Untitled Document
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Untitled Document
Mad About You
AMC’s new hit Mad Men presents a blend of Madison Avenue advertising with Pennsylvania Avenue ambition on the eve of the most important elections of two generations.
By C. Todd Williamson, III
Sterling Cooper, Manhattan’s leading boutique advertising firm, prepares for a meeting with the advisers of a presidential frontrunner. In a pre-meeting brainstorming session, Sterling Cooper partners Bertram Cooper and Roger Sterling, along with Don Draper, the firm’s creative director, play the guessing game for the upcoming election.
They’ve come up with a plan to promote their candidate as one with experience; someone whose been as close to the leader of the free world as anybody else. While they’ve already entered into their minds that their candidate’s primary opponent will be a young hot shot from the U.S. Senate who’s noted for more style than substance, the men of Sterling Cooper are grasping the reality of taking on a presidential campaign.
This isn’t 2008, it’s 1960, and the “experienced” candidate is the two time elected Vice-President, Richard Nixon. The educated guess is banking on Sen. John F. Kennedy as the Democratic nominee.
Mad Men is AMC’s first original series and the network usually known for showing films from the golden age of cinema, is now presenting a classic era with contemporary stars. The society of Mad Men is set in the fast paced world of Madison Avenue advertising in 1960, a year considered as the height of the 1950s conservative exterior fused with the liberating ideals of the 1960s.
The show’s producer Matthew Weiner, who also produced the HBO original series The Sopranos, sends viewers back in time to a far less politically incorrect world. So far, the series has become one the highest reviewed shows of 2007 as it attempts to tackle issues that we don’t think would occur in the ‘Nuclear Age.’ Other angles touch on once taboo subjects such as the presence of the neighborhood divorcee or coping wit the idea of visiting a psychologist. Both items today appear to be commonplace.
But Weiner and the show’s writers have been keen on covering a multitude of issues. You watch Don Draper work to keep his creative juices flowing as he attempts to come up with new fresh ideas for Sterling Cooper’s diverse clientele. From Jewish travel agents to front window Manhattan clothing stores, the “mad men” similar to Draper have the daunting task of creating that next big catchy jingle, theme song, catchphrase, or pitch that will increase sales.
Keeping up with the events of the period, Weiner has not shied away from the biggest story of 1960, the presidential election. Apparently, Sterling Cooper is taking on a rather large political client.
In the episode titled “Red In the Face,” Sterling Cooper’s upper management prepares to meet with the “Nixon Brain Trust.” They do so by first, forecasting the opposition, the second item on the agenda is framing Nixon’s image.
“The nomination is a lock, all we need is an opponent,” says Roger Sterling. Two names are tossed around. The first is Lyndon Johnson. The guess is that Johnson will make a power move at the Los Angeles Convention and win the nomination. If Johnson wins, Nixon will lose the ‘South.’ |
Bertram Cooper, brilliantly played by Tony Award winner Robert Morse, immediately squashes this notion. “It’s gonna be Kennedy, the Boston Blackie won West Virginia,” asserting that Kennedy, a Catholic and dark horse candidate won the primary in the heavily protestant state. He continues, “So where does that leave us?”
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Kennedy and Nixon in Miami, 1960.
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His business partner Sterling (John Slattery) responds, “Nixon, experienced in office, knows foreign affairs…knows the real threat of communism at home and abroad.”
Sterling frames Kennedy as, “A Catholic son of a millionaire, a boy, too scared to do anything but go on vacation…he’s inexperienced.”
Cooper adds, “He doesn’t even wear a hat.” Ambitious young account executive, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) interjects, “I don’t know. You know who else doesn’t wear a hat? Elvis. That’s what we’re dealing with.” Cooper, clearly annoyed at this point, answers back, “Remind me to stop hiring young people.”
Sterling adds on, “You think America wants a greasy kid with his finger on the button? Now if the adults could weigh in...”
In retrospect, Lyndon Johnson did go on to make a power move at the 1960 DNC, but it did not garner him the presidential nomination. A Kennedy family political machine that had already secured delegates by surviving the primaries outmaneuvered him. This was a tactic unheard of in 1960, but is a requirement to win either parties nomination in 2008.
Nixon was framed as experienced in foreign affairs and at the side of President Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy’s ‘breakthrough’ fashion trend of going hatless did later set a precedent. No other president since him has been seen wearing a hat on a consistent basis. As Pete Campbell made the comparison to Elvis, once elected, Kennedy was received by screaming fans at home and especially abroad in nations such as Germany, Ireland, France, and Great Britain.
By October 1962, he officially became the “greasy kid” with his finger on the button during the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event in which many scholars herald as one of the key defining moments of the American presidency in regards to national security.
The “strategy” scene in the television series also foreshadows the divisions brewing between the “Greatest Generation” of World War II and the “Baby Boomers.” The Election of 1960 would be the first battleground between the generations during the upcoming decade. Eventually clear divisions would be visible by the onslaught of Vietnam, race riots, assassinations, and the growing counterculture, which all appear to be a planet away in the world portrayed in the series.
But as Mad Men recreates a past of historical fiction every Thursday, it also casts an inside look the today’s political reality that occurs everyday. |
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Hillary Clinton (1) and Barack Obama during a CNN Democratic
presidential debate |
Today, in one party, the experienced Hillary Clinton, who has sat next to a sitting p resident for 8 years plus held her seat in the Senate for 6 years, faces a man who calls himself a “skinny kid with a funny name” in Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
Earlier in the year, it was revealed that the Clinton campaign used the services of a small South Carolina based advertising media firm, similar to Weiner’s gradual portrayal of Nixon with Sterling Cooper.
But Clinton came under fire as it was revealed earlier this year that the head of Sunrise Communications was none other than South Carolina State Senator Darrell Jackson, an influential politician that was accused of receiving financial payments from Clinton’s campaign in exchange for an endorsement.
Today’s PR gurus have become yesterday’s ‘mad men,’ framing and constructing the image that their clients want us to see. More than not, we end up finding out the qualities.
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