Political TV commercials

I'm sitting in my study not, as Damon Runyon used to say, not causing discomfort to any party in particular. I'm waiting for my favourite nightly news programme, which takes an hour, as no commercial interruptions and so encourages the viewer to rattle the ice and pour the barley wine and fortify himself against what's in store – wars, argument, violence, natural misfortunes, like an unpredicted ten inches of snow that came roaring in on Denver or what's common enough at this time of the year, a tornado making matchwood of a town in Arkansas.

We, in the east, have been blessed with a splendid fall, the brilliant, silver days and the sharp nights which has been followed now by Indian summer with hot, golden days and mellow nights. I bemuse myself by looking out towards the western sky – an abstract of horizontal bands of scarlet, light green and pink. It's gone in ten minutes. There is little or no twilight at this latitude which is just south of Madrid. I'm so scared or riveted by this El Greco sunset that I'm a minute or two late for the public television news.

I turn it on and somebody's interviewing a man who makes, directs, television commercials which is a puzzling item on non-commercial television and the man's saying, 'Arguments, issues, we're not interested. We're looking for images and symbols' and we're shown some quick examples of this man's art. A thousand balloons rise to the sky and maybe ten thousand invisible youngsters cheer on the soundtrack, that's all. What does it mean? It means, as a symbol, I suppose, that things are on the up and up. We cut to a handful of college students, male and female. They look serious, decent and puzzled. One of them says to a middle-aged man in a suit, 'But, tell us, you're running for Congress. Do you mean to raise taxes?' And the man bumbles, 'Erm... well...' he says and clears a nervous throat – a sure sign in this little movie that he's a Democrat. A no-nonsense voice, a voice over, says, 'Don't hesitate! Vote Republican!'

The man being interviewed is, I gather, the man in charge of the political television commercials for the Reagan campaign. What is the main aim, he's asked?' He is straightforward, blissfully unapologetic. 'To look good,' he says, 'on television.' And then we see something which I assumed we were not meant to see, the students again, breaking away and chuckling with relief, just like actors at the end of a successful take in a movie being made on location. Well, that's just what they were. We didn't hear how many takes it took before the director was satisfied that, a) they looked like students, b) they avoided peering into the camera, c) they appeared serious, decent and puzzled.

The man being interviewed made no bones about this routine. 'Sure, coaching the cast to seem like doctors or students or the grateful poor, or whatever, is the essence of the game.'

I ought to say that the aim of, above all, looking good on television is not restricted to the Republicans. The Democrats are after the same thing. The party line or prejudice not boringly argued out, but crystallised in an image, a symbol, a memorable slogan, in 30 seconds – better in ten seconds – whether the issue, the line, the prejudice that's being symbolised is taxes, poverty, social security, the arms race.

Since these so-called political commercials are watched, not sought out but simply stumbled on, by many more millions than attend rallies, outdoor or in, these are the things we ought to be talking about when we go into, as all the pundits are doing just now, the comparative merits of Mr Reagan and Mr Mondale in presenting the substance of their arguments with style. Incidentally, I'm talking to you before the final debate on Sunday 21 between the two candidates.

I have to say that I've seen scores of these party commercials and the Republicans seem better at it than the Democrats. Are they both crude, punchy, scandalously over-simplified as expressions of either party's policy or programme? Yes, they are. But ever since a young man named McGinniss who worked on the Nixon campaign of 1968 wrote a book called, 'The Selling of the President' – a calm and, to some of us, shocking book which revealed how far the advertising agencies and their writers and directors had gone to produce, or rather invent, a Nixon image that would look good on television.

Ever since that memorable lexicon, the real pros at campaigning have not been the candidates' managers or speech writers or advance men and women who whip up the crowds of the party faithful to appear in city squares or outside factories. In fact, it's become more and more doubtful whether the candidates themselves are the real contestants, but rather the cosmetic personality that the commercials create. And now, I think, we're down to the nub of the popular appeal.

