Donald Trump must face up to his failures and resign

This essay was published in the History News Network by Wendy Melillo an Associate Professor of Journalism in the School of Communication at American University.  Although the subject is about political advertising and the impact it has on voters' emotions, the fact is, the imagry for Donald Trump's re-election is already cast in the message expressed by the Lincoln Project's "Mourning in America".  In my opinion, Donald Trump must resign.  Lack of leadership qualifications notwithstanding, Trump will not recover from the Lincoln Project ads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yG_-K2MDo

The promise of American greatness knew no bounds in “Morning in America,” the iconic ad created by the group of political consultants and advertising gurus (the “Tuesday Team”) who worked for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. In the ad, Americans were working, getting married, and buying homes – confident that the country they lived in was “prouder and stronger and better” under President Reagan’s leadership than four short years before.

Advertising typically sells us life as we want it to be, not life as it truly is. Maybe that’s why the anti-Trump, conservative super PAC known as the Lincoln Project’s new ad “Mourning in America” is such a gut punch. As misery and despair unfold in scene after scene of job loss and death, there’s no escaping the dystopian nightmare America is now mired in as the country battles the coronavirus. After seeing the ad, Donald Trump started rage tweeting at the ad’s creators – attorney George Conway, Republican strategists Steve Schmidt and John Weaver, and media consultant Rick Wilson – at nearly 1 a.m. on May 5.

The history of political advertising offers a glimpse into why ads like this one can come to define a politician’s candidacy for better or worse. Ads that effectively tap into the collective cultural zeitgeist can become harbingers of a candidate’s fate in a way that political polling will never be able to do. Numbers can’t effectively capture the moment when advertising causes perceptions to harden into actual beliefs that govern voter decisions come election time.

We’ve seen such moments before. The 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad turned Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet, into an unpatriotic, East Coast elitist. Compare the 2008 wil.i.am “Yes We Can” video in support of Barack Obama to the 2007 viral video “Vote Different,” which superimposed Hillary Clinton’s face in the place of Big Brother in a make-over of the 1984 Apple computer ad. Putting Obama’s speeches to music communicated hope and love. Depicting Clinton as an authoritarian evoked all the negative feelings against her.

It’s worth a trip down memory lane to recall exactly how much advertising has influenced presidential campaigns and their outcomes. Historians credit Eisenhower’s decision to accept advertising with changing the course of how modern presidential campaigns would be conducted going forward, according to the former Museum of Television & Radio’s (now the Paley Center for Media) 2004 exhibit, “Madison Avenue Goes to Washington: The History of Presidential Campaign Advertising.” Whistle-stop tours ended and the era of slick ads designed to enhance a presidential candidate’s image began.

Eisenhower hired veteran ad man Rosser Reeves in 1952 to create what would become the first presidential campaign spots to air on TV. Republican Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey had rejected Reeves’s advances four years earlier because he considered mixing puffery with politics undignified.

Reeves, later known for the famous M&M candy campaign “Melts in your mouth,” crafted Eisenhower’s image by removing his glasses and filming him answering questions from Americans about taxes and Korea. The strategy behind the $60,000 campaign, called “Eisenhower Answers America,” allowed Reeves to present the candidate as fatherly, decent, responsible and trustworthy. Democrats complained that Eisenhower was selling the highest office in the land like advertisers sold soap or laundry detergent.

John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign featured the first-time political ads were shot on location. One positive ad showed Kennedy talking directly about his Catholic religion, a controversial issue at the time. The Kennedy campaign also produced a damaging attack ad that undermined the carefully honed image Republican opponent Richard Nixon had earlier created during his famous Checkers speech. When Nixon ran against Kennedy, Eisenhower was asked at a press conference to name something his vice president had done. Eisenhower answered, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” The Kennedy campaign used the remarks in TV and radio ads that questioned Nixon’s experience and capability.

