The attack of the attack ads

Green Bay, Wis. —  This is not the sort of happy talk you expect to hear when you flick on your TV at 7 in the morning: “These people want to kill us.” This is not what you expect to see: Grainy mug shots of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Unless, that is, you live in Green Bay, and it’s time for “Good Day Wisconsin” on WLUK, the local Fox affiliate. I had come to Green Bay the last week of September, with five weeks left in the presidential race, to watch television. Stationed at the Holiday Inn downtown, along an industrial stretch of the Fox River, I had come to see what a majority of the country, in this bifurcated, swing-state-wooing march to Nov. 2, isn’t seeing. Campaign TV ads. In real time. Bush and Kerry fighting it out amid Packer highlights, the local forecast (A frost warning? In September?), the segment on the woman who crochets memory quilts for her grandkids.

After Green Bay it would be on to Miami, to an even bigger battleground, Florida. Watching TV in a state that’s up for grabs makes it clear that this presidential race is being narrowcast. Some 60% of Americans, including those in Los Angeles, live in a place where not a single presidential ad has been broadcast on local TV since March, according to the University of Wisconsin-based Wisconsin Advertising Project, which has been amassing a huge database tracking TV ads in the nation’s 210 markets.

The other roughly 40% are being bombarded every time they turn on the TV. Wisconsin, with its 11 electoral votes, is a case in point: Kerry and Bush ads aired in a continuous loop, squeezing local advertisers off the air and leaving viewers dizzy with attack and counterattack ads that change by the week, if not faster.

“They come in very last minute,” Jay Zollar, general manager at WLUK, said of the churn. “It’s difficult for us to plan how we sell our inventory.”

In Green Bay-Appleton, during the roughly two days I was there, campaign ads aired 382 times across the city’s five network-affiliated stations, according to Nielsen Monitor Plus and the Wisconsin Advertising Project. This, despite the lack of academic consensus on how much ads influence voters.

In the city’s sports bars (and there are many, this being Packer country), Wisconsinites, a gracious, self-effacing bunch in the main, seemed bemused by it all. “You don’t get the ads?” they kept saying in surprise. They themselves were sick of the ads, found them too negative, a cacophonous turn-off. I nodded, feeling like an odd kind of tourist, not here to see their city so much as watch what was on their television sets. Maybe if I stayed for a month I would begin to feel their oppression.

“They treat us like idiots,” was what Sharon Toebe, who works with disabled children, said as she sat at the bar at Titletown Brewery. But you could tell people also thought there was something vaguely undemocratic that a state as large as California wasn’t being treated, in a sense, to one of the most distinguishing features of a presidential race.

True, the campaigns take out ads on national cable news networks, and you can go watch the ads on any number of websites, on www.john kerry.com and www.georgebush.com, or www.moveonpac.org and www.pfavoterfund.com. But this is an elective act; it is not the same as turning on your television and being regularly, urgently harangued for your vote.

‘Good Day Wisconsin’

In Green Bay, the first ad I saw, the one that told me people were out to kill me, happened to be the most sensational. “Finish It,” produced by the conservative interest group Progress for America Voter Fund, a political action committee, or so-called 527, began airing Sept. 27 in Iowa and Wisconsin.

Thanks to the McCain-Feingold-Cochran Campaign Reform Bill, the provenance of a political ad, and hence its accountability, has become easier for a TV viewer to figure out. If it’s an ad produced by the Bush campaign, for instance, the president must by law appear on screen, saying, “I’m George Bush, and I approve this message.”

This, of course, does not prevent either candidate from letting other groups do the dirtier work, in ads that can appear so many times that you lose track of which come from the candidate, which come from the party and which come from an interest group.

Like the majority of the ads I saw, “Finish It’s” theme was terrorism and Iraq. “They killed hundreds of children in Russia,” the grim-voiced announcer said over footage of a man carrying a wounded child from the recent school hostage crisis in Russia. “Two hundred innocent commuters in Spain. And 3,000 Americans.”

