Television-Era Campaign Logics Die Hard, but Also Coevolve with the Internet
Most of the commentary on the 2008 Obama campaign has focused on internet media. “If it were not for the internet,” said Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post, “Barack Obama would never have been elected president” (K. Anderson, 2009). But 2008 was, in many respects, much like any other television-era campaign, and to downplay this is to misunderstand the campaign’s true significance. At the same time, to place the enduring influence of television-era campaigning in its proper context we must consider how campaigning now works in an increasingly integrated hybrid system.
Television-centric campaign strategy abounded in 2008. Obama’s time was ruthlessly scheduled for maximum efficiency and impact, not least in the area of fundraising, where appearances were skewed toward “high-dollar” events. Public utterances were mostly scripted and actions were mostly stage-managed. David Axelrod, Obama’s chief adviser, and David Plouffe, his campaign manager, were the most important individuals in this domain. Speeches were drafted by committee, with professional speechwriter Jon Favreau taking the lead, though several key speeches had significant input from Obama himself (Plouffe, 2010: 40, 49). The campaign had a large staff devoted to advertising and internal polling. It made heavy use of focus groups to test policy statements in advance of press releases, particularly on key issues such as healthcare. In keeping with television-era traditions, the campaign plowed massive resources into Iowa, the first contest of the primaries, to maximize the chances of establishing momentum and viability in the eyes of elite journalists. A terrible fear of the slightest mistake polluted the campaign for its entire duration, a fact that insider accounts betray in some detail, with, for example, tales of “systemic failure” and the inadequate “scouring” of potential problems like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial pastor whose interventions on race relations became more inflammatory as the campaign progressed. As David Plouffe put it: “I still kick myself for how terribly we mishandled our Wright work” (Plouffe, 2010: 41). The phrase “Wright work” reveals the time-honored practices of the war room: seeking out potential problems with a candidate’s past and rendering these amenable to careful management. The campaign solicited the support of high-profile figures from the spheres of television entertainment, business, and sports, and it orchestrated their appearances in “high-roller events” for the maximum possible television exposure and impact on the news agenda. Participation in the early televised primary debates was accompanied by what the campaign called “visibility contingents”—supporters deliberately assembled to convey a sense of enthusiasm in front of the cameras (Plouffe, 2010: 61).
There was also classic “opposition research,” which enabled the war room to feed to the press negative background information on competitors, in the hope of generating critical coverage. Notable examples include the information about rival Democratic candidate Senator John Edwards’s “$400 haircuts,” which was given to the press by an Obama researcher, and “Punjabgate,” a story that tried to portray Hillary Clinton as soft on jobs outsourcing, but which backfired when the New York Times instead framed its report around the Obama campaign’s attempt to smear opponents.
Control by the campaign war room also extended to what it perceived as equally important matters, such as the public’s attitudes to celebrity endorsements. The most vivid example of this was Oprah Winfrey. “We … deployed our ace in the hole—the big O …,” wrote Plouffe. “Her numbers among noncore caucus-goers and primary voters in the early states were even higher than among the general population. We tested this thoroughly before deploying her … ” (Plouffe, 2010: 118). The campaign conducted opinion polls on all of its potential endorsers. The Reverend Al Sharpton’s low approval ratings meant his support was not requested. The campaign also delayed the announcement of Senator John Kerry’s endorsement of Obama for several weeks, after polling showed that it would distract attention from Obama’s early gains (Plouffe, 2010: 125, 132). But Sharpton and Kerry were established political figures whom one would expect to receive such careful treatment; Oprah was not.
Oprah’s cultural reach owes a great deal to her television career, but in recent years this has been augmented by three brand-building projects that have embedded her persona and values in American public life: the Oprah.com website, the Oprah book club, and O, the Oprah Magazine, which sells 2.4 million copies and has an estimated readership of some 16 million per month (Garthwaite & Moore, 2011). These provide a significant sphere of influence for companies and politicians fortunate enough to hitch themselves to the bandwagon. Celebrity endorsements are nothing new in electoral contests, but the extent to which the Obama staff integrated Oprah into their campaign is striking. Rather than hope in some vague sense that the sheen of America’s biggest television celebrity might rub off on their candidate, the campaign saw it as a crucial part of their goal of expanding the electorate, particularly among young women and African Americans, and they succeeded in drawing into the electoral process groups less likely to respond to formal political appeals.
The big O endorsement paid off early. Thirty thousand people came to hear Obama, his wife Michelle, and Oprah speak at meetings in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids in early December 2007, just a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses. This amounted to 13 percent of the eventual record turnout of 240,000 in that state. And, in a remarkable shift, eventual turnout among the under-thirties was at the same rate as among those over sixty-five—a significant departure from previous caucuses, when older voters turned out at twice the rate of the young (Nagourney, 2008b).
NEWER MEDIA LOGICS ENCOURAGE OLDER MEDIA LOGICS: TELEVISION ADVERTISING
Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign raised a total of around $750 million; around $500 million of this came through online donations. The amounts raised online were unprecedented in campaign politics worldwide, but precisely what role did this money play in the campaign?
