Emotions ran high in stem-cell advertising

     by Dan Hellinger
     They say all politics is local, but it's not always the case," said a swaying Michael J. Fox in a television ad supporting Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat challenging incumbent Senator Jim Talent in last week's election. At the time, Fox probably did not fully appreciate how much his intervention in one state election could dominate the national news.

     Alessandra Stanley, media critic for The New York Times, wrote, "The plea is as disturbing-and arresting-as a hostage video from Iraq."

     The ad endorsed McCaskill for her support of a "yes" vote on Amendment 2, the so-called "stem cell initiative." Supporters were asking voters to inoculate themselves against any attempt by the state legislature to restrict research and therapy beyond federal limits. But, opponents like Anita Crane, editor of Celebrate Life, the magazine of the American Life League, wanted voters to believe that Amendment 2 "would forge a constitutional right to clone, destroy, buy and sell embryonic human beings." Each side had approximately $30 million to wage a media war over the initiative.

     Opponents of the stem cell initiative attempted to respond to the Fox ad with their own star power. Their ad included former Rams quarterback Kurt Warner and Cardinals pitcher Jeff Suppan. Then, the stem cell side responded with their own athlete-celebrity - former football Cardinal's star tight end, Jackie Smith, in a radio commercial. Celebrity endorsements are hardly new, but never before had the starting pitcher of a World Series game been featured in a political ad to be shown while he was on the mound.

Emotional Wallop
     Rarely does a political ad pack such a powerful emotional wallop as did the Fox pitch for McCaskill. It will go down in the history of political advertising as the equal of Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy" ad, which featured a little girl picking petals off a daisy during a countdown to a nuclear explosion, and the "Willie Horton" ad that helped sink the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis in 1988. These kinds of ads generate benefits beyond the norm because they create tremendous buzz. The "Daisy" ad never actually aired but was strategically leaked to news media, contributing to Johnson's landslide victory.

     Although the Fox ad did air as a commercial, its original audience was limited to Missouri, but was shown and discussed around the country, and Fox subsequently filmed ads for a variety of candidates, mostly Democrats who supported stem cell research.

     Like the "Daisy" and "Willie Horton" ads, Fox's appeal cut through the clutter of campaign advertising. It reached an important part of the electorate who often stays home on Election Day. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director for the Annenberg Public Policy Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, perhaps the foremost expert on political advertising, told the Washington Post that Fox's youth added a particularly effective dimension to the McCaskill ad. "As a result, a lot of people in his age range can look at him and say, 'If that can happen to him, it can happen to me.'"

     Such emotionally laden ads carry a risk of alienating voters who find the entire message exploitative. However, Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing demagogue carried on KMOX radio, negated much of that feeling when he accused Fox of deliberately exaggerating his symptoms. The controversy stimulated many otherwise apolitical people to seek out the ad on the Internet - something not available at the time of the "Daisy" and "Horton" ads. There had been more than 2 million views of the ad on YouTube by the end of October.

     The Fox ad wasn't McCaskill's only attempt to ride Amendment 2 to victory. The Democrat developed a series of ads, "Missouri voices," which included several highlighting the stem cell issue. One was Ida. Ida looked much angrier than Fox as she said directly into the camera that she has Parkinson's and wants to tell Senator Talent one thing: "You never know what life brings. I hope you and your family will never need the cures offered through stem cell research. I never thought I would."

     The opponents of Amendment 2 also sought to personalize the issue. One of its spots featured a woman seated on the couch in what would pass for a typical, white, upper middle class suburb. The woman gradually breaks down sobbing as she describes the threat to her daughter's health and childbearing capability as a result of selling her eggs for medical research.

     Another ad, produced by the Vitae Caring Foundation, featured a "student" breaking down as she describes the unintended effects of having sold her eggs for college expenses. Vitae calls the stem cell initiative a hoax on its Web site, but the "student" was, in fact, an actress, not an actual victim.

     These kinds of ads do address a legitimate issue - the ethics of medical research in a commercial environment. Opponents greatly exaggerated the health risks and chose to ignore language in the proposition making it more difficult to clone a human being, should future technology make that possible.