It seems to me that the election will be decided by the man who is best able to act out the image that the director's script writers and cameramen have created for him and, here again, I have to admit that Mr Mondale's team has not managed to focus or gel a sharp image of a man. We seem him alternately angry, poised, sarcastic, graceful, dogged, alarmed.

Mr Reagan, on the contrary, we see in no more than two moods. Most of the time he's the smiling, upright, likeable optimist. He is rueful or sad only when he's looking at his opponents policies and making him out to be a preacher of doom and gloom. If I'd only just arrived in America for the first time and knew nothing of the presidential issues and problems, I should have to, as an old movie critic, put heavy money on Reagan, the good Joe, for 6 November.

I appreciate that this seemingly glib thought will be repugnant to many intelligent people who go on believing that elections are settled by millions of voters who weigh the issues, consider this argument and that and then, in the polling booth, come down on one side or the other. It's galling for old newspapermen, like me, what are now called workers in the print medium, to have to admit that most people do not read the New York Times before they go out and vote. The vast majority of Americans have never seen the New York Times, just as the vast majority of Britons may have seen but never bought or read the London Times. And editors of newspapers still hate to concede that in appealing to the emotions and the minds of the people, they run a very poor second to television.

The people who learned this early on and learned it for keeps were the advertising agencies who used to deal in quick slogans and catch phrases in print. They discovered as long ago as a survey 30 years ago that a television advertisement produces between ten and 12 times the response of a newspaper ad. That's why television ads, whether for a pill or a political candidate cost so much, and in the present campaign, the men who package presidential candidates in television political ads are the true king-makers.

Now, who do you suppose is most affected by these 30-second half-truths and immediate emotional appeals? I hazard a guess that the answer lies in another accredited fact, that the young American between the ages of, say, ten and 25, watches on an average six hours television a day. Way back there in the battling Sixties, the young were embroiled in politics, mainly in the politics of protest. They had as much as anybody to do with spreading the fateful disillusion in the Vietnam war.

Now those famous radicals may have been a minority of the young, but on every campus across the country they set the political tone, if not the rowdy example, of their generation. They constituted a liberal majority of the young. And into the Seventies, we took for granted their bias and the Democrats, incidentally, depended on it. Those young people fought to lower the voting age to 18 and they got it in 1971. What was not so sharply noticed down the intervening years was that in every election since 1976, the group of eligible voters that had the poorest voting record was the newly enfranchised young.

We also took an unconscionable long time to wake up to the fact that the college young don't stay young for ever. A college generation doesn't change every 20 years, it changes every four years and now, this year, the Democrats – lulled by decades of assuming that the blue-collar workers and the unions and the young would always be with them – the Democrats have discovered that the radical young are a listless minority.

The blue-collar workers broke with their Democratic allegiance in 1980 and something like 40 per cent of union workers flouted the appeals of their bosses and went for Reagan, but the young, as a political force, have tended to be ignored. Suddenly there appears a survey of political preference across the country and it's produced the staggering fact that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 are for Reagan by 71 per cent to 29. It's the most startling political fact and historically the most interesting of this presidential election and will lead to a great deal of beetle-browed and chin-rubbing enquiry.

One early explanation is that youngsters of that age have known only two previous Presidents – Carter and Ford – neither of them, we must admit, likely to stir people whose heyday in the blood is young. When Nixon abdicated, that generation was eight or 14. Names like Roosevelt or Kennedy are echoes from the history books.

Certainly a good orator could usefully invoke them with passion and admiration and a good orator has been doing it every day. Not, as you'd expect, Mr Mondale who could rightly claim Roosevelt and Kennedy as the great heroes of his party. No, it's been President Reagan who, not mentioning party, conveys that he is in the direct line of those great men.

By the way, the great general President Eisenhower is as unmentioned in this country as Khrushchev's name in the Soviet Union.

Maybe most of the young living in a new prosperity have given up politics and instinctively turn to the man who doesn't fog up politics with complications, who is the likeable optimist, the good Joe. Whichever way you look at it, it's a puzzle.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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