Content area
Full Text
`THE 30-SECOND PRESIDENT' Wednesday at 10 p.m. & 2 a.m., Saturday at 11 a.m., A&E Close enough. As A&E cable repeats the 1984 PBS series "A Walk Through the 20th Century With Bill Moyers," its program on presidential campaign commercials falls one day after the New York primary. The real rush to buy TV time won't be on until fall anyway. And Moyers' incisive history of this strange tool in campaign strategy will linger in the mind at least that long. He delivers all the goods in this probing - and nostalgic - hour. The vintage commercials are here: black-and-white relics from Eisenhower's groundbreaking use of TV in 1952 (astonishingly creaky and naive); Goldwater's screaming scare ads from 1964; an anti-Nixon spot that consists simply of "Agnew for Vice-President?" on the picture and hysterical laughter on the soundtrack. Moyers also talks with two men responsible for the shape of campaign TV. Rosser Reeves, the '50s hard-sell king, talks about how he masterminded Ike's TV foray in '52. He took a "singularly inept speaker" and made him look dynamic by using the sales techniques of Madison Avenue. Tony Schwartz, king of the game over the last 25 years, uses a subtler approach with "deep-sell" ads that aim at a gut level. He produced the most infamous political commercial ever: the '64 Johnson "daisy ad" in which a sequence of a little girl pulling petals off a daisy was followed by the image of an atomic mushroom cloud, over which LBJ intoned about "the stakes" of modern diplomacy. The spot didn't have to mention Goldwater; people were already wondering whether his finger was too close to the button. The ad aired only once. But it did its job. Schwartz dismisses the idea that today's slick TV ads don't educate the public about issues. "That's not the function," he says....