Remote, Controlled

By JEFF GREENFIELD

If you want to learn the darkest strategic assumptions of a presidential campaign, you could spend weeks enticing operatives to reveal their confidential polling data, focus-group surveys and off-the-record-deep-background-not-for-attribution- expose-me-and-I'll-kill-you thoughts. Or you could watch television commercials.

People like me are supposed to disdain campaign ads as simplistic and demagogic. But these ads reflect a campaign's efforts to distill its themes into the purest form. And why not? It's where the lion's share of the budget is going. Watch these ads, and they'll tell you exactly what these campaigns most hope--and fear.

Is the campaign of Governor George W. Bush afraid that Steve Forbes will launch a round of attack ads like those that so damaged Bob Dole four years ago? Listen to Bush talk about why we're so cynical about politics. "I believe oftentimes campaigns resort to mud throwing and name calling, and Americans are sick of that kind of campaigning," he says, chatting with an unseen listener. "I'd like to run a campaign that is hopeful and optimistic and very positive." It's a textbook effort at inoculation. If you hear anything bad about me, the ad's subtext says, it's that mud throwing and name calling I warned you about.

Another Bush ad, by far the most striking and unusual of this campaign, reflects an effort at a different kind of inoculation. As a worried little girl wanders around what seems to be an abandoned military base, Bush tells us that "we live in a world of terrorists, madmen and missiles." The girl suddenly disappears, as Bush says that "a dangerous world still requires a sharpened sword." When he promises a "foreign policy with a touch of iron," the girl reappears, reaching out her hand to a uniformed arm. While the ad was produced well before the Governor flunked that geopolitics pop quiz, it clearly reflects a central campaign concern: that Bush might be seen as a lightweight, a silver-spoon child of privilege without the heft to deal with the presidency. The disturbing images, the edgy music in a minor key, the unsettling language aim at one point: No mindless frat boy here.

The ad also aims at defusing the appeal of the Republican candidate whose biography stands in sharpest contrast to Bush's. More than half of Senator John McCain's bio ad details his horrific experience as a Vietnam prisoner of war. There are black-and-white photos of the angry mob that dragged the downed Navy pilot off to 5 1/2 years in prison. There is no reference to policies or programs, only an assertion that McCain has been "taking on the Establishment and defying special interests and never forgetting those heroes with whom he served." (A neat way of referencing heroism without claiming it for himself.)

Look at two Bill Bradley ads, and you can see his entire campaign in microcosm. In one, Bradley sits at a desk, surrounded by a flag, framed photos, an Oval Office-style window in the background. "Wouldn't it be better if we had more than sound bites and photo ops when we were choosing a candidate?" he asks. "I think so. That's why my campaign will try to be different. It'll concentrate on issues, ones that concern you." There's not a single word of substance in the ad. Instead, Bradley is talking about talking about issues, hoping that voters will credit him with substance when they see him on the news or in debates.

So why is Bradley, the "unpolitician," using two Senators in his bio ad? Maybe because polls show most voters still think of him first as a former basketball player--and because he trails far behind Bush and Vice President Al Gore in "leadership" ratings.

Sometimes you can read a campaign in a single slogan. Gore's bio ad is filled with pictures of his younger days as an Army journalist in Vietnam and as a newspaper reporter, probably to erase his image as someone who was born in a blue suit with a briefcase in his hand. But listen to the end of an otherwise routine commercial on health care: "Change that works for working families." Now subject that phrase to political parsing: "Change"--I'm not Bill Clinton--"that works"--I'm not a wild-eyed liberal like Bradley--"for working families"--I'm for you, the tax-paying middle class, the folks Clinton brought back to the Democratic Party.

All these campaigns have one common note: there's not a single direct attack on anyone else. In a time when the "angry voter" has all but disappeared, no one is trying to draw blood--yet.