The living room candidate is a website we were recently made aware of in my political history class. It allows visitors to view for free the campaign commercials of presidential candidates from the very first TV ads to today's advertisements. One particular ad that caught my eye was from the successful campaign of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992. This ad is listed under the title "Milwaukee" and focuses on everyday people and their common complaint of how the Bush administration has overlooked their lives and their incomes for the past four years. I think that this ad is successful in that it brings the issues right to your door, these are everyday people, or so they are portrayed to be, it allows the viewer to watch the commercials and think to themselves "I am just like this person". If the people in this commercial were any indication of the the rest of the country, then we were in a lot of trouble. By showing the people that every viewer at home could relate to, and showing that Clinton and Gore sympathized with these people and would strive for a better economic future for them, it made people want to rally around this future that is promised by a new direction that Clinton would bring to office. I think that it may be successful in targeting this area, but it does leave a lot of gaps in the constituency, ones that I'm sure other ads filled.
http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1992
Good way of characterizing this strategy. Maybe it's an issue of empathy - ability to recognize not just someone else's pain as your own, but of identifying with the 'average' person shown. I wonder if these were actors or votes - one never knows.
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