The vast sums raised online paid for private planes and motorcades, essential resources for the system of symbols that has defined “presidentiality” since television emerged. They paid for a huge nomadic army of salaried staff who were deployed across the country like pieces on a chess board. Obama advertised across all possible media: television, radio, newspapers, internet, billboards, video games, ringtones, leaflets, bumper stickers, and text messaging. But most importantly, the money paid for historically unprecedented amounts of television advertising. Obama outspent all previous presidential campaigns in this area and by a large margin. According to its chief advertising manager, Jim Margolis, the campaign spent a total of $407 million on commercials: $93 million in the primaries and $314 million in the general election. John McCain spent $147 million in the general election (primary data are not available) (Margolis, 2009: 120). Obama sank around $250 million into television ads alone. Not only did this exceed McCain’s television spending by around $100 million, it was $62 million more than what (at that time) was the record-breaking amount the Bush-Cheney campaign spent in 2004 (Toner, 2010: 154). During the final two months of the campaign, Obama spent almost $84 million more than McCain on television and radio (Kenski, et al., 2010: 266). Nielsen television data show that during September, October, and November of 2008, Obama comprehensively out-bought McCain in cable television units (2,092 to 1,518), network television units (432 to 345) and local spot television units (299,207 to 164,556) (Abramowitz, 2010: 96). The vast bulk of these local television ads were aired in the key battleground states. These were significant older media advantages for Obama, and they were bought with the online money.
Consider some of the sums spent to promote even the most basic messages of the campaign. The Obama campaign spent over $14 million on television ads aimed at associating McCain with Bush, including $6 million for a month of spots entitled “The Same.” A similar ad, entitled “90 percent,” cost a total of $8 million in national cable slots during the final two weeks of the campaign: it was so prevalent
that paid media was transformed into earned media when the ad went on to be parodied in a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch starring actor Will Ferrell. The National Annenberg Election Survey found that heavier users of television, newspaper, and the internet for their campaign information were more likely to believe Obama’s “McSame” arguments (Kenski, et al., 2010: 42).
In a move unprecedented for a major party candidate since the 1970s U.S. campaign finance reforms, Obama’s internet donations allowed him to withdraw from public funding for the general election. This, in turn, freed his campaign to spend on its media and grassroots organizing at levels far beyond what would have been possible had it stayed within the federal limits. It could coordinate its media campaign with the Democratic party organizations in the key states, but it was not reliant on the party for funding a volunteer operation. It could massively increase its television advertising toward the end of the campaign, when McCain’s campaign was running out of money. This financial advantage was demonstrated to remarkable effect late in the campaign, when Obama was able to run a series of two-minute commercials and an extraordinary thirty-minute hybrid documentary-advertisement on national television, laying out his economic policy in some detail, amid a context of growing financial crisis. The online money paid for all of this.
Due to a lack of money, McCain was forced to run ads funded jointly by his campaign and the Republican National Committee. These are regulated by the FEC to ensure that messages are focused exactly equally on the presidential campaign and broader party messages. They often produce confusing and ineffective ads at best and downright nonsensical ads at worst. Senior adviser to McCain, Steve Schmidt, described them as “like watching a Fellini film on acid” (Schmidt, 2009: 57). In the end, McCain’s team abandoned the approach and fell back on their own rapidly dwindling supply of money.
For all the talk of the importance of the ground war and the establishment of a volunteer infrastructure assisted by the custom-built social network site, MyBarackObama.com, television advertising played an equally important role in building support, even as early as six months before the Iowa caucuses. When the campaign’s record-breaking second quarter fundraising totals were published in mid-2007, the first response in the war room was to increase advertising. As Plouffe put it, the influx of money, much of it raised online, allowed them to “begin advertising earlier and more frequently … because voters in these states knew very little about Obama at this point. Most of what they knew was surface information—he was a senator, gave a good speech in Boston in 2004, served in the Illinois legislature. We needed to fill in his life story, his values, accomplishments, and agenda. Now we had the resources to do a more thorough job” (Plouffe, 2010: 78). This theme—using television advertising to “do a more thorough job” in conveying the controlled, personalized narratives that are so crucial to a presidential campaign, and for which television is the best medium—is a powerful current in the story of Obama’s 2008 victory. The approach continued throughout the post-Iowa primaries and into the general election campaign, when television advertising, and not just the internet, was seen as the most effective means of quickly establishing candidate recognition and even of spurring enthusiasm among local volunteers.
As the campaign moved into the general election, managing resources in the swing states required a careful balancing of priorities. On the ground, staffers and volunteer labor often plugged the gaps in states that were lower down the pecking order for advertising spending. Minnesota and Wisconsin fell into this category, for example. But overall, television advertising was seen as a better means of educating the electorate about the personal and family history of a relative newcomer to national politics (Plouffe, 2010: 250, 264). The idea that the internet was the only key to the ground campaign is wide of the mark: the picture is more complex.
