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| After being asked about his lunch order during debate prep, Trump inexplicably did a Nixon impression and walked off the stage (Business Insider). |
The screening room at Sterling Cooper tells you everything
you need to know about the 1960 election, and, by extension, quite a bit about
how we made our way to the fever-pitch of celebrity politics with Trump v.
Clinton. Made when Obama was still a
senator who enjoyed not being passionately hated by nearly half of the country,
the first season of Mad Men ends up
projecting the last decade of American presidential politics – right down to
some of the Donald’s most beloved of tactics.
Here are six ways Mad Men manages to sum up two different historic elections a half-century apart, at the
same time.
Nixon, first low
energy candidate.
On paper, Nixon had everything going his way in 1960 against
Kennedy. He was a VP for a popular
president, enormously experienced, and was still more than a decade away from
outing himself as the proverbial shady asshat.
None of his advantages, however, prepared him for having to go in front
of a camera and
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| Nixon was so boring during his first major ad that the nation saw a small uptick in the desire for nuclear war. |
explain why he would actually make a good president. After Don and his crew listen to a cheery,
optimistic and high-energy jingle from Kennedy, Nixon breaks in hoping to
soberly “talk to you for a moment about dollars and sense.” Appearing like some sort of life-sized wooden
doll sitting on a desk, Nixon seemed to be the guy who could talk an IRS agent
to sleep, leading Don to mockingly sum up: “Turn it off…Message received, and
forgotten.” The ultimate cynic, Don
knows the one thing that Americans have no appetite for is boring, a trend that
simply turned into a fact of life during the 2016 GOP primary while Trump
metaphorically dangled his private parts for an enormous audience, on a daily basis. It doesn’t take much to imagine a Trumpian
coming to Don’s conclusion about Bush the Third, ultimately helping to bury the
extremely well-financed GOP favorite, Jeb!, with little more than a middle
finger and a grade school-level nickname.
Kennedy, the first
political celebrity.
With Nixon way ahead in the polls and the perfect paper
candidate, the old guard of Roger and Bert are confident in the direction of
the election in the early parts of the campaign. Then Pete chimes in on Kennedy, suggesting
that what they’re really experiencing isn’t a logical rundown of numbers and qualifications. “Elvis,” he says, “that’s what we’re dealing
with here.” Though Pete is quickly
dismissed by the troglodytes in the room, his commentary forecast the type of
political realm that would eventually open the door wide open to the ongoing
Trump rampage. As Kennedy was morphing
into the first bona fide political celebrity, Pete was starting to see an
entirely new angle for marketing candidates – an advertising firm’s wet dream,
beholden only to a publicist’s imagination.
Also entering the equation is Jackie Kennedy, who begins her national
seduction as the Sterling Cooper’s half-hearted Nixon boys look on. What they see is a natural beauty, an easily
likable woman wafting a hint of sensuality and even able to deliver a TV
spot in Spanish. Before even getting
to the conversation about how this is pandering for votes, in 1960 it played as
a stunning bit of marketing that certainly would stick with a viewer a lot
longer than Nixon being Nixon. Despite Don's Wife, Betty, saying the things she feel she's expected to, mainly denouncing the Kennedys, it isn't long before she's glued to the TV as Jackie gives her famous tour of the White House. Later on,
when it’s pretty clear that even Kennedy detractors would rather watch a
Kennedy TV spot, Pete even comes up with the ingenious move to push laxative
ads into time slots instead of letting Nixon and Kennedy trade
commercials. Ultimately, when your
candidate simply can’t compete with a rock star and his glowing wife on television, having voters
think about bowel movements is better than going blow-for-blow with Elvis.
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| Nixon asks the King to check out his demo tape (1970, Zimbio.com). |
Issues are
dramatically overrated.
Follow Trump on Twitter for a couple of days and the last
thing that you might find is a tangible issue – a reminder about the American
electorate more so than a critique of the campaign. In many ways, Trump probably deserves credit
for just admitting the obvious: Americans care about their Instagram like
counts, celebrity gossip, and, of course, their forever extending appetite for
public train wrecks of all shapes and sizes.
Serious topics and real issues are, by and large, for political nerds
and journalists, representing only a small portion of the electorate.
But Trump is also far from the first to promote
image and drama instead of the issues, which is what we find when the liquored
up Sterling Cooper boys pop on the first TV spot for Kennedy. Despite being forced into being a Nixon man,
Don immediately recognizes a hit when he sees one – a joyful blob of fabricated
happiness that is perfect for lampooning the short-winded American attention
span. He reflects: "It's light,
it's fun. It doesn't cloud the mind with, I don't know, issues." We may pretend that it’s dollars and sense
that get people into the voting booth, but the 2016 campaign has proven that
excitement and energy comes into play long before issues do – if they even make
it into the conversation at all.
