Scared yet? Fear again a campaign tool -- Sept. 10, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER 

Since businessman Donald Trump glided down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president in June 2015, he has stoked fear.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said that day. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems . . . they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

In the home stretch of the 2020 campaign, Trump is running as the law and order president, claiming Democrats will tolerate lawlessness.

“You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” he warns, raising the specter of anarchists running loose to loot, burn and obliterate American cities whose police have been defunded by Biden and “radical socialist Democrats.”

Former Vice President Biden does not support defunding the police and has made clear rioters, looters and arsonists should be prosecuted.

“Donald Trump keeps telling us if he was president, you’d feel safe. Well, he is president – whether he knows it or not,” Biden tweeted.

Fear is a time-tested campaign tool used by both parties to excite voters. More than half a century ago this week – on Sept. 7, 1964 -- perhaps the most effective presidential campaign ad in history aired on TV.

Known as “Daisy,” the 60-second, black-and white spot for President Lyndon B. Johnson shows a little girl counting as she picks petals off a daisy. An ominous male voice then counts down to a nuclear blast, and the camera focuses on the child’s eye, which transforms into a massive, fiery mushroom cloud. 

“These are the stakes,” Johnson intones in a voiceover. “To make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

The Daisy ad was shocking at the time, but it’s more subtle than campaign ads we see today.

It didn’t even mention Barry Goldwater, LBJ’s Republican opponent, and it ran only once – although it aired repeatedly on talk shows and news programs.

Goldwater was already trailing Johnson, so it’s unclear how much the ad contributed to Johnson’s landslide victory of 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 52.

To win reelection, Trump doesn’t need to scare vast numbers of people into voting for him – just enough to carry the battleground states, as he did in 2016.

But will it work? In 2018, Republicans wielded the cudgel of fear in congressional races, and Democrats still flipped about 40 House seats to regain control.

Trump’s strategy is to attack Biden with everything and the kitchen sink.

Biden wants to raise your taxes, offshore your job, throw open the borders, wage endless foreign wars, surrender to China and destroy the suburbs, Trump says. That’s a hefty agenda for someone Trump derides as “Sleepy.”

As technology accelerates, campaigns can target digital ads to individual voters through social media in record time.

Hours after news broke of journalist Bob Woodward’s bombshell book, “Rage,” a new Biden ad on Twitter played audio tape of Trump saying to Woodward about COVID-19: “I wanted to always play it down . . .  I still like playing it down.”

The ad faults Trump for failing to inform the public accurately and blames him for tens of thousands of lost American lives.

“It’s unconscionable,” Biden tweeted. Trump maintains he just wanted to avoid panic.

The anti-Trump Lincoln Project, founded by a group of Republican operatives, fills social media with ads attacking Trump and Republican senators.

A new Lincoln Project ad hits a new low. The ad shows hideous pictures of flesh-eating parasites and likens Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, to a parasite.

Still, the worst in negative ads and fearmongering may be yet to come.

Of the nearly 70,000 political television ads that ran in the final days of the 2016 campaign, fewer than one in 10 were primarily positive, according to a CNN analysis of data from Kantar Media/CMAG.

The reason is both parties believe, as Richard Nixon did, that fear is a great motivator. Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire wrote in his book “Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House”:

“People react to fear, not love – they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true,” Nixon said.

©2020 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Dueling values at State of the Union -- Feb. 7, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

For his 1965 State of the Union address, Lyndon Johnson tried something new.

Wanting to reach the largest audience possible, LBJ moved the speech from day to primetime.

At 9:04 p.m. on Jan. 4, 1965, before a joint session of Congress, the president laid out his vision for a Great Society -- including hospital insurance for the elderly, a voting rights law for African Americans, federal aid for education and an extension of the minimum wage.

Not to be outdone, Republicans demanded time for a response, also a first. GOP House leader Gerald Ford and Senate leader Everett Dirksen did the honors.

Within two years, most of Johnson’s proposals were law.

Those were the days. LBJ had just won by a landslide. He knew he had to act fast to get big things accomplished. His laundry list became marching orders for the fattest Democratic majority in Congress since the New Deal.

Shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, President Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress. He knows he has to act fast to accomplish his goals. He’ll outline a laundry list of legislative priorities. A Republican response will follow. And that’s where similarities with 1965 end.

Obama will face a divided, deeply partisan Congress. He’ll expound on how the Democratic values he talked about in his Inaugural Address translate into policies to strengthen the middle class. If the last four years are a guide, though, many of his proposals will go nowhere.    

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a Cuban-American in his first term, will give the Republican response. Rubio is a fresh face and he’s trying something new: He will speak in Spanish and English. He’s expected to offer a view of how smaller government, as championed by the GOP, will help the middle class.

Rubio has a tough assignment – to hit the reset button on a party that fumbled the last election. Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana recently called the GOP “the stupid party” for dumbing down its brand and failing to appeal to minorities. Plus, Rubio has a lot of hype to live up to. He’s glorified on the cover of this week’s Time magazine as “The Republican Savior.”

As theater, the night of dueling values could get interesting.

Obama will use the bully pulpit to promote job creation, targeting education to job skills, reducing dependence on foreign oil while promoting green energy, reforming immigration and reducing gun violence. He wants to increase spending on those priorities.  

At the same time, the president insists he’s eager for a “big deal” on deficit reduction that will end the cycle of government by crisis that replays every few weeks or months.

Obama’s brand is strong among Democrats after his Inaugural Address in which he set out liberal themes for his second term, but he has alienated Republicans. The White House envisioned the two speeches as a package with the State of the Union offering what former senior Obama adviser David Plouffe called “details and blueprints.”

Obama gave a glimpse of Tuesday’s speech in remarks this week to House Democrats.

“The question I will ask myself on every item, every issue is, is this helping to make sure that everybody's got a fair shot and everybody is doing their fair share and everybody's playing by the same rules?” he said.

Next month, Obama is expected to send Congress his budget for the fiscal year that starts in October.

Despite Lyndon Johnson’s legendary success, most presidents fail to get what they ask in the State of the Union speech.  

Between 1965 and 2002, on average 43 percent of the policy proposals contained in State of the Union addresses were enacted by Congress in the legislative session in which the president gave his speech, Donna R. Hoffman and Alison D. Howard wrote in the 2006 book “Addressing the State of the Union.”

For second presidential terms, the success rate drops to 39 percent.

In 2013, the Democratic president’s State of the Union address will be a wish list. The Republican response will be one too.

 © 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.