Any day you’re not moving the ball forward, it’s moving backward. Lee Atwater, the controversial Republican political consultant and mentor to Karl Rove, coined this insightful maxim while he was serving as the manager for George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. Atwater’s statement can be considered a timeless piece of advice that should be kept in mind by all politicians, political consultants and pundits no matter where they may fit on the political spectrum. The core principle behind the maxim is the importance of staying on message, of always defining yourself and of never letting your opponent define you. However, since consistently achieving these ends in any political campaign is not always an easy task, the ball often begins moving backward when all three goals are not reached.
Many tactics are used by political consultants in the attempt to move the ball forward when crafting their candidate’s message and to avoid having the ball roll backward by being pulled off message because of distractions from opponents or from the media itself. However, there is one widely-used tactic in the United States, and which is increasingly used in Canada, offering the potential to move the ball both forward and backward simultaneously, thus helping one candidate but hurting another at the same time. That tactic is none other than the negative attack advertisement.
Negative advertisements are nothing new. They have been used for the better part of half a century in American politics, but it wasn’t really until the 1988 presidential election that the effectiveness of the technique would be fully realized. Flawlessly executed, it could diminish the credibility of the target of the advertisement while successfully reshaping voters’ opinions of the attack ad’s intended protagonist. In 1988, the National Security Political Action Committee aired an advertisement that is still considered by many to be the most successful negative attack ad of all time: the infamous “Willie Horton” advertisement.
The advertisement contrasted Republican George H. W. Bush’s view of crime and its punishment with that of his Democrat opponent, then Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis. It focused on Dukakis’s policy of granting weekend passes to prisoners serving time for felony offences in the state of Massachusetts. In a manner deemed by many to be racially charged, the advertisement highlighted how Willie Horton, an inmate serving a life sentence for murder, was let out on a weekend pass but went AWOL. During his extended weekend leave, he kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and raping the woman before being apprehended some months later in the state of Maryland. The advertisement wrapped up with the pithy phrase, “Weekend prison passes: Dukakis on crime.” Although the advertisement was produced outside the Bush campaign by the National Security Political Action Committee, when it was coupled with the guerilla-like campaign tactics utilized under the direction of Atwater, the Bush campaign was able to reshape the public’s opinion of Dukakis and eliminate his roughly seventeen point lead in the polls. The end result was a landslide victory for Republican George H. W. Bush in November of 1988.
Twenty-four years later, the legacy of those negative attack ads perfected in the 1988 presidential campaign lives on. In the ongoing 2012 Republican presidential nomination process, candidates have spent millions of dollars generating negative advertisements in an attempt to reframe and redefine an opponent in a less favorable light, albeit with more subtlety than in the no-holds-barred Willie Horton advertisement.
The success of the Willie Horton ad demonstrates that using negative advertisements can move the ball forward, benefiting those who launch the advertisement and, especially, the candidate who is positively associated with the advertisement. However, there is always the possibility that this same practice can be damaging to those who launch the advertisement.
Mary Matalin, the widely respected Republican political consultant who worked on the 1988 Bush campaign with Lee Atwater and who served as the deputy campaign manager for the 1992 Bush re-election campaign, stresses the importance of keeping a campaign positive until just before going negative. Launching a negative ad when the public already views your candidate negatively can be extremely damaging since it risks a backlash from those who claim to hate negative campaigning. In other words, you cannot successfully launch a campaign by projecting negativity from the outset. To do so would seriously jeopardize your campaign by swiftly moving the ball backwards. The pitfalls of such a strategy are illustrated by the recent Ontario provincial election where the Progressive Conservative leader, Tim Hudak, who went negative from the outset and did not project a positive vision for Ontario, was rejected by Ontario voters.
Because they understand that negative advertising can be a dangerous double-edged sword, many candidates will claim that they are running a “positive” campaign and will extol the virtues of such a campaign to voters even as they purchase millions of dollars worth of airtime and fire one negative attack ad after another at their opponent. To see a striking example of this phenomenon, one need look no further than the Republican presidential candidate nomination race. In state after state, most candidates have launched multiple negative advertisements but are still careful to remind voters that they are running a positive campaign. This seemingly contradictory behaviour brings to mind another old maxim worthy of note: that is, in all politics, perception is reality.
