By Seth Stevenson
The biggest surprise in the Republican presidential campaign in Iowa has been the relative sluggishness?until this week?of the TV propaganda battle. "The Iowa ads started later this year than last time around," Ken Goldstein, the president of Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, told Yahoo News. "Things are only starting to heat up now. This has been a pre-primary season driven by debates, not by ads, and the campaigns have for the most part been content to let it play out that way."
The sheer frequency of the debates has kept them front and center in the conversation. And the key turning points this fall happened either on stage (Rick Perry's deflating "oops") or in news reports (Herman Cain's losing struggle against the skeletons in his closet). Still, the ads the campaigns have launched across the Iowa airwaves offer insight into each candidate's strategic approach to branding. Just as corporate marketing departments seek to shape consumers' feelings toward products, political campaigns try to position their candidates within voters' minds.
Consider Newt Gingrich's sole Iowa TV ad this election cycle.
Titled "Rebuilding the America We Love," the ad steals its stylistic approach from the "Morning in America" ad created by the 1984 Ronald Reagan campaign. Both spots feature gentle, string-and-woodwind-driven scores, and scenes of waving American flags and suburban tranquility.
But while the Reagan ad celebrated an improving national condition, the Gingrich ad is displeased with the status quo and nostalgic for the brighter days of the past. It's a bit incongruous: If conditions are so dire right now (the Gingrich ad's mission statement--"We can and will rebuild the America we love"--implies that our country needs some serious refurbishing), why does the ad emit such a calm, upbeat vibe?
Gingrich needs to fight the impression, aided by a barrage of negative attack ads aimed at him by rival PACs and campaigns, that he is volatile and prone to zany proclamations. So it made little sense to re-introduce him to Iowa with a scaremongering ad full of bleak imagery.
Instead, the Gingrich we meet is almost grandfatherly. He is filmed in a warm light and smiles as he speaks in soothing tones. The financially outgunned Gingrich has used his precious paid TV time to paint himself as a cheerful, conciliatory man of reason. He even strikes a subtly inclusive tone: When his script refers to "respecting one another," the ad shows us a white woman and an African-American man walking purposefully together.
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