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The Living Room Candidate
An online exhibition retells the story of American political history as we once saw it.
By: C. Todd Williamson, III
“Morning in America,” “A Place Called Hope,” and “The Willie Horton Ad” are just a few campaign commercials from election history past that have been used to persuade Americans to elect three different people into the White House.
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The names behind the three ad titles listed above are Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George H, W. Bush, but the American Museum of the Moving Image’s online exhibition titled The Living Room Candidate displays commercials from the Republican, Democrat, and sometimes Independent nominees dating back to the 1952 election between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.
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"Reagan's Record" 1980, courtesy The Living Room Candidate.
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The exhibit is a bend of the political past and the interactive web media that has been commonplace in today’s political culture. These images give viewers a chance to view campaign commercials that possibly persuaded them to vote one way or another and also reminds us why others didn’t make the cut to Inauguration Day.
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The process of streaming and obtaining this footage did not come easy for the museum and much of the support came from the Scharff Weisberg Media Resource Center (MRC). "The most challe nging part was producing several streaming format files for each clip," commented the MRC's Josh Nissim.
"We had to produce sure
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Actor Harry Belafonte gives a key endorsement in 1960.
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stream files, which contain several bit rates within each file, so the server could select the most appropriate bit rate to match the user's connection," said Nissim.
“This project couldn't have been done without the MRC," said Carl Goodman, the Museum's Curator of Digital Media & Director of New Media Projects and Co-Curator of The Living Room Candidate. “Scharff Weisberg was always willing to go the extra mile every time a problem arose outside the original scope of work," he added.
The hard work paid off. Now, billions around the world can watch the powerful images of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy” Ad, depicting a young girl picking the petals off of a daisy flower followed by a nuclear blast signaling the little girl’s demise. The ad was so controversial that it only aired once. |
The videos are listed by election year and categorized by political party. The site itself, gives the world a chance to view past political endorsements and also the coming of age of the ‘cool’ medium of television.
One commercial that may not be considered a classic, yet is still effective is one by President Gerald Ford titled “Leadership during the 1976 presidential in which he lets cameras in the Oval
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Johnson’s “Daisy” ad 1964 courtesy The Living Room Candidate.
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Office to convey the feeling of a “non-imperialistic” environment.
Viewers get a chance to witness America’s political figures in their seasoned prime as well as their efforts to bring attention to the nation’s biggest problems for that particular era. For Eisenhower, it was national security against the communist and for Clinton, a suggestion of universal healthcare. Some issues addressed are outdated or have been resolved; others are just as prevalent today as they were in the last 50 years.
To view Living Room Candidate, visit http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/index.php
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