Short Cuts

"I propose we agree to completely eliminate the 30-second, 60-second, radio, TV ads and instead have a debate twice a week," Vice President Al Gore suggested to Governor George W. Bush a little while ago.

Gore has made this offer before, to both Bush and Bill Bradley. He talks about "these little 30-second TV ads" with the tone reserved for the neighbor's ill-bred children. They "masquerade as real, meaningful dialogue," says Gore. "They're not. They're most often slogans and fuzzy images."

It sounds good to decry 30-second ads; the very phrase "30 seconds" suggests something too brief and tawdry to be good. But you'll notice Gore didn't ever stop running them himself, and he probably guessed no one would take him up on his offer. In fact, candidates find those scant 30 seconds valuable and effective.

"The bottom line," says Republican consultant Scott Howell, "is advertising still works. If it didn't, McDonalds and Burger King wouldn't buy time."

But that's just the point, critics cry. The complexities of a candidate or the subtleties of an issue aren't as simple as a double cheeseburger. Not only that: Many ads are glib, distorted or even unfair. Their sheer repetition can dull a candidate's message and irritate voters.

Curtis Gans, of the Commission for the Study of the American Electorate, thinks TV spots, particularly negative ones, "create a miasma over the political process. Every candidate looks awful; you don't have a debate on the issues. Warring attack ads urge people not to vote for the other guy, and eventually, they don't."

Gans says negative ads drive down voter turnout, and the people who do make it to the polls have usually been poorly served by those ads. "What we get," he says, "is people whose primary exposure to the campaign is the ads themselves."

Stephen Craig, a professor of political science at the University of Florida, agrees that some voters "learn more about the issue position of candidates from the candidates' spots than they do from either TV news broadcasts or newspapers."

The trend is for people to pay less attention to campaigns, not more, points out Lynda Lee Kain, the director of the Political Communications Center at the University of Oklahoma. So eliminating TV spots wouldn't necessarily drive voters to seek out political information in other places. Would you rather have voters who've seen 30-second ads, or who've seen nothing at all?

The information in the ads isn't necessarily bad. At the bare minimum, a candidate is likely to present his own views clearly and effectively in a TV spot. "It's simply not true that you can't say anything about an issue in 15 or 30 seconds," says Kain. And look at the debates, he adds, where candidates are usually limited to brief responses of 30 seconds or a minute.

Some of the "miasma" Gans mentioned comes from ads that are inaccurate or distrted. Those ads are often the most memorable, because they generate so much discussion, but they aren't necessarily the norm. And TV spots hardly have a patent on distortion. "There are problems with accuracy in a lot of different communications, from ads to debates to speeches at rallies," says Darrell West, a political science professor at Brown University.

So what would happen if Bush met Gore's challenge and they dropped their TV spots and the debates start flowing? "People wouldn't watch them," says Craig. A fraction of the populace watched the barrage of debates in the early months of the campaign, and putting those debates on the major networks probably wouldn't change the numbers much.

"Politics isn't as glitzy as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," says Howell. The novelty of any new approach, whether it's debates or 15-minute spots or something else, will soon wear off. While any consultant would encourage more exposure for a candidate, Howell says, they would never accept it "at the expense of 30-second messages."

But some voters make up their minds based on TV spots, and Howell thinks that's a problem. Other observers disagree. Ads work not "by persuading people who weren't going to vote for you, but rather by reinforcing your vote,"says Craig. And West agrees "voters draw from a variety of information sources."

That trend is accelerating now, Howell believes. He sees the 30-second spot taking on a new role as a sort of "tickler," which gives a quick summary, but points viewers towards an Internet site where much more information is available.

Now that's an idea even Al Gore might fancy.