1930s and images of the Federal Art Project. Similarly, Obama’s watchwords—change, progress, hope— not only speak of the future but also recall the imperatives of Social Realism and the New Deal. Thus Obama’s brand is one that adopts the rhetorical dazzle and moral certainties that we associate with the past, while maintaining a resolutely contemporary feel. Most important of all, though, it feels right.

In his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), Daniel Boorstin, the late Librarian of Congress, coined the term pseudo-event to describe events such as press conferences and presidential debates that are manufactured solely to be reported. Yet he stresses, in defiance of Adlai Stevenson’s concerns, that our reliance on branding and false images “cannot—in contrary to highbrow clichés— accurately be described as a growing superficiality. Rather, these things express a world where the image, more interesting than its original, has itself become the original.”

Boorstin, whose thoughts on the image prefigure the philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum in every respect (except in the French philosopher’s gleeful acceptance of the hyperreal), sees democratic societies as being more concerned with what people believe than with what is true: credulity is more important than credibility. Boorstin worried that this meant we were becoming accessories to hoaxes that “we play on ourselves.” But perhaps this is too pessimistic a reading. From the very moment that George Washington was inaugurated— and the paving stones on which he stood were prized up and hoarded—we have been willing to sacrifice reason and fact to impression and sentiment. Indeed, the emotional, illogical choice has a much longer tradition than the intellectual one. As the brand consultant Wally Olins has stated, “In a sense brand affiliations seem, in our individualistic, materialistic, acquisitive, egocentric era, to have become some kind of replacement for or supplement to religious belief.”

The emotional impulse that brands create in us is strikingly similar to what theologians describe as a “leap of faith”: the act of passionately believing in a religion without empirical evidence. If that’s the case then the branding and marketing of candidates hasn’t degraded the democratic process, as Adlai Stevenson feared. It has instead made it immaculate.

"All The President's Marketing Men" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.