     On the other hand, while some ads in favor of the proposition featured medical researchers and professionals dispassionately endorsing the amendment, others came close to promising miracle cures if only the voters would concur with the amendment. Some pro-stem cell research ads deliberately left the impression that without the legislation Missourians would not have access to cures resulting from the research. That possibility cannot be discounted, but no such legislation had, in fact, moved forward. Also some of the advertising for the proposition left the impression that new miracle cures were just around the corner.

     Talent wanted voters to believe he is a moderate on the issue of stem cell research. The incumbent senator attempted to respond with ads touting his support for medical research, including stem cell research under existing guidelines. He also protested Fox's charge that he (Talent) sought to "criminalize the science that gives us a chance for hope." Talent says he supports stem cell research that does not involve cloning or destroying a human embryo.

     His efforts were undermined in the St. Louis debate on Oct. 11 when Mike Bush, a former sports reporter who anchors KSDK (Channel 5)'s evening news, chose to frame a question about stem sell research around a personal friend's bout with ALS disease. Bush wanted to know, what would Senator Talent tell Sam Goldstein? Essentially, Bush was hitting Talent with the same kind of sucker punch that Bernard Shaw delivered to Michael Dukakis in 1988, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Talent did little better in responding than Dukakis did.

     In effect, Talent had a Willy Horton problem. Horton was the African-American convicted rapist and murderer featured in an ad critical of the Democratic presidential nominee, Dukakis. The ad charged that Dukakis supported a prison furlough program that allowed Horton, whose mug shot was prominently featured in the ad, to commit a subsequent heinous crime. The ad was ostensibly about crime but it was really an attempt to appeal to white racism and fears about blacks.

     Like the Fox ad, the Horton ad itself became an issue and was subject to fierce criticism. But the damage to the Dukakis campaign was done. George H.W Bush recognized its effectiveness and referred to it repeatedly throughout the campaign. Lee Atwater, the Republican media strategist behind the ad, denied it was racist, but just before this death in 1991 Atwater apologized to Dukakis for making Horton "his running mate."

     Through similar ads run throughout the country, Michael J. Fox made himself the "running mate" for Democratic candidates across the country - but a welcome one. Talent, meanwhile, no matter how much he claimed to support medical science, found himself saddled with a running mate named "Parkinson's Disease."

Celebrities, Polls, Turnout
     How powerful is a celebrity endorsement? By the time you read this article, we'll know how the election turns out, both on the amendment and on the Senate. Yet we may never know how much the ad ultimately shaped the outcome.

     In their last sounding before the election, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and KMOV (Channel 4) poll found that 75 percent of McCaskill voters supported the amendment. Slightly more than half of Talent supporters opposed it. Talent and McCaskill were dead even at 47 percent each. A Survey USA poll done for Channel 5 and a station in Kansas City, found McCaskill ahead by 3 points, just within the margin of error. However, Survey USA found much higher percentages of Talent supporters opposed to the proposition.

     The Channel 5 poll found support increasing for both "yes" and "no," with late deciders breaking even. Previous to the Fox ad, polls had identified significant slippage in support for "yes." In the Senate race, independents had swung back and forth (within a narrow range) for the two candidates. The late October swing toward "yes" and toward McCaskill among this group suggests that the Fox ad had the intended effect.

     By aligning itself closely with Amendment 2, the McCaskill camp clearly hoped to bring out more voters sympathetic to Democrats. However, in contrast to the gay marriage issue two years ago which helped mobilize conservative evangelicals sympathetic to the GOP, the McCaskill side strategy had greater potential to mobilize her opponents, not just supporters.

Sex, Lies and YouTube
     By far the most cited organization for checking the veracity of political ads is Annenberg's FactCheck.org. In late October, the organization said Talent ads "share a simple, misleading strategy: false attribution." In particular, FactCheck accused the Talent campaign of attributing several highly critical quotes about McCaskill to the Kansas City Star. In fact, her opponents and critics, not the paper's own reporters or editors, made the statements.

     Although FactCheck.org included many articles critical of Republican candidates on its Web site, as of Nov. 1, it had posted no direct criticisms of McCaskill advertising.

     Ads tend to get more negative closer to an election and when national and unaffiliated groups involve themselves. FactCheck.org says the national party media operations amount to "attack-ad factories." Together, the two parties were pouring more than $150 million into ads that were 90 percent negative. The GOP filed a report with the Federal Election Commission on Oct. 23 indicating it would spend more than $1.7 million on ad buys to have an impact on the election.