Stoking fear about Republican Barry Goldwater became the key Democratic advertising strategy used to keep Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House in the 1964 presidential race. The Democrats hired the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (today DDB Worldwide) to produce a series of hard-hitting ads. One TV spot featured a saw slowly cutting off the eastern section of a model of the U.S. Just before the piece fell off and floated away, the announcer told viewers that Goldwater thought the nation would be better off without the Eastern Seaboard.

Perhaps the most controversial and memorable presidential campaign ad of all time, the “Daisy Girl” spot, played off of the very real fear Americans had of nuclear annihilation, as historian Robert Mann recounted in his book Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds: LBJ, Barry Goldwater and the Ad That Changed American Politics. The countdown to a nuclear missile launch is told through the eyes of a young girl pulling petals from a daisy flower as the mushroom cloud appears in her eye. The spot aired just once, on Labor Day, during NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies, but the subsequent media interest brought it fame as an attack ad.

The 1968 three-way race between Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace saw the birth of the media specialist in presidential campaigns, which became a major contributor to cost, even as attack ads grew in prominence. One Humphrey spot featured a man’s voice laughing uproariously as the words “Agnew for Vice President?” appeared on a TV screen.

When Nixon’s media advisors created their own in-house agency called “The November Group” in 1972, they “saved the 15 percent of the amount of television and radio air costs an agency holds back as the fee for placing an ad,” wrote Kathleen Hall Jamieson in Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising. Advertising teams would appear again in Reagan’s Tuesday Team – named after election day held on the first Tuesday in November – and in 2000 for George W. Bush’s “Park Avenue Posse,” headed by the ad agency Young & Rubicam’s Jim Ferguson.

At the time, the 1988 race between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was considered the most negative historical contest since the 1964 Daisy Girl spot. Two ads painted a devasting picture of Dukakis as weak on crime. Jamieson described “Revolving Door” in her book this way: “A procession of convicts circles through a revolving gate and marches toward the nation’s living rooms.” Jamieson said the ad made a false inference “that 268 first-degree murderers were furloughed by Dukakis to rape and kidnap,” since the facts revealed that only William Horton, a first-degree murderer whose saga the Bush campaign chronicled in the “Willie Horton” ad, escaped his furlough in Massachusetts and committed a violent crime.

As journalists stepped up their scrutiny of advertising claims made in the 1992 race, Bill Clinton’s ad team used real news footage in attack ads and played on a positive association by including a photo of a young Clinton shaking JFK’s hand.

The people who produce advertising understand how emotions can drive decision making, and voting choices are no different from product purchasing decisions. One’s instincts, often translated into “which candidate would you would rather have a drink with,” influence the ballot box, as the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson knows only too well.

Speaking of his homage to the original Morning in America spot, Wilson wrote in his May 6 column in The Daily Beast, “That brilliant, evocative minute caught a moment of uplift in the minds and hearts of American voters in that rarest of political spots; it was true in the audience’s gut.”

The darker Mourning in America video, where America is presented as “weaker and sicker and poorer,” might well be the 60-seconds that decide Trump’s fate in November.

If H.G.Wells were writing today......Coronavirus in the world history of germs

An echo opinion by Rick Wilson published in the West Virginia newspaper the Charleston Gazette-Mail: 

The coronavirus pandemic is defined in the documented "Mourning in America", as per the Lincoln Project PAC video. This video will go into history as being as damaging an anti Donald Trump media campaign as was the 1960s, ad that survives to this day, (the Daisy ad), to define Senator Barry Goldwater as "dangerous".

In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the octopus-like Martians almost wiped out humanity — until they died from infection from earth’s micro-bugs.

(I would also add to this analogy The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton.)

One might think if Martians could develop space travel, they’d have thought about germs too, but that’s not important now. The point is that things too small to see can have a huge impact.

I’ve been thinking lately about how outbreaks have often changed the course of history.

Let’s start with the Bible. Aside from the plagues of Egypt in Exodus, an example is related in 2nd Kings and elsewhere about the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem.