Birth of negative TV
advertising.
There he was: sitting two-term president Dwight Eisenhower unable to think of a single
accomplishment of his own vice president, Richard Nixon – all in front of a
merciless camera that would soon turn into a mass-produced megaphone. Though Ike certainly had no idea of the
implications, Pete quickly understands that Kennedy was handed a golden
opportunity for the nascent political TV era.
And this during a race that was just starting to slip away from Nixon,
who started as a dramatic favorite and was rapidly becoming as well-liked as
Ted Nugent at a Jill Stein rally. Of
course, the negative ad snippets were really just beginning when they trickled
onto airwaves for the first time in ‘60, leading Kennedy’s VP, Lyndon Johnson,
to take full advantage of the trend with his infamous “Daisy” ad against Barry
Goldwater in ‘64.
By 2016, negative advertising
has become a hallmark of presidential politics, with both candidates
Twitter-blasting negativity across the internet at lightspeed in a way that
wasn’t even possible when Obama was elected in 2008 – a year after season one
of Mad Men aired. Now locked in a race between two of the most
disliked presidential candidates in history this year, the negative ad phenomenon
has come full circle as both campaigns take off the gloves for the home stretch,
surfacing for a slice of positivity only for sake of appearance.
The POTUS as a product.
After glowing about an impressive Kennedy ad, Pete correctly
points out that “the president is a product – don’t forget that.” Like Pete, the Kennedy team clearly seems to
understand this from the beginning, offering the type of optimistic image that
leads Don to mockingly suggest “happy days are here again,” without the burden
of knowing a single thing about the candidate.
Then there’s Nixon, a man who appears so dull that Kinsey suggests
viewers are more likely to go get a suicide-aiding icepick than actually like
seeing Nixon on TV. Hammering home the
secondary nature of facts/issues, the idea of a candidate being a product first
and foremost was taken to the next level during both of the 2016 primaries,
although much more dramatically on the GOP side. After all, it wasn’t Dr. Ben Carson’s original
ideas about the Egyptian pyramids that sunk his campaign. That only happened when the American voter
realized he was as dull as The 700 Club
– even if he did believe that the pyramids were built to be elaborate grain
silos.
Of course, the same thing happened
on the other side when Lincoln Chafee was such an abysmal presidential product
that his campaign was finished before Jim Webb even got a chance to talk about
the VC he killed in ‘Nam. Products can
have flaws, limited appeal or even be mostly useless. What a product can’t do is fail the eyeball
test when on display by looking uninteresting or like it doesn’t belong, which
holds true whether you’re putting together shiny packaging for toothpaste or
prepping a candidate hoping to be the leader of the free world.
Play the personal
story angle, hard.
Having a great personal story wasn’t always a given
centerpiece of a presidential campaign, though today it’s mainly viewed as
Politics 101 in the era of omnipresent social media. Sensing the importance of the growing trend
as the Nixon vs. Kennedy election was heating up, Don suggests that Nixon
should thrust his inspirational personal story into the spotlight instead of
his soporific conversations about brass tacks.
To Don, Nixon is a rags to power and riches story that started with a
poor upbringing in California, paralleling Don’s own climb as well as the
perception of the collective American dream.
On the flip side, Kennedy had
simply stolen the personal narrative angle
despite the fact that many viewed him as a silver-spooned college kid with his
thumb up his ass. Instead of Nixon inspiring
voters to jam ice picks in their eyes and ears, or just vote for Kennedy out of
spite, Don is ahead of the curve and realizes that what the average American
really needs is a personal story they can believe in – even if it’s total and
utter horseshit, like his own.
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| When shown this photo of Hillary, Trump had to be forcibly removed from his Twitter account. |
In the recent
Democratic convention, Hillary’s camp did everything it could to go back to the
roots, to the days when she was an idealistic young law student who had never
heard of a private email server. As far
as Trump goes, the Twitter rants have mostly overshadowed a campaign painting
him as a phenomenon of American business, one who pulled himself up to be an
alleged billionaire purely by intelligence, ingenuity and swollen testicles. Although the trend has been building for
decades, it remains as important as ever as two unpopular candidates hope to
overcome the negativity, including one who
is actually more disliked than head lice, root canals and even Nickelback.
