Reagan Its Morning Again in America
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The Ad That Helped Reagan Sell Good Times to an Uncertain Nation
Given that Donald J. Trump appears to have locked up the Republican nomination after spending little on television ads, it may be hard to explain to younger Americans how a single commercial made a difference in the 1984 presidential campaign.
The one-minute commercial commonly known as "Morning in America," created for President Ronald Reagan's re-election effort in 1984, is one of the most effective campaign spots ever broadcast. The ad's haze of nostalgia and optimism helped obscure Mr. Reagan's lingering political problems with the deficit and unemployment.
The scenes in "Morning" would have fit almost seamlessly into the 1950s sitcoms "Father Knows Best" or "Leave It to Beaver." One difference is that the ad is rendered in soft, pastel colors similar to those used in "The Natural," the Robert Redford baseball film also released that year.
Set to the music of sentimental strings, images include a paperboy on his bicycle, a family taking a rolled rug into a house and campers raising an American flag. The subtext is that after 20 years of social tumult, assassinations, riots, scandal, an unpopular war and gas lines, Mr. Reagan returned the United States to the tranquillity of the 1950s.
At the start of the ad, the narrator's melodious voice says: "It's morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history." This wording, which reflected the growth of the American population in four years, distracts from the fact that unemployment remained higher (at about 7.5 percent) than it was when Mr. Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, left office.
In fact, Mr. Reagan's party had been blamed for a punishing recession. Using the slogan "Stay the course," Republicans lost 26 House seats and seven governorships in the 1982 midterm elections.
It's true that by 1984, the severe inflation that helped Mr. Reagan defeat Mr. Carter in 1980 was down significantly, but under Mr. Reagan, the deficit had more than doubled. Although times were improving, the president was potentially vulnerable to attack for having failed to fully keep his 1980 pledge to restore the American economy.
Nancy Reagan, who was, as ever, deeply involved in the way her husband was presented to the world, disliked the pedestrian ads produced for his 1980 campaign, which appeared to bend over backward not to make Mr. Reagan, an ex-actor, look "too Hollywood." And in 1984 what came to be called Tuesday Team Inc. (named for Election Day) entered the picture.
Unlike earlier presidential campaigns that gave their accounts to existing advertising agencies, the Reagan campaign constructed its own shop with about 40 stars of the industry, starting with BBDO's Phil Dusenberry, who had been co-screenwriter for "The Natural" and had produced Michael Jackson as he hawked Pepsi.
The team was quartered in a rented suite, without windows, above Radio City Music Hall. According to one member, Tom Messner, writing last month in Adweek, the group was offered free offices in — of all places — the newly opened Trump Tower, but that was dismissed as "a little showy."
"Morning in America" and several other Reagan TV ads were written by Hal Riney of Ogilvy & Mather in San Francisco. Known for his skill at appealing to the emotions, he was determined to demonstrate that negative political ads were not the only kind that worked.
Riney had created a dreamlike 1970 spot for Crocker National Bank depicting a couple being married, to the sound of a song he had commissioned from the songwriter Paul Williams called "We've Only Just Begun." The song was soon made into a hit by a rising brother-and-sister duo called the Carpenters.
By Mr. Messner's account, Mr. Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, and other Reagan lieutenants briefed the Tuesday Team on the president's accomplishments over two days in Washington. At one point, the president popped in and said, "If you're going to sell soap, you ought to see the bar."
Mr. Riney told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2004 that the briefings were "a total waste of time" because it was obvious that the main commercial should address how Mr. Reagan had turned the country around after Mr. Carter. He wrote "Morning" and several other Reagan ads quickly, while drinking bourbon in a bar below his Ogilvy office — by his own account he was a heavy drinker in those days.
Mr. Riney used his own resonant voice to narrate "Morning in America." A full quarter of the commercial is devoted to a small-town church wedding that is almost a dead ringer for the one in Mr. Riney's Crocker Bank spot. The faces in the ad are overwhelmingly white.
The commercial boasted that interest rates were about half those of 1980, and that about 2,000 families a day were buying homes. Then, over the wedding images, it said, "This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married."
The number of weddings held per day is not quite the chief metric an economist would use to measure the health of a society, but reciting this statistic allows the announcer to say, "They can look forward, with confidence, to the future."
Then the payoff: "Under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder, and stronger, and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?"
What's missing from "Morning in America" is Mr. Reagan. His face appears in the commercial for only two or three seconds, at the end — a still color photo on a campaign button, next to an American flag.
Why wouldn't Mr. Riney (who died in 2008) call more attention to a leader now often remembered as one of the most beloved Americans of the 20th century?
Only 10 months before his re-election campaign began, Mr. Reagan's Gallup Poll approval rating had dropped to 35 percent, equal to President Lyndon Johnson's at its nadir during the Vietnam War. By mid-1984, it had rebounded to the mid-50s, but this was not a spectacular figure.
What this commercial had to sell, therefore, was not so much the still controversial president as the notion that under his leadership, good times were returning to the United States. (Mr. Riney's approach must have been influenced by the 1976 commercials for President Gerald Ford, which had marching bands and cheerful young singers performing the catchy jingle "I'm Feeling Good About America.")
On the campaign trail, Mr. Reagan's opponent, Walter Mondale, sensing the power of "Morning in America," complained: "It's all picket fences and puppy dogs. No one's hurting. No one's alone. No one's hungry. No one's unemployed. No one gets old. Everybody's happy."
Thirty-two years later, the Reagan campaign of 1984 is largely remembered for that one commercial. Few would argue that it saved Mr. Reagan from defeat by Mr. Mondale, who ultimately carried only Minnesota — his home state — and the District of Columbia. But it captivated many voters and helped push many of Mr. Reagan's problems to the periphery. In today's fractured media universe, it is unlikely that a single paid TV spot will again approach that kind of influence.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/business/the-ad-that-helped-reagan-sell-good-times-to-an-uncertain-nation.html
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