A photo of the rubble of the World Trade Center appeared, three firefighters seen in silhouette against the smoke. “John Kerry has a 30-year record of supporting cuts in defense and intelligence,” the announcer said, “ ... and endlessly changing positions on Iraq.” News articles flashed on the screen, footnotes impossible to sort out. Then Kerry appeared, red-eyed and dour-faced. “Would you trust Kerry against these fanatic killers?” Now the ad resolved to a shot of the president, behind his presidential lectern, speaking to a crowd. “President Bush didn’t start this war,” the announcer said defiantly, “but he will finish it.”

Abruptly, we rejoined “Good Day Wisconsin,” anchored by Pete Petoniak and Rachel Manek. They were giving a divorced mother of two a makeover, live from the Chameleon Salon and Spa in downtown Green Bay, and the stylist was promising to bring out the Princess Diana in her face.

This is where the campaign ads are mostly clustered, around the local news, on the theory that these viewers are more engaged politically than the ones watching “Judge Hatchett.” And so the political ad race played out amid a stew of locally flavored programming: the snow blower sale going on at Menards and endless highlights of the Packers, who had lost the day before to the Indianapolis Colts.

The political ads repeated like the same seven songs at a Top 40 station. The ones attacking Kerry hit at the flip-flopping image. “Windsurfing,” a Bush campaign ad that showed video of Kerry windsurfing off Nantucket over the tag-line “John Kerry, whichever way the wind blows,” now had a sister ad that Wisconsin was seeing. This one looked junkier than the first, a Photoshopped Kerry, with surf music, and a young woman going, “Windsurfing. Fun on water. Bad on issues. Total wipeout, dude.”

The Kerry ads mocked Bush for declaring an end to “major combat” in Iraq aboard that aircraft carrier back in May 2003.

“I saw a poll that said the right track / wrong track in Iraq was better than here in America,” an ad showed Bush saying during a muddled moment in a Rose Garden news conference.

“The right track?” an announcer came on. “Americans are being kidnapped, held hostage, even beheaded. Over a thousand American soldiers have died. And George Bush has no plan to get us out of Iraq. John Kerry does. The Kerry plan: Allies share the burden. Train Iraqis to protect themselves. John Kerry. A new direction in Iraq.” Then Dean Cain reappeared on “Live With Regis and Kelly,” say, or Stephen Collins on “Good Day Live,” plugging their TV shows.

“If you’re making a decision based on the ads, you’re not paying attention, in my mind,” said Jack Rajchel, 52, a service manager for a medical equipment supply company. This was at Anduzzi’s, a sports bar near Lambeau Field. It was Monday night; the mood at the bar was subdued. Rajchel said I should stick around; the Metallica concert at the Resch Center would let out soon, and then things might pick up. Were Metallica fans disproportionately Kerry, Bush or undecided?

Later that evening, at the Coach’s Corner, I found myself in deep discussion with a man who claimed the government was hacking into Islamic websites to prevent us from seeing more beheadings in Iraq over the Internet. He was voting for Bush, he said, because the Middle East was out to get us, and our troops were dying so we wouldn’t. It dawned on me how effective that ad “Finish It” might be.

Criticized early on for using 9/11 imagery in their ads, Bush and the Republicans and the conservative interest groups still managed to frame the ad debate through the prism of fear. Fear is easily manipulated. Especially when you have only 30 seconds. Fear makes you buy into the diet supplement, or the ad that warns, “These people want to kill us.” Buy Bush. How do you counter that? How can you touch the same nerve with an ad that says, “You’re not that fat”?

Back at the Holiday Inn, I finally caught a political ad that had nothing to do with terrorism or Iraq. It was also, in a less visceral way, about fear -- a Kerry ad attacking Bush over the rising costs of prescription drugs for seniors and for blocking Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices. The ad featured an elderly couple, Jerry and Shirley Busser, of Lorain, Ohio, sitting at their kitchen table amid a mass of pill bottles. “I’m 72 and still working,” Jerry Busser said. “I just couldn’t afford to retire because of the bills. You don’t take your medication, you’re not going to live.”

