Author: jbenton

Dallasites, if you get a chance, stop by the Sixth Floor Museum sometime before the end of January. (Of course, all Dallasites have already been to the Sixth Floor Museum — a.k.a. where Oswald plugged JFK — many times. It’s just about the only tourist destination of note in town, which makes it a mandatory stop when out-of-town visitors drop in. I’ve been at least a dozen times.)
Anyway, their temporary exhibit is called The Living Room Candidate, and it’s an entertaining video history of TV commercials from presidential elections past. (The non-Texans among us should head to the web site, which has most of the ads available for viewing.)
Don’t worry about the later years — go straight to the early stuff from the 1950s and 1960s. It’s fascinating to see how quickly the form evolved. Eisenhower’s commercials were almost painfully earnest — the look of a military man forced to interact with The Public and mouth political hackery with fake conviction. But it’s not surprising he won two terms: Adlai Stevenson’s ads were ludicrously dull talkers that wouldn’t hack it on air today.
But the one election you want to check out is 1964, LBJ vs. Goldwater. It’s not hard to figure out why Johnson won in a landslide. Goldwater’s ads were stuck in Eisenhower form: people sitting in chairs and talking to the camera (if occasionally looking crazed while doing it). His only innovations seemed to be fascist parodies that seem to blame the nation’s ills on outtakes of West Side Story.
But LBJ’s ads were works of art. Emotionally manipulative, sure, but works of art nonetheless.
The most famous one, of course, is the daisy ad. That’s the one that features a cute little girl picking petals off a daisy — then segues into a vision of a nuclear holocaust, while an off-camera LBJ intones biblically: “We must either love each other…or we must die.” It’s an incredibly cheap shot (that only aired once), but it is nonetheless some powerful shit.
The ads, viewed as whole, did an amazingly good job of painting Goldwater as, well, batshit crazy: a loose cannon itching to nuke the Soviets, the Chinese, the Vietnamese — hell, maybe the Belgians if he got some bad waffles one morning. Johnson clearly had real filmmakers working for him — the quality of direction is much higher.
But the best of them all is Confessions of a Republican. It’s four minutes of an actor playing a Republican who doesn’t want to vote for Goldwater. It’s amazingly effective at seeding doubts and, even though it’s clearly an actor with a script, it seems infinitely more real than the “real” people in modern ads. I mean, were I a Republican in ’64, I think I’d be forced to think things through after seeing this. In this New Yorker article, professional quote machine Kathleen Hall Jamieson calls it the one of the most effective ads of all time. (Transcript here.)
If my eye for actors is right, the Humphrey campaign tried bringing the same guy back to do a somewhat similar ad against Nixon in ’68. But it’s nowhere near as effective — the dialogue is much obviously politically driven, the reasoning is gone, and the air of self-evaluation has disappeared. But honestly, I think a “Confessions of a Republican”-style ad could be used by either party effectively in ’04. Even the scripted can seem sincere.

Buy a brand-new Windows XP computer, plug in the Internet and bam: 20 minutes max before you get a virus, worm, or other malware. Pitiful. In case anyone wonders why I’m a Mac guy, here’s reason No. 3,972.
Still extremely busy. Should all be worth it come the weekend.

Well, what the hell do I know: Chanda and Venus have been ousted in doubles.
But she beat Cara Black (6-4, 3-6, 6-3), putting her into the third round. I doubt she’ll get past Mauresmo, though.

The schedule is up for the Austin City Limits Festival next month. A tentative suggested plan:
Friday:
4-5 p.m.: Sloan (although Neko Case is tempting)
[early dinner]
6-7 p.m.: Broken Social Scene
7-8 p.m.: Ryan Adams (but leave a little early and catch some of…)
7:15-8:15 p.m.: Rebirth Brass Band (but leave a little early and move to…)
8-8:45 p.m.: Franz Ferdinand (although Gomez is tempting)
8:45-9:55 p.m.: Los Lonely Boys
[party]
Saturday:
[sleep in late, then straggle in late to…]
2-3 p.m.: Josh Rouse
3-4 p.m.: Old 97s
4-4:45 p.m.: Bruce Robison (and hope he plays this song)
[early dinner, unless I grow remarkably more pro-Modest Mouse]
6-7 p.m.: My Morning Jacket (although Los Amigos Invisibles is very tempting)
7:15-8:15 p.m.: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (leaving early for…)
8-8:45 p.m.: The Neville Brothers
8:45-9:55 p.m.: The Pixies
[party]
Sunday:
[sleep in late, a hearty migas brunch, then…]
1:45-2:30 p.m.: Calexico
2:30-3:30 p.m.: The Roots (also tempting: Doyle Bramhall and Shelby Lynne)
3:30-4:30 p.m.: Ben Kweller (but leave after three songs for…)
4-5 p.m.: Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra (but leave after two very lengthy songs for…)
4:30-5:30 p.m.: Elvis Costello
5:30-6:30 p.m.: Spoon
[get in the car, drive back to Dallas, moderately sad over missing Wilco, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, David Garza, Cake, and Ben Harper in the evening]
Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately. My pace will pick up soon, I hope.

Here’s my story from today’s front page. Most of you will find it more interesting than most of my stuff — it’s about how test-prep companies like Kaplan and the Princeton Review are profiting from anxiety about the new SAT test that will debut in March.

ChandaWatch: She won her first-round singles match over the koala Samantha Stosur. But the fact it took her three sets (6-2, 6-7, 6-0) doesn’t bode well. Next up: the Zimbabwan menace Cara Black. If she gets past Black, it’ll be the 2 seed, Amelie Mauresmo, in the octofinals.
The Chanda/Venus doubles team faces the Chinese Ting Li/Tian Tian Sun duo later today.

U.S. Senate candidate (and Barack Obama opponent) Alan Keyes rocks the showtunes.
Maybe Obama and Keyes could settle this whole Senate race thing with a showtunes battle — sort of like 8 Mile but with a Andrew Lloyd Webber vibe. It might be Keyes’ only chance at victory.

Screw-loose Screw founder says he got screwed.
A large silver cross around his neck gleamed against his chest hair. He has been wearing it for a few months. “I feel doomed as a Jew,” he said. “I’ll try anything else.”

Great piece in WaPo about the perils of mixing race baiting, stand-up comics, and t-shirt manufacturing. (Well, it’s a great story — the writing’s a little awkward in a few places.)

ChandaWatch: Our Hero’s chances at a medal just improved greatly. It seems that Serena Williams, hours before she was to board a flight to Athens, backed out, claiming “lingering knee pain.”
That means Serena’s singles spot will be wasted — the deadline for replacing members of your Olympic team has passed, so Aussie Samantha Stosur will get the spot. But Serena had planned to pair with sister Venus as the top American doubles team. (They won the gold in Sydney.) So now Venus’ new doubles partner will be…Chanda Rubin!
This is excellent news on a few fronts. One, obviously Venus is a hell of a doubles partner. Two, when you’ve got an achy knee (as Chanda has had since January), doubles play is a much better fit than singles — much less lateral movement, much heavier reliance on upper-body reflexes. And Chanda’s a heck of a doubles player herself — her only Grand Slam title to date remains winning the Australian Open in doubles a few years back. So while her singles campaign probably doesn’t have much of a chance, we may see Chanda on the medals stand yet.