But over the years, Republicans retained their vestigial ties to Madison Avenue. One reason is that Republican presidential campaigns have more often leaned toward the values of product advertising—how much of a difference is there, anyway, between selling a washing machine and selling an idea like tax cuts?

Well, there are a few differences. In politics, the budgets are puny and the turnaround time lightning-fast, while in the product world, the pace is leisurely and the spending extravagant. And Madison Avenue executives never work on product campaigns with the kind of ruthless mathematical rules of political campaigns. “Imagine a product that had to get 51 percent market share on a specific date,” says Carter Eskew, the Gore campaign’s media strategist. “And if you failed to get 51 percent, your product would be removed from the shelves. That’s the difference between the two worlds.”

Steve McMahon, who made Howard Dean’s ads, puts it this way: “The advertising they produce is meant to communicate an emotion or feeling, and what we do is move public opinion.”

But for Reagan, and now Bush, there is nothing wrong with a little emotion. Stevens looks at the gap between Washington political firms that practice the art of issue-oriented persuasion and New York ad firms that specialize in triggering emotions, and he sees lessons to be learned. “I can convince you better than someone from Madison Avenue that eating hamburgers at Burger King gives you cancer,” he says. “But they are making you feel emotional and involved in eating hamburgers. That’s pretty impressive. I think people who can make you feel emotionally involved about eating hamburgers have something to teach you about defending the country or improving education.”

In 1984, Madison Avenue reached its apex of influence in presidential campaigns. Reagan’s advertising all-stars, known as the Tuesday Team, included Edward Ney of Young & Rubicam and Sig Rogich of R&R, Kenneth Roman and Hal Riney of Ogilvy & Mather, and Philip Dusenberry of BBDO. The anthemlike spot that opened and closed the campaign, “Prouder, Stronger, Better”—popularly known as “Morning in America”—was a lyrical montage of Americans raising flags, going to work, moving into new homes, getting married, and raising more flags. Except for one photograph at the end, Reagan doesn’t even appear in the ad. “Nineteen eighty-four was the first campaign where it didn’t look like political ads,” says Pacy Markman, a former Madison Avenue ad-maker who worked on Coke’s account for several years and whose firm, Zimmerman & Markman, now produces spots for MoveOn. “I took Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ ad and put a Coca-Cola soundtrack behind it, and it worked perfectly.” Ed Rollins, a top Reagan strategist, once bragged that the ads had helped make ’84 an “issueless” campaign.

Many of Bush’s ads mimic this Reagan strategy. Though some of the spots seek to destroy Kerry’s credibility while shielding Bush from obvious lines of attack, the campaign’s emphasis is on above-the-fray, positive commercials. “Safer, Stronger,” one of Bush’s first ads, is, as the name implies, a direct descendant of “Prouder, Stronger, Better.” There are no facts or accomplishments transmitted, just images—a stock ticker and a flag-draped stretcher from ground zero—that recall the challenges of the recession and 9/11. Text across the screen proclaims TODAY, AMERICA IS TURNING THE CORNER. The tagline simply emphasizes continuity: PRESIDENT BUSH. STEADY LEADERSHIP IN TIMES OF CHANGE. Even in Reagan’s famous ad, a voice-over cited a series of facts about interest rates and other economic indicators that had improved from the Carter years. But Bush’s first few positive spots this year are unique in the history of presidential advertising in that there is no informational content whatsoever. They are truly issueless. In that sense, they represent a striking resurgence of Madison Avenue’s influence in presidential politics.

Bush’s negative spots are more Karl Rove than Y&R. They are fiendishly clever in characterizing John Kerry as a tax-raising flip-flopper who is soft on defense. But in these same ads, Bush isn’t trying just to define Kerry but to disarm the senator issue by issue. In “Differences,” a visually unremarkable attack ad that claims Kerry will raise taxes, Bush’s strategists add a secondary point that Kerry “voted against giving small businesses tax credits to buy health care for employees.” The idea is to preempt Kerry’s future attacks on a key Bush vulnerability, the growing ranks of the uninsured. In “Troops,” the Bush team not only hammers Kerry for voting against the $87 billion supplemental funding for Iraq but specifically mentions that the bill contained money for body armor, higher combat pay, and health care for reservists, three areas that Kerry has attacked Bush for underfunding. Bush’s most recent ad, “Wacky,” done in the style of an old Laurel and Hardy movie, is the most artful preemptive strike. Anticipating criticism for high gasoline prices, Bush says Kerry supported a 50-cents-per-gallon tax hike. Even Democrats are impressed. “They thought, What are we vulnerable on?” says Markman. “We are going to get nailed on gas prices being high, so let’s do an ad on John Kerry wanting to raise gas taxes, and then when they come back at us, it’ll look defensive.”

One of the dangers for any incumbent president, and the issue that undid Bush’s father, is appearing detached from the concerns of average Americans. An attack now coming from Kerry and his surrogates is that Bush is not “on your side.” So in “Wacky,” the voice-over notes sarcastically, “Maybe John Kerry just doesn’t understand what his ideas mean to the rest of us.” With this, Bush has taken his own vulnerability and turned it on his opponent. “That last line is very powerful,” says Mandy Grunwald, who made Clinton’s ads in 1992. “They are trying to drive a wedge between John Kerry and the middle class in this country. They are doing it a thousand ways with cultural issues. That’s the first time they’ve done it with an ad. They want him to seem aloof and French.”