Iowa 2004 -- A Touching Campaign

G. R. Boynton
Department of Political Science
University of Iowa

Campaign ads are designed to convince. No candidate is interested in alienating potential voters. Hence, we can examine them to determine what the candidates and their campaign advisers believe will be convincing. They become cultural artifacts revealing what candidates believe electoral democracy has become at this time in this space.

The time of this report is the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2003-2004; the space is Iowa. We recorded 69 ads that were run in Iowa during the campaign. We believe that is either most or all of the ads run in the state. We have ads for five candidate. The other candidates either did not run campaign ads or they ran campaign ads in New Hampshire or elsewhere.

What is electoral democracy? Everybody knows. Ask the candidates. Ask their advisers. Ask scholars. The answer is -- talk and decisions about public policy. And these candidates did not disappoint.

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Jobs, jobs, jobs! Health care, health care, health care! And the drum beat of policy talk went on and on. Every candidate had ads about Iraq. Every candidate had one or more ads about jobs and about health care. And they all said they would pay for their plans by rolling back the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy.

Forty-nine of the sixty-nine ads criticized the policies of the Bush administration. Forty-four of the sixty-nine ads briefly laid out their own plans. Only 10 of the sixty-nine ads were not policy talk.

But you surely noticed that it would have been difficult to distinguish the candidates on the basis of their policy talk. Gephardt was not critical of the war in Iraq. Kucinich was concerned about civil liberties in the face of the Bush war on terrorism. Otherwise it was jobs and health care. There must be other ways to distinguish the candidates since people do have to vote for only one.

People vote for candidates -- for persons who they come to know via electronic communication. And one way candidates tell voters who they are is with biographical ads. Biographical ads are a trajectory. A trajectory from some past to a future with the candidate in office, and the point of the ad is to convince voters that this trajectory is the one the voter would like to see.

Edwards did it with rags to riches.

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That is one of our favorite stories. Anyone who remembers The Man From Abilene or Hope will recognize the same story here.

But not everyone can do rags to riches -- plausibly. They have to find a different starting point for their trajectories.

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Kerry started his trajectory with Vietnam. After Vietnam every other day is extra, he said. His trajectory began with an experience that propelled him into public office to do what's right.

Gephardt talked about his parents and his son's cure from cancer. Howard Dean talked about medical school and his career as governor. They all had a story to tell.

But policy talk and biographies are not limited to this time and space. They are ubiquitous in U.S. electoral democracy. What distinguished this time and space was talk about empowering and touching.

Often empowering talk does not sound like empowering talk. This is the way Dick Gephardt did it.

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Empower me to act for you -- that was his message. This is standard representative democracy talk. If you empower me to act for you I will repeal Bush tax cuts, provide health care for Americans, free us from foreign oil, push for international minimum wage. I will fight for America's middle class. It is so much a part of the culture of electoral democracy that it is difficult to notice it. It is just how we talk. It is electoral democracy.

But you cannot miss the different note of Howard Dean.

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He was remarkably insistent with this theme; over and over it was the the punch line of the ads. It was in the early ads; it was in the last ad he ran in Iowa.

Instead of you empowering me -- representative democracy -- you are the ones empowered -- power to the people. I looked around my caucus and the Dean supporters were easy to spot. They were the college students and left over liberals from the 1960s. It has been a long time since power to the people was a winner, and it may be a long time before a candidate tries it again.

What Dean's challenge does is hold up empowering me to act for you to our observation. We can see the dominant cultural stance because we are reminded that it could be otherwise.

But that was Howard Dean. It was not Iowa even though Iowa was where he tried it. Iowa was something else.

We are a nation of hundreds of millions. That is a limit on what our electoral democracy can become. It is the politics of broadcast. But Iowa and New Hampshire stand at the beginning of the election season as reminders of our past. Reminders of a time when elections were first person affairs.

The candidates 'camp out' in Iowa and New Hampshire for months before the caucuses in Iowa and the voting booths in New Hampshire deliver their verdicts. They meet voters one at a time, two at a time. The largest crowd they can get together is 25 or 30. There is a steady stream of hands to be shook, and friends and supporters to be hugged. It is touching politics.

Kerry began his Iowa campaign with the most traditional of ads.

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The candidate standing above the crowd. American flags to his back. Thundering his message to a cheering audience who were furiously waving banners. The ad was 29 seconds long. The camera focused exclusively on Kerry for 14 of the 29 seconds. In another 9 seconds Kerry was in the foreground. The crowd was in the background. Only 6 seconds focused exclusively on the crowd, and never close enough to see the persons in the crowd.

It bombed. And it almost took Kerry's candidacy with it.

Apparently the candidates learned. Only 7 of the 69 ads featured the kind of large crowd of this Kerry ad. Thirty-six of the ads had small crowds of people -- 2, 3, 4, up to 25.

But it was not speech making that was rejected. Nine of the 17 Edwards ads featured him talking with small crowds -- making speeches -- but the similarity ends there.

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This is Iowa speech making. A small room; large enough for making a speech, but it would hold only 25 or 30 people. Persons line the wall to emphasize the 'overflow.' The candidate is not on a podium; he is among the people. But it is the camera that does the work. Back and forth it moves -- from Edwards to people in the audience. Always close enough for the face to become real.

These are the faces.

This is the pattern of movement of the camera -- from Edwards to persons and back.

Edwards then a woman in the crowd. Then back to Edwards, and then to a college student. And so it went through six cycles in 29 seconds for just over 2 seconds a cut. The camera was focused on Edwards 16 seconds, which is the same as for Kerry in his ad. But there is a dramatic difference in the feel of the two ads. One is spectacle, and one is up close and personal.

What has happened? Iowa campaigning has been brought into broadcast politics. If you looked at the campaign advertising of 2000 or 1996 or 1992, etc. there was nothing distinctive about the ads. They were constructed just as they were constructed for a national audience. Sometimes the candidate would be pictured with a small crowd, but nature filled scenes or criticisms of the opponent's record with a narrators voice 'over' was as common in Iowa as they were nationally. In this campaign that changed. Iowans heard from the candidates and narrators did not get much work in Iowa 2004. Only 33 of the 69 ads used a narrator voice over.

Candidates did their own voice overs.

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Dean, Edwards and Kerry all did one or more ads in which they were the voice narrating the action on the screen.

More often they talked directly to the viewer. This is a hoary category of ad -- the talking head. But they managed to make it into something very personal. Kerry did it by addressing you directly. He filled the screen, looked straight at you, and addressed you.

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Part of making it personal was cutting down the distance. Gephardt was sitting across the counter from you. It was a familiar scene filled with familiar actions. But the camera drew you in as he talked. It might be called zooming, but what it does is cut down the distance. You are held right there by his eyes.

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Well, there is much more, but I have run out of time. So I must conclude.

Where does this go? What is the point? The point is simple. We scholars have available a remarkable collection of cultural artifacts with which to trace changes in how electoral democracy is acted out. If you look at the ads from 1952 and 1956 you see dramatic differences in the technology being used. But you also see dramatic differences in sentiment. Electoral democracy is not a constant; it is a constantly evolving acting out of political life.

I leave you with three final thoughts. First, I would not look for ads like this in the national campaign. I do not believe the nation is ready for Iowa politics, and I am confident that they are not ready for power to the people.

Second, this is the url

If you would like to look at the ads or have your students look at the ads this is where they are. Or you can just send me a request for the address via email.

Finally, one more campaign ad. It was broadcast the day after the Iowa caucus. There is no voice the first twenty-seven and one half seconds -- only a few words on the screen and music in the background. It was John Edward's thank you by celebrating Iowa politics.

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