Daisy Girl

From today's New York Times, Tony Schwartz, the adman who created Lyndon Johnson's 1964 Daisy Girl ad, has passed away. Daisy Girl (actual title: Peace Little Girl) is the most famous television political ad ever created. George H.W. Bush's 1988 Willie Horton ad is the only other one that even comes close in terms of impact. The difference is that Daisy Girl is a genuine work of art. It tries to evoke an emotion in the voter rather than propose or oppose any particular policy. It preyed on unspoken fears that Barry Goldwater--LBJ's opponent, who'd once joked about lobbing a nuke into the men's room in the Kremlin--couldn't be trusted with his finger on the button. Like the Willie Horton ad, Daisy Girl was never widely disseminated. The LBJ campaign showed Daisy Girl once and the press and the outrage of the Goldwater campaign carried it on the wind.

I love political advertising. It was instilled in me at an early age. When I was a kid and my dad was driving me to school, he used to amuse himself with Tourette-like riffs on old ads and slogans, to the point of driving me insane. So I was probably the only kid my age who knew that Barry Goldwater's slogan in '64 was "In Your Heart You Know He's Right" or that Nixon's 1968 ads proclaimed "This Time. . . Nixon."

There is a great website, The Living Room Candidate, which archives commercials for presidential campaigns from 1952's Eisenhower-Adlai Stevenson tilt up to 2004. Schwartz's commercials for LBJ's 1964 campaign were all masterful. I would especially recommend the one titled "Our President," which again makes the point against Goldwater by solemnly praising LBJ's "prudence."

And Richard Nixon (or RN to those of us who love him) learned the lessons of the LBJ campaign. All of his ads from 1968 are masterpieces: watch "Convention" (which might be the most remarkable political ad I've ever seen and doesn't have a word of dialogue) or "Failure" (which the Obama campaign could pretty much use with a minimum of edits). There was a reason these were stuck in my Dad's head.