136 PART TwO • THE POlITICS OF AMERICAn dEMOCRACy
daisies. As she held a daisy, she pulled the petals off and quietly counted to herself. Sud-
denly, when she reached number ten, a deep bass voice cut in and began a countdown:
“10, 9, 8, 7, 6... .” When the voice intoned “zero,” the mushroom cloud of an atomic
bomb began to fill the screen. Then President Johnson’s voice was heard: “These are the
stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We
must either love each other or we must die.” At the end of the commercial, the message
read, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3.”
Since the “Daisy Girl” advertisement, negative advertising has come into its own. In
recent elections, an ever-increasing share of political ads have been negative in nature.
The public claims not to like negative advertising, but as one consultant put it, “Negative
advertising works.” Negative ads can backfire, though, when there are three or more
candidates in the race, a typical state of affairs in the early presidential primaries. If one
candidate attacks another, the attacker as well as the candidate who is attacked may
come to be viewed negatively by the public. A candidate who “goes negative” may thus
unintentionally boost the chances of a third candidate who is not part of the exchange.President lyndon Johnson’s “daisy girl” ad contrasted the innocence of childhood with the
horror of an atomic attack. Would such a campaign ad be effective today? (Doyle, Dane, Bernbach)Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
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