On With His Head
Photo exploits the
controversy surrounding 1996's most reviled political ad, a Greg Stevens and
Co. spot for Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner that attacked challenger Mark
Warner as a national Democrat and--heaven forbid--a liberal.
The Stevens ad featured a
buddy photo of President Clinton, former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder, and Sen.
Chuck Robb, in which Mark Warner's head was superimposed on Robb's body--Warner
was actually off to the side in the picture.
It would have been a bad
idea to try this trick anywhere; it was an even worse idea to try it in
Washington, using a Washington Post photo. When the fake-photo story hit
the front pages, Stevens, one of the most respected Republican consultants
around, took the fall. John Warner asked him to leave the campaign (although
he's still working for Bob Dole, and it's still not clear exactly how all this
happened). Stevens himself is so closemouthed about it that he could do an ad
for No Excuses jeans.
Mark Warner's media team
responded with an ad that targets John Warner's greatest strength--his
perceived integrity. Photo assumes, correctly, that the audience is
familiar with the controversy, and opens--as the narrator says--with the "real
photo." Mark is almost out of the frame; you wouldn't look past the three
powerful, well-known figures to find him--unless you were explicitly looking
for him, that is. The next scene piques the viewer's interest by showing how
the trick was played. Though the image was computer-generated, the tactic is as
old as Stalin airbrushing the exiled Trotsky out of photos with Lenin. But
where the old way always looked fake, today's technology can make the fake look
entirely authentic.
The next scene invokes a
newspaper story as a third-party verifier of the scandal, and adds the charge
that John's campaign is guilty of the dirty deed and of lying about it.
Here Mark's spot adroitly turns the corner from response to attack. Indeed, it
ignores the essence of John's charge (captured in the succeeding scene of the
offending ad, which showed House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, Sen. Ted
Kennedy, and Sen. Chris Dodd; they were the ones for whom Mark was accused in
the red chyron of "Raising Millions"), choosing, instead, to use the phony
picture to segue into a general attack on John Warner's character. Until now,
this Republican senator has been a rare exception to politics as usual: He
broke with his party to oppose Robert Bork for the Supreme Court; he opposed
Oliver North for the Senate even after North was the Republican nominee against
Chuck Robb, the GOP's No. 1 target in 1994; he's pro-choice. These stands
protected him against the standard Democratic charges against the Republicans:
Gingrich, Medicare, and education cuts.
But Photo punches
through his Teflon. Charging that John was "less than candid," it asks, "How
long has he been fooling us?" The fake ad becomes a moment of dark
revelation--a window into John's true character. The charges pile up--and what
is a response spot dares to charge that John is "unprincipled," that we can't
"trust" him. The visual recap of the trick-decapitation and the ensuing
newspaper story make the assault as credible as it can be, given the unusually
strong public perception of John as a decent and independent guy, who was,
until now, the least likely of political hacks.
The fake
photo is the latest emblem of a year when consultants have become more
notorious than famous, more Dick Morris than James Carville. Mark Warner's
consultants moved swiftly to convert the mistake into their best argument yet
for unseating John Warner, whose campaign previously boasted that he made
Virginia proud.
--Robert
Shrum
