Television Ads in US Presidential Campaigns Have a History of Exploiting Fear

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, printed single-sided, grade: 1,7, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: Election campaigns are common rituals in democracies.Politicians try to persuade voters in order to be elected.Therefore, political candidates usually make use of professionalcampaigning strategies that involve the television as the mostimportant medium. Since the 1960s US presidential campaignads on TV have been increasingly successful and cutting-edge.They sometimes were so convincing they even swung adecision. Over the last decades the predominant topics in USfederal politics were the Cold War as well as national securityand the US military. In 1964 the presidential election campaignwas highly influenced by the escalating situation in Vietnam andthe general disquiet caused by the arms race and nuclearweapons. The American psyche was collectively anxious aboutthe latent atomic menace so it suggested itself to address fearin a presidential campaign ad. The Nixon campaign 1972 dealtwith one of the genuine Republican topics: Military. Due to itssuccess it was remade in two subsequent campaigns called Tank Ride in 1988 for George Bush and 2004 in WeaponsFlorida for George W. Bush. The latter will be examined in thispaper, too.However, there are different approaches to persuade thevoting public; one of the most favorable techniques is playingon the people s emotions. Thus, it is not surprising that USpresidential campaign ads have a history of exploiting fear intelevision ads. It leads from 1964 until 2004 and aims atpersuading voters by the well-directed use of sounds, imagesand language.