Kathleen Hall Jamieson Quotes
… the most famous ad produced in the history of political television
The ad, created by Tony Schwartz, only ran once, on September 7, 1964. It was so dramatic that News and other media replayed it and discussed it up until the election. LBJ’s opponent Barry Goldwater was a military hawk in the midst of the Cold war where nuclear war was everyone’s greatest fear. The Daisy ad was crystal clear and made overt what many Americans concern was about Goldwater. Johnson won in a landslide. See {586351} for the kinds of views that made Goldwater so vulnerable.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dean, Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania, Description of the LBJ “Daisy” TV Ad, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction and Democracy, 1992
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Democrats used this quotation during the 1964 presidential campaign, in a famous TV ad with a little girl, a mushroom cloud and the announcer quoting Goldwater.
A professional mature female actress spoke the words. The Majority of the Republicans voted against the Medicare law that had passed under Lyndon Johnson. They lost millions of votes over that for years. Then at the end of the 20th century, many Republicans tried to reduce or privatize Medicare which by then was second only to Social Security among all government programs. The Democrats then used many variants of this Schwartz ad to great effect.
One of the many Goldwater statements that made most Americans believe he was not prudent enough to trust with the nuclear “trigger”, See {622850}.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is an American professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She co-founded FactCheck.org, and she is an author, most recently of Cyberwar.
