Any political junkies needing a break from this election need look no further than The Museum of the Moving Image’s web site, The Living Room Candidate. The site’s been up for a while and so the interface is dated, but the content is fascinating.  The site presents every general election television campaign commercial since 1952.

The link is here:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/

You can spend a lot of time with the site, revisiting not only candidates, but glimpses at the pressing issues of the day, and also how these ads have changed.  And haven’t.

Because of the way the site is built, I can’t link to individual ads within the site.  And so, the links below are from YouTube, which has a few, but not most of the spots.

Morning in America

Any review of presidential television spots has to start with Reagan’s Morning in America spot in 1984.  It still holds up as a masterpiece. Although, clearly, diversity wasn’t an issue in 1984. The spot could have been shot in a gated community in Johannesburg, with only a couple of children, maybe, vaguely, non-white.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU-IBF8nwSY

Meanwhile, contrast the Mondale ads.  The only one on YouTube focuses on deficit reduction and is testament to how much Reagan’s Keynesian deficits tied the Democrats in knots.  Mondale—the liberal—running on a platform of “cut spending”, “close tax loopholes”, and “ trust fund”, which is to put new taxes in a trust fund to pay off the Reagan deficits.  How did the country not rally behind this clarion call to action?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCk3WaEUks4

Dark Knight in America

The ads from 1972 are particularly interesting. Many of them still have an earnestness that we usually associate with newsreels from the fifties and early sixties, but some of the spots show the influence of films made in the late sixties and early seventies.

And, it’s 1972.  Probably the nadir, so far, of the American spirit.

Here’s a Democrats for Nixon spot in which the Nixon campaign claims that McGovern has introduced a bill in congress that would put 47 percent of Americans on welfare. It’s notable that this seemingly random number, 47, is also the percent of American’s that Mitt Romney would famously describe as the “takers” in our society in 2012. I welcome any comments from members of the Masons or Illuminati.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7XJH8uI9YI

And here’s McGovern’s “Democrats for McGovern” ad. Amazingly, this ran the week of the November election.  It features a blue-collar guy in the voting booth with two choices: Nixon or McGovern. And his internal deliberations about who he should vote for:  “All the fellas say they are voting for Nixon.” “My dad would roll over in his grave if I voted for Nixon.” “This hand voted for Kennedy . . . “

It’s an ad that only the early seventies could have produced. And, it shows the New Deal coalition unraveling inside one man’s head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av_nDxp4iXE

The rest of McGovern’s ads are worth watching.  Several spots with the senator and, mostly short so that McGovern would loom tall, blue collar workers, in urban settings, talking about crime and Vietnam. There’s a rawness to it that none of the other ads on the site even attempt to replicate. A reminder of how bad a place the early seventies were.