Stills from Lyndon B. Johnson Museum and Library

In the annals of campaign advertising, it stands as a legend: A young girl plucking flower petals, counting each as it falls, is interrupted by a sinister voice counting down 10 … nine … eight … until a nuclear blast fills the screen, a fire-ball replacing the black terror in her eyes.

In the background, we hear the stern voice of President Lyndon B. Johnson: “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.”

The year was 1964, and the ad, which aired only once, shifted the tone of Johnson’s successful bid against the sharply anti-communist Sen. Barry M. Goldwater. More than that, however, it ushered in a new age of political propaganda, highlighting the emotional power of advertising — particularly television advertising — to sway voters and decide races.

Political candidates have never looked back.

Indeed, it’s a sad truth of modern politics that campaign cash (ie, media funding) is prerequisite to any successful bid for higher public office — increasingly so. This year’s presidential contest will be the most expensive in history. The two leading presidential contenders have already spent roughly a quarter-billion dollars on advertising. If there’s one universal rule in politics, it’s that those who have trouble fund-raising need not apply.

“American politics,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, “has long ago shifted from an enterprise based on mass organization, to an enterprise based on TV and radio propaganda. It’s no longer labor intensive. Now it’s capital intensive.”

The reason is clear: ads work. And yet — considering all the hours of media attention, the public interviews, the endless campaigning, the viral Internet videos, the stump-speeches, the national conventions, the soon-to-be televised debates and the countless water-cooler arguments weighing the virtues and vices of the presidential candidates this very minute — the question remains: what causes voters to respond to short, one-sided bursts of un-nuanced messaging?

Why, that is, do ads work?

Clearly, the question cuts across disciplines, dredging to discover the countless reasons that folks behave the way they do, asking no less than what it is to be human. Faced with the question, Frank Ginsberg, chairman and CEO of Avrett Free Ginsberg, a New York-based advertising agency, said with a sigh, “We don’t have enough time.”

Yet there is a craft — dare we say a science — tested over decades, that allows advertisers to target specific audiences, appeal to their tastes and sensibilities, and predict with some degree of accuracy how they will respond. This is true whether it be a consumer buying a soft drink or a voter choosing a candidate.

A leading factor in this equation rests on emotional appeal. Ads are not just narrations; they attack the senses. In the case of Johnson’s “Daisy Girl” commercial (which never even mentioned Goldwater’s name) the intended response was clearly fear — a tactic repeated in the 1988 Willie Horton ad that helped sink Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’s White House hopes. Television is particularly suited to stimulate such an emotional reaction, combining images with music, text and narration to create an all-encompassing sensory experience.

“Ads are designed to have an emotional appeal that’s often more important than the actual information,” said Paul Freedman, a University of Virginia political scientist specializing in campaign advertising. “If you’re selling a car, you’re selling an image, you’re selling a state of mind. It’s not just a hunk of metal and plastic.”

In this way, Freedman added, candidates can brand themselves in the vaguest terms — an agent of change, for example, or a man of experience. The point being, Freedman said, that brands are “divorced from nuance.”

Campaign ads can also be effective by instilling confidence in voters seeking a reason to support a particular candidate. Marvin Overby, political science professor at the University of Missouri—Columbia, said many political ads fall in this category, aiming not to steal supporters from another candidate, but simply to mobilize those inclined to be their own. “Voters don’t want to feel like they have to flip a coin,” Overby said.

Darrell M. West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, echoed that message, saying ads frame issues in ways encouraging voters to feel a certain way about the candidates. “Political spots can’t create impressions that don’t already exist among the electorate,” West wrote in an email, “but they can encourage voters to see the candidates in particular ways. You can win by making people like you or dislike your opponent.”

In a prominent example this year, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican presidential nominee, attacked his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), for his celebrity, equating his superstar status to that of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

Repetition — the hammering away at an audience with a singular message — is also a powerful method of persuasion best accomplished through ads. In the modern political culture, these messages arrive “not just forcefully, but inescapably,” said Miller of NYU, who’s working on a book about the Marlboro Man, the ultimate in commercial icons. “Ideally,” he added, “you would have the commercial itself become a news story.” As was proven by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, even negative coverage is free advertising.

