Public Eye Harry and Louise

By MARGARET CARLSON

He's a big-picture guy and doesn't sweat the details. She loves policymaking and is fascinated by health care. He's been playing hoops outside while she's scrutinizing the fine print of the President's Health Security Act.

Bill and Hillary? No, that other fun couple, Harry and Louise, the on-air pair making the insurance industry's case against the Clinton health-care plan. Harry and Louise are more than just a couple of smooth talkers moving product: they're would-be opinion leaders. TV and radio commercials have become a major forum for debating the restructuring of one-seventh of the economy, the health industry. Besides the $10 million that the Health Insurance Association of America has spent on Harry and Louise, the AFL-CIO has budgeted $3 million on campaigns to support the Clinton plan. Meanwhile the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association has allocated about $9 million for ads to counter any impression that they may be the bad guys.

What explains Harry and Louise's inspiring 286,000 calls to a toll-free number since the series began in September? Sure, they lured both Clintons into blasting them, but it's the hokey soap-opera techniques perfected in the Taster's Choice coffee ads that have made Harry and Louise seem like a bad song you can't stop humming. The actors cast as Harry and Louise by Ben Goddard, president of the Goddard-Clausen/First Tuesday ad agency, are similar to the Taster's Choice twosome in age, self-absorption and pseudo sophistication, although they have dissimilar levels of sexual tension.

"Harry and Louise are Everyman," says Goddard, but no one like them has ever been seen in nature. Which is more fantastic? That a cappuccino-swilling duo would be caught dead spooning coffee from a jar, or that a two-career couple would spend their nights reading aloud from government documents? That anyone, much less the sophisticated lady with the arch British accent, would cart Taster's Choice to Paris, the City of Cafes, or that Harry's response to his wife's persistent nattering would be a chipper "Health-care reform again, huh?" If the pair of them had been members of the Screen Actors Guild when F.D.R. was President, there might be no Social Security.

Both ads play on the credibility of the successful middle-aged yuppies who have no more pressing concerns than the specter of bad coffee or bad regulation. Says Adweek's Barbara Lippert: "Harry and Louise are the perfect 'muppies,' with a plumped, overstuffed existence, telling other people that if they make similarly smart choices they too can have a beautiful life." Oddly enough, the admakers have no concern for the annoyance some viewers might feel at the sight of this self-satisfied couple who pay their bills on time and floss every day. Lippert says it doesn't matter how irritating they are "if the ad has 'recall.' "

So much recall, in fact, that Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, is asking the press to undertake an "ad watch for public-policy commercials. Harry and Louise invite false inferences . . . They frighten people about reform, while insisting they are for it."

Last week there was justifiable outrage over a health-care ad by the Democratic National Committee in which the words of Republican Governor Carroll Campbell of South Carolina were edited to make it sound as if he had said "there's not a crisis," when he had said "you shouldn't say there's not a crisis." The muppies confuse in their own way: Harry and Louise shed no more light on health care than their counterparts selling Taster's Choice shed on instant sex or coffee. For now, viewer discretion advised.