The good old days of the Nixon campaign

[salvorhardin]

Last edited Fri Jul 13, 2012, 06:49 PM - Edit history (1)

The solution that Nixon’s handlers came up with to market an ungainly candidate who resisted packaging was to play to his vanity as the man in the arena. The campaign would put on 10 one-hour live TV shows broadcast in different media markets, showing Nixon answering unscripted questions from a panel of voters and newsmen. Part of the artifice was picking a panel that would be skeptical without being adversarial (always one African American, but never two). Too much sycophancy, though, would create boring television. As [Roger] Ailes put it, “I’m convinced we need legitimately tough panels to make Nixon give his best.”

What a diabolical, Nixonian way to sell a candidate—use campaign cash to buy TV time in hour-long blocks to show him responding to real questions from real voters and real reporters! Fortunately, we live in an era when Obama and Romney would almost never resort to these kinds of dirty tricks. The idea of a presidential candidate regularly answering questions in public (let alone paying for the air time) is so 20th-century.

...

What a quaint notion and what a breach of message discipline: A presidential contender, locked in a close election, actually answering questions from reporters less than 48 hours before the polls opened. When Richard Nixon represents the good old days, it represents a sad commentary on how far we have come in turning presidential politics into a branch of robotics.

Full post: http://www.cjr.org/swing_states_project/good_old_days_nixon_campaign.php?page=all