Political TV Ads

Thanks to Radosh.net I found an interesting resource. It is a site called The Living Room Candidate. It is from the Museum of the Moving Image and it has a collection of presidential TV ads from 1952 to 2008. Some of them are quite a trip into a time machine of politics. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Not profound, but a simple truism. The only thing that changes is the slickness and technology.

Here's a true classic from 1952- I like Ike:



And probably the most famous of all, known as The Daisy Girl. It was a Johnson ad in 1964 against Barry Goldwater who was being portrayed as one who would start a war. It only ran once as an ad on NBC, but both CBS and ABC ran it in its entirety on the evening news. Talk about scare tactics.



And one more. This one from Nixon-Agnew trying to link Humphrey with the failures in the war and our nation in the Johnson administration. It effectively used the Democrats theme song since Roosevelt, Happy Days are Here Again.



There's a lot more where these came from... The Living Room Candidate.