Finally, political advertisers are successful for the simple reason that many voters, for countless reasons, don’t follow politics very closely. Lynda Lee Kaid, professor of telecommunications at the University of Florida, said television ads allow candidates to lend an education (of sorts) that’s convenient to the viewer, providing “substantial amounts of information without great effort by the voter.”

Freedman, of UVA, agreed. “For many, many, many Americans, the campaign is coming to them only through these ads,” Freedman said. “They reach people who otherwise don’t have the time or the inclination to be plugged in to whatever’s going on with a political campaign.”

The candidates certainly know it. Through the end of July, Obama’s campaign had spent more than $152 million on advertising and related expenses, like media consultants, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog. McCain’s campaign, meanwhile, had spent nearly $54 million over the same span, CRP says.

And who would question their reasoning? If advertising can make a pair of blue jeans a symbol of social acceptance, turn a sandal into a walk down Hollywood Boulevard and transform a bottle of beer into a sexual fantasy, why would we doubt it couldn’t remake Sarah Palin into Joan of Arc? With the right image-making machine, anything is possible.

As Ginsberg said of his target audiences: “We know them better than they know themselves.”

Intrigued, I called the study’s head researcher, Douglas Oxley of the University of Nebraska, to see if he agreed with this conclusion.

“In some ways [the study has] been misinterpreted,” said Oxley. He said that his study didn’t find a link between DNA and political leanings. “We could have things happen to us in the womb or later in life that could cause” physiological and ideological differences.

The study, released yesterday, tested the physiological responses of 46 participants to various threatening images, like bloody faces. It found that people who self-identified as “in favor of socially protective policies” responded much more strongly to the stimuli than people who held more liberal views on such issues as welfare, abortion, immigration, gay rights and school prayer.

The researchers concluded that people of different ideological persuasions have divergent physiological reactions, and that people with socially conservative views tend to be more shocked by potentially threatening stimuli.

“Some people have said that we’re calling conservatives ‘frightened’ or something along those lines,” Oxley said. “And we’re not. All we’re suggesting is that there’s a physiological difference between people who hold one set of political beliefs and people who hold another set of political beliefs.”

The study had its limitations — the sample size was small and all of the subjects were white Nebraskans — but it’s still a small step toward a greater understanding our ever-increasing ideological divide, even if the answer doesn’t lie in our genes.

According to a document released by the city, this is true — Palin’s salary was reduced from $64,200 to $61,200 shortly after she took office in late-1996. However, in June 1998, her pay increased to $68,000, She received another pay cut in July 1997, before having it restored to $68,000 three months later, where it remained until she left the position in 2002. From TPM:

The records don’t explain the mechanisms by which the pay shifts happened. As best as we can determine, the cuts were engineered by Palin herself through some sort of executive mechanism, and the raises were City Council-mandated hikes.

What’s the upshot? Well, Palin’s claim that she “took a pay cut” as mayor is true in a narrow sense. She came in and took a pay cut that she engineered herself.

But in a broader sense, the claim is an oversimplification that borders on misleading. The bottom line is that whatever her intentions, over the course of her mayoralty Palin’s pay went up thousands of dollars and stayed higher for years, money which she presumably kept. (If any proof emerges that she donated it to charity or channeled it back into city coffers in some other way, we’ll happily update.)

This isn’t another Bridge to Nowhere. But it does fit a pattern here, where Palin burnishes her reform credentials by describing intentions as realities or otherwise boiling down the record into easily-digestible sound-bites that at best are half-truths, as this latest one has now proven to be.

It also illustrates that all information originating with the McCain campaign is suspect until independently confirmed — fact-checking is a good game to get into if you want serious job security for the next couple of months. After eight years of near-constant spin from the Bush administration, is this what the American people are looking for from their government?

