Last week the Republican National Committee released a Web-only spot opposing the closing of the Guantanamo detention center that sampled the infamous "Daisy ad" from Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater.
Either out of sense of decency, loss of nerve or ineptitude, the RNC made an utter hash of it.
More on that in a moment -- first, let me refresh your collective memory: "Daisy" opens in a field on a child, dreamily counting as she picks petals off a flower. Her counting is interrupted by an eerie launch-pad countdown in voice-over. She looks up. Freeze frame.
The camera zooms in on her face, Truffaut-style, until it plunges into the black of her pupil. Then a monstrous thermonuclear explosion, over which we hear LBJ speechifying: "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 lines, usually attributed to then-special assistant to the president Bill Moyers (who has said he can't remember), riff on a poem by W.H. Auden.
The implication was, obviously, that Goldwater's itchy nuclear finger would trigger a holocaust. Thank God for LBJ, peacemaker.
Created by the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency of New York, the Daisy ad aired only once, on Sept. 7, 1964, on NBC, during a showing of the biblically bad "David and Bathsheba." The Johnson campaign (Moyers, Jack Valenti and others) then pulled the ad, counting on howling outrage to carry its message forward.
In the next few weeks, the relatively young and naive TV news media obliged, replaying the one-minute spot over and over until, finally, Daisy had accreted into something else entirely: a document that had to be seen for its own sake, a media contagion borne aloft by gusts of outrage.
Leveraging its own creative and stylistic innovation, and ruthlessness, Daisy became probably the first example of viral advertising.
Goldwater, by the way, lost in a landslide.
It's a measure of disarray in the once media-savvy RNC camp that its Daisy mix is so unpersuasive. For starters, the ad wants to take Obama to task for closing Gitmo when the president has been thoroughly turned back by his own party on this score.
Second, it's clumsy. The hyper-clipped sound bites from Democratic Sens. Jim Webb and Harry Reid and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs are transparently selective and out of context. The RNC of 2004 would never have let those seams show.