The Assyrians were probably the most brutal empire in the ancient Middle East, with detailed artwork depicting torture and mass executions. They ended the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C., deporting and resettling many of the survivors aside from the Samaritans, giving rise to speculation about “lost tribes of Israel.”

The same almost happened to the kingdom of Judah around 701 B.C. When things seemed hopeless, the invaders were hit by a mouse-borne epidemic, a story backed by ancient Greek historian Herodotus centuries later.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/09/07/daisy-girl-political-ad-still-haunting-50-years-later/15246667/

No Judah would have meant no rabbinical Judaism or Christianity.

An outbreak in Athens around 430 B.C., helped end the glory days of ancient Greece. After the Greeks defeated the Persians, Athens went to war with Sparta and its allies. The Athenians were a sea power while the Spartans were strongest on land.

Athenians brought in citizens from outlying areas, staying supplied by sea while Spartans burned their farms and fields. Overcrowding made sanitation worse, leading to an outbreak described in detail by Thucydides, an Athenian general and historian who barely survived it.

There’s debate about the disease, but we can just say it was bad. According to Thucydides, “Words indeed fail one when one tries to give a general picture of the disease; and as for the sufferings of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure.” Demoralized people “became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.”

Tens of thousands died, including the great political leader Pericles. While the war would drag on for 27 years, Athens never recovered and was ultimately defeated. War exhausted the winners as well. It wasn’t long before Greece was dominated by the Macedonians under Philip and his better-known son, Alexander the Great.

Rome had its outbreaks, the worst coming in 541 A.D., after it converted to Christianity. The emperor Justinian wasn’t exactly good, but he was the last to be called “the Great.” The empire had two capitals, the western in Rome and the east in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. The west fell under “barbarian” domination, but Justinian came close to reuniting it, also engaging in diplomacy and war with the Persian superpower to his east.

Then came bubonic plague, carried by fleas on rats in grain shipments from Egypt. It raged off and on for around 200 years, killing 25-50 million people.

Any hope of reuniting the empire was gone, paving the way for the rise of Europe as distinct countries rather than imperial provinces. One place largely untouched was Arabia. Islam was soon to spread through plague-weakened regions as far as the Iberian Peninsula in the west and Persia and beyond in the east.

Plague would return to Europe around 1350, recurring in waves, by some estimates wiping out more than half the population. Some historians believe it killed feudalism and helped prepare the way for the rise of capitalism and Protestantism.

When Europeans encountered indigenous people in the Americas, Old World diseases such as smallpox, chicken pox, cholera, tuberculosis, mumps and measles wiped out huge portions of the population, far more than the considerable violence of the “discoverers.” The late Yale historian David Brion Davis called it “the greatest genocide in the history of man.”

Cortez’s small band of gold-hungry murderers wouldn’t have been able to conquer the huge Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1520, without the help of a smallpox epidemic that reduced the population by an estimated 40%.

Yet another epidemic made possible the expansion of the young United States and saved the world’s first victorious slave uprising. In the early 1800s, Napoleon sought to reimpose slavery in Haiti after a victorious uprising. Haitians fought back fiercely, aided by yellow fever, a mosquito-bourne virus brought from Africa during the slave trade. The French had never before been exposed to the disease. Their expeditionary force was wiped out. To raise money to recover, Napoleon sold the U.S. territory claimed by France for $15 million in what became known as the Louisiana Purchase. This nearly doubled the size of U.S. territory.

Epidemics weren’t done with Napoleon. In 1812, he invaded Russia with his Grand Armee of around 500,000 soldiers. Invading Russia is about as good an idea as invading Afghanistan. In addition to resistance by Russian soldiers, civilians and “General Winter,” the French were struck by lice-bourne typhus. As many as 400,000 invaders died, with typhus killing the majority. Who knows what a different outcome would have meant for Russia. Perhaps there would have never been a Stalin.

These are just a few examples of how microbes have shaped history. While we’re lucky that COVID-19 might not be quite as lethal as previous epidemics, it’s a safe bet that it will leave huge and lasting changes in its wake.

It’s up to us to decide what kinds of changes those will be.