Having the Last Laugh

By Amy Wilentz.

Oklahoma Democrat Jim Jones, campaigning for the Senate against Incumbent Republican Don Nickles, has discovered that less can be more. In his TV spots, the balding Jones tells voters, "I'll have more time each day to work on Oklahoma's problems because I won't need one of these." Grinning broadly, he raises a whirring -- and superfluous -- hair dryer to his head. The implication? That Nickles, thickly thatched and Hollywood handsome, is just another pretty face.

Government may be serious business, but the trend in political advertising this year is to make your point with a punch line. Candidates are taking to the airwaves with props and gimmicks to get their messages, and their names, across to a frequently indifferent public. In person and on television, New York's little-known Republican gubernatorial candidate Andrew O'Rourke is using a cardboard cutout of Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo to deride his popular opponent as "one-dimensional." South Dakota Congressman Tom Daschle, a populist Democrat hoping to unseat incumbent Senator James Abdnor, juxtaposes shots of long, gleaming limousines purring around Washington with , pictures of his own 1971 Pontiac wearily chugging toward the Senate Office Building.

A television advertisement for Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy demonstrates his affinity for his state's dairy-farming community by going directly to the source. The commercial shows the Senator, accompanied by two farmers, pasting Leahy bumper stickers on the sides of some contented cows. To make the point that Illinois Republican Governor James Thompson has broken a number of promises, Democrat Adlai Stevenson III, not normally known as a barrel of laughs, has been showcasing an ad that features a pair of legs doing a soft- shoe. The voice-over: "When it comes to song and dance, nobody's better than Jim Thompson."

Gone are the days when candidates would appear as talking heads to tout their credentials. "Political advertising is beginning to recognize that it competes with other advertising for people's attention, which means McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Buick and Crazy Eddie," says Manhattan Political Consultant Scott Miller. As broadcast political advertising becomes ubiquitous, many observers have begun to question its efficacy. Last week's New York primary, for example, was notable for the poor return on some heavily financed television advertising. To be effective, says Miller, candidates must "use the same methods and technologies that are available to everybody. Humor is part of that."

The resulting blend of politics and commercial advertising techniques can sometimes be startling. Democratic Senate Hopeful Wyche Fowler of Georgia satirizes the American Express commercials by strolling through a rack of clothes asking "Do you know me? I'm Congressman Wyche Fowler, and I think you are paying too much interest on bank credit cards." California's Republican Senate candidate Ed Zschau piggybacks on the popularity of Bartles & Jaymes cooler commercials by featuring two good ol' boys sitting on a front porch musing about the number of floor votes missed by Incumbent Democrat Alan Cranston. "Three hundred forty-seven of them," the ad tells us. Says one codger: "If a 16-year-old did that, he'd still be in the third grade."

Unless carefully handled, such advertising can backfire. "You don't trivialize important issues," says Consultant Miller. "When you trivialize an issue that people take seriously, there is an enormous backlash." The time to use a sidesplitter, Miller says, is "when you're dealing with straight politics, because people don't take politics very seriously."

Incumbents' voting records are a popular target for sarcasm. "The character question cuts more deeply than specific issues in a lot of campaigns this year," says Washington Media Consultant Robert Squier. The trend got a big boost from Republican Mitch McConnell's wildly successful "bloodhound" spots for the Kentucky Senate race in 1984. The series of commercials starred jowly hunting dogs in hot pursuit of Democratic Incumbent Walter Huddleston. The dogs searched everywhere for the supposedly lackadaisical Huddleston, in his district office and other places where one would be likely to find an assiduous Senator. In the last spot, the dogs finally captured Huddleston -- up a tree. McConnell scored an upset victory. This year, says Senator John Heinz, a Pennsylvania Republican, "I think it's fair to say that every campaign, Republican or Democrat, is looking for the next bloodhound ad. It's a worrisome trend."

The Huddleston defeat taught campaign consultants another lesson as well. "An attack unanswered," says Squier, "is an attack agreed to." In other words, you had better fight back. In Louisiana's Senate race, Republican Henson Moore's ad campaign uses a sleek series of voter-in-the-street encounters to ask the significance of the number 1,083. After a series of wild guesses -- a new tax form? the year the Normans conquered England? -- a narrator supplies the answer: the number of floor votes Democratic Candidate John Breaux has missed in 14 years in the House of Representatives.

Breaux promptly struck back in kind. What is the significance of the number 1,083? the narrator asks. After more guesses -- the number of games lost by the New Orleans Saints? the highest temperature this August? -- comes the Democratic answer: the average number of jobs Louisiana loses each week thanks to Republican policies. As candidates increasingly try to skewer their opponents, they can sometimes discover the joke is on them.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington, with other bureaus