The Democrats observe: “In an AP article today, Glen Johnson highlights the difficulty John McCain is having trying to explain his long held position in support of George Bush’s failed 2005 privatization of Social Security in the wake of this week’s economic turmoil.”

The article reports that McCain’s privatization position now looks like bad policy and terrible politics:

McCain defends retirement accounts amid stock dive

Wall Street turmoil [left McCain] defending his support for privately investing Social Security money in the same markets that had tanked earlier in the week…. A headline Friday in the Manchester, N.H., Union Leader, the leading paper in that battleground state, underscored the political challenge. “Pension funds for workers take a hit,” read a story about a roughly $500 million decline the past three months in the state’s public pension fund.

McCain counters that he does not support full-bore “privatization.” He has not exactly been pushing the issue at all, recently. Social Security is unlikely to break through as a national campaign issue right now, either, but it could gain traction in swing states with large elderly populations. The Republicans’ old promises to shrink government and ‘Let The Market Decide’ just don’t have the same ring.

The plan requires Chicago to reduce emissions levels to 3/4 of what they were in 1990 by the year 2020. The city will do so by implementing green building standards, ratcheting up the use of renewable energy sources, improving transportation and reducing industrial pollution.

Besides Daley, about 800 other mayors have talked about adopting the same goal, but Chicago is the first  to  come up with a discrete plan.

“We can’t solve the world’s climate change problem in Chicago, but we can do our part,” Daley said, according to the Associated Press. “We have a shared responsibility to protect our planet.”

Now they’ve got their own thing, The “New” New Deal. From The Big Picture:

If you are a fan of irony, consider this: The conservative movement has utterly hated FDR, and his New Deal programs like Medicaid, Social Security, FDIC, Fannie Mae (1938), and the SEC for nearly 80 years. And for the past 8 years, a conservative was in the White House, with a very conservative agenda. For something like 16 of the past 18 years, the conservative dominated GOP has controlled Congress. Those are the facts. We now see that the grand experiment of deregulation has ended, and ended badly. The deregulation movement is now an historical footnote, just another interest group, and once in power they turned into socialists. Indeed, judging by the actions of the conservatives in power, and not the empty rhetoric that comes out of think tanks, the conservative movement has effectively turned the United States into a massive Socialist state, an appendage of Communist Russia, China and Venezuela.

I’s also amusing to count up all the programs the government has created just for this crisis - see the beginning of the post at The Big Picture for the list so far.

The Pentagon is refusing demands from state government officials to clean up three contaminated military sites, in Maryland, New Jersey, and Florida. EPA has authority, under the Superfund toxic clean-up program to back the states and make the Pentagon clean up these bases– which are full of toxins released from unexploded chemical weapons. But EPA has yet to exercise this power– even as the Pentagon has allegedly bullied these states by threatening to cut off funding for oversight activities.

The Pentagon defended itself at the hearing by saying they disapprove of state officials and EPA’s approach to the clean-up. Barbara Boxer, (D-Calif.) an ardent Bush administration foe, responded: “I don’t want the EPA making decisions on war strategy and I don’t want the [Pentagon] making decisions on environmental clean up.” I don’t know– maybe we should see if Stephen Johnson has been secretly spending his time cooking up an Iraq withdrawal plan.

“We demand that you immediately remove Mr. Garrett’s voice from this ad. As Mr. Garrett is a non-partisan news correspondent covering the Obama campaign for Fox News, it is highly inappropriate, among other things, of your campaign to use him in your ad.”

The letter comes just one week after CBS had McCain’s “Lipstick” video pulled from YouTube because it contained footage of news anchor Katie Couric. The campaign has also received a long list of similar requests from artists and their representatives, whose material has been used without permission in ads, videos and campaign events, including: musicians Jackson Browne, Van Halen, Heart, Frankie Valli and comedian Mike Myers.

Clearly, it’s not that the McCain campaign doesn’t know about intellectual property laws, it’s just that it doesn’t care.