Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising

Once again, presidential candidates have begun to bombard the American public with a deluge of campaign advertising for the upcoming 1988 Presidential Election. Correspondingly, Kathleen Hall Jamieson offers us this timely, incisive, and highly-informative study which chronicles the schemes and strategies that candidates and their ad executives have employed to sway the hearts and ballots of often unsuspecting voters.

Drawing on previously unpublished campaign documents and unprecedentedly frank interviews with insiders, she traces the origins and evolution of presidential advertising from the earliest days of banners and broadsides to the advent of broadcasts. Focusing on each presidential election from 1952 to 1980, Jamieson examines how political advertising has developed, how candidates have shaped it and been shaped by it, and how it has both contributed to and contaminated the political process. Illuminating in its wealth of evidence and rhetorical analysis, Packaging the Presidency unmasks the small untruths and big lies that have appeared in the print, radio, and television ads of presidential candidates.

Once again, presidential candidates have begun to bombard the American public with a deluge of campaign advertising for the upcoming 1988 Presidential Election. Correspondingly, Kathleen Hall Jamieson offers us this timely, incisive, and highly-informative study which chronicles the schemes and strategies that candidates and their ad executives have employed to sway the hearts and ballots of often unsuspecting voters.

Drawing on previously unpublished campaign documents and unprecedentedly frank interviews with insiders, she traces the origins and evolution of presidential advertising from the earliest days of banners and broadsides to the advent of broadcasts. Focusing on each presidential election from 1952 to 1980, Jamieson examines how political advertising has developed, how candidates have shaped it and been shaped by it, and how it has both contributed to and contaminated the political process. Illuminating in its wealth of evidence and rhetorical analysis, Packaging the Presidency unmasks the small untruths and big lies that have appeared in the print, radio, and television ads of presidential candidates.

Packaging the Presidency, Third Edition, is now completely updated to offer the only comprehensive study of the history and effects of political advertising in the United States. Noted political critic Kathleen Hall Jamieson traces the development of presidential campaigning from early political songs and slogans through newsprint and radio, and up to the inevitable history of presidential campaigning on television from Eisenhower to Clinton. The book also covers important issues in the debate about political advertising by touching on the development of laws governing political advertising, as well as how such advertising reflects, and at the same time helps to create, the nature of the American political office. Finally, current public concerns about political advertising are addressed as Jamieson raises the topic of ads dealing mainly in images rather than issues, and of political aspirations becoming increasingly only for the rich, who can afford the enormous cost of television advertising.

About the Author:

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is G.B. Dealey Professor of Communications at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action, Interplay of Influence: Media and Their Publics in News Advertising and Politics, and Eloquence in an Electronic