     Negative ads are not nearly so corrosive to our political culture than personalized attack ads. If McCaskill's ads scored higher on Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" scale than Talent's, she matched him in terms of personal negativity. For example, instead of simply attacking the senator's record on welfare measures, she chose to ask in a radio spot "what kind of a man…" votes for various cuts in social services.

Voter Choice and the Media
     What's a voter to believe? Does Talent really not care about veterans? Will McCaskill "cut and run?" Does Amendment 2 really guarantee a right to clone - or is it about nothing more than allowing science to produce medical advances? We explored some of these issues in October's SJR. Voters are being asked to decide a complex and difficult issue, but, as we've seen, both sides in the stem cell battle have relied as much on emotive as rational appeals to voters.

     Political scientists attempt to study how voters make choices by dividing their attention between forces that are internal and those that are external to the individual. A recent Duke University conference on the subject was organized to examine predispositions that are in place before a campaign and cognitive and affective reactions to events during the campaign. The Fox ad clearly falls into the category of an "affective" event, and a calculated one at that.

     Voter predispositions in turn can be divided between those that are part of the voter's first-hand experience and those that are "mediated." Loss of a friend or relative in war, knowing someone who becomes unemployed, experiencing increased prices at the supermarket or gas pump-all are examples of events that cumulatively may predispose a voter against an incumbent because they are actually experienced.

     One job of polling is to research and accurately gauge voter predispositions, especially those of voters who are independents or only weakly identify with a particular political party. When Claire McCaskill utilized a farmer to criticize high gasoline prices, she was attempting to capitalize on discontent over which she and other politicians have little control, and to reach out to a constituency that might be enemy territory for her overall.

     The psychological terrain inside the voter's head is difficult to map. When citizens are asked just before they cast their ballot to count up what they like and dislike about each candidate, the net score predicts very well how they vote. However, some research shows that this judgment is based not only on what happens in the campaign but what voters have stored away, perhaps even unconsciously, about each candidate.

     Still other research suggests that evaluations of candidates are strongly influenced by their record, party identification and a rational calculation of how much better a challenger might do versus the actual performance of the incumbent.

     Some political scientists believe that the "science" of predicting election outcomes or individual voting is quite immature and will grow in power over time. Others ridicule the notion that any comprehensive theory of voter choice will ever be developed. The best political scientists may hope to achieve is to map how voters behave in a particular historical and cultural situation. History and culture are always changing. And those who run campaigns are only too happy to use the knowledge developed by political science and change the cultural context.

     Many political scientists believe there never will be a universal, comprehensive theory of voting behavior. It would be foolish, however, to underestimate the power of what we know about voter choice, however ephemeral it may prove to be. Social psychology has been quite effectively applied to consumer choices. Indeed, as Bill Moyer's pointed out during the Reagan years in his PBS series, "The Public Mind," the shift of public predispositions from the Democratic liberal majority forged under Franklin Roosevelt to a more conservative orientation favorable to Republicans was engineered by the media gurus behind Ronald Reagan's successful run for the presidency in 1980 and his re-election in 1988.

     There is a dialectic at work here. Joseph Goebbels drew heavily on Madison Avenue for his revolutionary propaganda campaign on behalf of Hitler. To his knowledge of the budding field of mass advertising he added his innovation, the "big lie." His development of political propaganda in turn inspired a new generation of public relations specialists after World War II. Around 1980 it was the turn of the political world to borrow back.

     Under the adroit leadership of Michael Deavor, deputy White House chief of staff, the Republicans built an image-making machine that combined the polling genius of Richard Wirthlin's polling firm, Decision Making Information, Inc., with slick Madison Avenue advertising. Fundamental media techniques have not changed. What has changed, largely due to Karl Rove's innovations, is a shift toward better understanding of how to use media as part of an overall strategy to increase turnout among voters predisposed to conservative candidates.

     Some of this innovation involves shifting from "carpet bombing" advertising to narrowly targeting key groups with a combination of old and new media. But there still comes a time when carpet-bombing through national media works. With the attention of much of Missouri on the Cardinals' World Series push in October, the McCaskill campaign launched its most effective aerial assault.

     Knowing someone with a serious disease that might be cured via stem cell-related therapies would be, in many cases, a powerful incentive to vote "yes."



     Dan Hellinger is professor of political science at Webster University.