Despite the obvious affordances of the internet for long-term campaign building, such as its suitability for integrating with the ground game and its capacity for rapid rebuttal (Anstead & Chadwick, 2009), once a campaign is underway, when candidates must deal with multiple contests in quick succession across a vast territory, television advertising is still seen as supremely advantageous. Obama sought to establish support bases in several states through advertising, particularly in the primaries immediately after Iowa and New Hampshire, when time was tight in the run-up to Super Tuesday, the day in 2008 when twenty-two primaries were held. And with the emergence of early voting rules that enable large states such as California to vote long before Super Tuesday itself, the time pressure in 2008 was even greater (Plouffe, 2010: 138). Record amounts of funds flowed into the campaign on the back of Obama’s Iowa and South Carolina victories in early 2008. All but $4 million of the $32 million total for January 2008 was raised online, which meant that it could be quickly deployed in broadcast ads in the Super Tuesday states to “help fill the void” in the ground effort, even in very expensive advertising markets such as Los Angeles and New York (Plouffe, 2010: 167). New York was particularly important for the campaign’s strategy of securing Democratic Party delegate votes even in those states where it did not stand to gain a majority of the popular vote.
Newer media logics enhanced older media logics, in a virtuous circle. Immediately after Super Tuesday, the Obama campaign increased its media buying on the expectation of a further influx of online donations. This gamble paid off: $55 million flooded in by the end of February (Plouffe, 2010: 177). As donations continued to increase, the campaign was able to increase its advertising across all older media: television, newspapers, and radio. For example, in the closing stages of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries it plowed all of its advertising resources into a television campaign about how to deal with rising gas prices. As attention turned to the Texas and Ohio votes, it ran full-page newspaper ads in all of the daily papers in these two states (Plouffe, 2010: 191).
It is often assumed that the internet enables campaigns to adapt quickly to unforeseen events (Chadwick, 2007), and this is undoubtedly the case. But we should also remember that the very same digital technologies and working practices that drive internet campaigning are also now deeply embedded in all campaigns’ internal coordination mechanisms and they also penetrate the habitual practices of journalists’ news production. In television news, there has been a shift toward real-time reaction and round-the-clock working. Campaign media staff now spend large amounts of their time in video processing rooms, using computers to rapidly produce and edit broadcast-quality video complete with sophisticated graphical overlays and animations. The completed files are transmitted digitally to the advertising agencies, who then liaise with the television companies. Television ads are therefore now just as much a part of the rapid-reaction, real-time campaign as e-mail, blogs, and social network updates. For example, in the midst of the financial crisis and on the day the Dow Jones index fell 500 points due to the Lehman Brothers collapse, John McCain remarked that “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.” The Obama campaign responded within a matter of hours with a television ad, “Fundamentals,” that was formally launched the morning after. Obama also mentioned “fundamentals” during the first televised presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi (Kenski, et al., 2010: 196). McCain’s selectively chosen seven-word remark became a major theme of the remainder of the campaign: it was included 668 times in newspapers and 303 times in broadcast news (Kenski, et al., 2010: 184).
Quickly prepared commercials like “Fundamentals” integrate and remediate the key turning points in the big real-time television events of the campaign. In another example, during the third televised presidential debate, McCain responded cuttingly to Obama’s claim that McCain held the same views as Bush: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago,” he said. The following morning, the Obama campaign issued a commercial featuring archived video footage of McCain proudly stating that he “voted with the president over 90 percent of the time” (BarackObama
dotcom, 2008a). The McCain campaign followed up soon after with a newspaper interview in the Washington Times and a television appearance on Meet the Press, both of which were aimed at distancing their candidate from the Bush era (Kenski, et al., 2010: 38).
Television and radio advertising are still perceived by campaign insiders as more effective than any other medium for persuading voters (Kaye, 2009: 14). They have become more, not less, valuable for campaigns because over the last few election cycles the broadcasting advertising system has itself evolved. The growth of cable television and satellite radio has fragmented audiences, as many viewers and listeners have switched from national broadcast networks to a range of new digital channels. Cable news is now watched at roughly the same levels as the nightly network news (Kenski, et al., 2010: 278). During the 2008 campaign, far greater numbers (44 percent) used cable news channels such as MSNBC, CNN, and Fox as their most important television sources of campaign information when compared with those (18 percent) who used network news, such as ABC, CBS, or NBC (Pew Research Center, 2008a).
Cable television creates new opportunities for effective and measurable advertising. Much of this is now targeted at the slots between a wider range of programming than “hard” news. Lifestyle and entertainment programs are now popular among campaign media buyers, because the buyers know with some precision the kinds of audiences that are likely to view certain types of niche cable content. Campaigns use their own data and those from the cable channels themselves, but they also buy data from market research companies such as Nielsen, MRI, and Scarborough Research. These data make it easier to target ads by gender, ethnicity, age, and likelihood of voting. The ad slots in between shows on stations like the Food Network offer advertisers a less competitive and cluttered environment for their messages than the more limited slots around the big network news shows. Cable ads are more likely to be influential as a result (Kenski, et al., 2010: 278). These developments have renewed television’s role as a medium for political advertising in presidential campaigns.
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