One afternoon I took a break from watching political ads on TV and drove to Madison, where you can see every single ad this campaign season has generated. Joel Rivlin, deputy director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, led by University of Wisconsin political science professor Ken Goldstein, is overseeing a database that will house reams of information on how Bush and Kerry -- and the political parties and special interest groups -- communicated with voters through their ads.

It means that a team of University of Wisconsin students is in a basement in Ingraham Hall, each making between $8 and $10 an hour to fill out an 80-item questionnaire for every downloaded ad. I watched the Michael Moore-ish “All in the Family” ad, from the Media Fund, which needles Bush for his financial ties to the Saudi royal family.

Rivlin talked about whether, as it had been suggested to me by several people along the way, there was something undemocratic about the way the ads were playing to less than half the country.

“It’s a recognition that your vote is not in play, not because you’re not important but because the system dictates ....” Rivlin, 25, from Leeds, England, broke off, reaching for a different analogy.

“Let me give you an example from English soccer,” he said. “Arsenal, a team in London, used to play the most boring [game]; they used to get the ball from the goalkeeper, kick it upfield, they used to have two 6-foot people right at the end who just headed it in. People chanted, ‘Boring, boring Arsenal.’ But it won the game.”

Daisy D., Bush, Kerry and me

Later in the week, ensconced in a vastly different locale -- the Loews Hotel on South Beach in Miami -- political spots appeared 641 more times over a two-day period. This was more than double the rate in Wisconsin, a measure of Florida’s 27 electoral votes to Wisconsin’s 11.

Here the local news was a world away from Green Bay. The newspeople were multiethnic, South Beach sexy and even, yes, in drag (Daisy D., a reporter for the local entertainment show “Deco Drive”). Juxtaposed against this more disco version of the local news, the political ads seemed a precipitous downer.

Watching television in Florida, though, I learned something disturbing: 97 foreign objects were left in people’s bodies last year by doctors, and 46 operations had been conducted on the wrong body part. This was according to a political ad that urged Floridians to vote no on Amendment 3, which if passed would give more protection against lawsuits to big medical providers.

But ads for the local races on the Nov. 2 ballot couldn’t keep pace with the presidential campaigns. Bush-Kerry was the hot local news of the week anyway, with the debate in Miami’s backyard, at the University of Miami. The local news teams feasted on the political celebrities suddenly in their midst, people like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and NBC commentator Tim Russert, who were more than available in the “spin zone” set up at the debate site.

As the debate loomed, the campaigns unveiled new attack ads, ones I hadn’t seen in Wisconsin.

The Bush campaign put up a spot featuring quick-hit TV clips of Kerry, edited for maximum embarrassment. “I have always said we might yet find weapons of mass destruction,” Kerry was seen saying, and: “The winning of the war was brilliant” and, of course: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.”

A counter ad put out by the Democratic National Committee had a photo of Bush, squinting into the distance, and the following voice-over: “No one call tell him he’s wrong, even though there were no weapons of mass destruction. The deficit has never been higher. He’s lost more jobs than any president in 75 years. And 1,000 American soldiers have died in a war poorly planned. But no one can tell him he’s wrong ....”

This was a version of a different ad I had seen in Wisconsin, one that asked: “How can you solve problems when you won’t even admit they’re there?” In Florida, though, Bush, the incumbent, had certain built-in advantages. Namely, his brother Jeb, the Florida governor, with whom he was seen repeatedly on the local news, touring areas affected by Hurricane Jeanne and visiting those still in shelters. This amounted to a kind of ad too -- the president seen offering aid and comfort to hurricane victims, while Kerry was holed up in the Bal Harbor Sheraton, preparing for the main event and making fewer and briefer appearances on the news.

Two days after the debate, the campaigns had new ads going, with titles like “Global Test” (a Bush ad) and “He’s Lost, He’s Desperate” (a Kerry ad).

At the Sam Adams Bar at the Miami airport, I lingered around the TV screen, knowing I was going back to a place where I might catch an ad on CNN, but only if I was lucky.

You don’t get the ads? the bartender, Sandra Sayer, mused. “Isn’t that un-American?”