Attack Politics: Negativity in Presidential Campaigns Since 1960. By

Emmett H. Buell, Jr. and Lee Sigelman.

Second Edition, revised and updated. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, September 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0700616794, $39.95; paper: ISBN 978-0-7006-1680-0, $19.95. 392 pages.

Review by Derek Charles Catsam, University of Texas of the Permian Basin

Elections continue to get nastier and nastier even as the campaign seasons grow longer and longer. The next Presidential election will be more negative than the last, which was more negative than the one that preceded it. Millions of Americans would likely embrace these seeming truisms. Yet is it the case that presidential elections get more negative with each passing quadrennial? This is the fundamental question at the heart of Attack Politics.

Buell and Sigelman actually pursue two goals in Attack Politics. One is to provide something of a synthetic overview of American presidential elections since 1960, albeit not ordered chronologically and without ever really explaining why they choose 1960 as their earliest election. The second of their aims is the titular goal of the book—to discern the nature of negative campaigns since Kennedy and Nixon faced off in their down-to-the-wire 1960 race. Arguably they accomplish the first goal better than the second despite their putative purpose.

After a general introductory chapter on “Negativity and Presidential Campaigns,” rather than follow a chronological path, Buell and Sigelman organize their chapters based on how closely contested particular elections were. They thus group the elections of 1964, 1972, and 1984 together as “Runaway races.” 1988, 1992, and 1996 fall under “Somewhat Competitive.” 1968 and 1976 were “Comeback Races.” 1960 and 1980 each warrant their own chapter as “Dead Heat” races while the authors bundle 2000 and 2004 into another “dead heat” chapter. 2008’s “Dead Heat and Somewhat Competitive” race occupies the last election-focused chapter, making this an especially timely book. They close with a chapter of summary and synthesis, though they also include a somewhat inexplicable appendix on the “Cold War Background to 1960 Presidential Context,” as if the 1960 campaign was the only one that fell against a backdrop in which the Cold War or other major events played a significant role.

The overviews of each election are fantastic. Clear and concise, balancing analysis and description, the summaries are the strongest element of the book and will be especially welcome in classes. Buell and Sigelman include fine assessments of the major players, prevailing issues, the dynamics, and the trends in each campaign while providing sound historical context. They make the elections come alive and provide a useful reference and overview even for specialists.

But the book’s raison d’etre is its investigation of negative campaigning, and on this issue the results are mixed. Part of the problem is inherent to the effort. Political scientists seem to believe that all things can be quantified and that quantitative analysis is better than its qualitative equivalent (even though the best parts of this book, by far, are the qualitative sections). They also tend to place tremendous faith in models. But human activity is not a math problem, the world does not adhere to models, and models rarely explain the world as it is lived.

The problem of quantification in this case is not one of high-level mathematics, to be sure. But there is something perplexing about Buell’s and Sigelman’s decision simply to add up all moments of negative campaigning in ads and speeches and to have them all count equally. I would imagine that the number of negative campaign moments tells us something, but it is far from certain that those numbers tells us all that much about tone and intensity, about which negative ads or sound bytes stick and which do not, and perhaps most significantly, which qualify as being dirtier than the others, and thus more poisonous. For when most people think about negative campaigning, they are not simply referring to candidates’ criticisms of one another. They are also referring to a noxious air of personal attacks and misrepresentations. There is a difference between saying that Barack Obama “pals around with terrorists” and saying that he is too inexperienced for office. Buell and Sigelman do not make that differentiation, to the detriment of their analysis.

The problem with modeling in the book is slightly different. The authors do not freight their argument with their own model. Instead they rely on someone else’s model and test to see if it applies in presidential campaigns since 1960. This reactive methodology may well be of some use to other political scientists, and that could prove important in pushing the scholarship forward, but given the accessibility of the election summaries, this book ends up being a peculiar hybrid of specialist scholarship and generalist accessibility.

Buell and Sigelman want to test one of the prevailing theories, the “Skaperdas-Grofman Model,” which asserts that candidates choose to go negative when the benefits outweigh the potential drawbacks. This seemingly obvious conclusion provides a series of circumstances as to when a candidate is likely to go negative, with the most prevalent being that a candidate is most likely to engage in negative campaigning if they are behind in the polls. Using Skaperdas-Grofman as their springboard, Buell and Sigelman assess the presidential elections since 1960 in their various configurations of closeness. And their conclusion is: Skaperdas-Grofman is sometimes accurate. Except when it is not.

This seems like a pretty apt, if unintended, summation of predictive models as a whole: They work except for when they do not. This seems an argument for steering clear of models and for trusting more subjective but also more humble analytical approaches. Buell and Sigelman are at their strongest when they steer clear of models and when they simply describe and analyze the presidential campaigns themselves. Their book is weakest where the interpretive framework is seemingly more rigorous.

Nonetheless, despite its shortcomings Attack Politics represents an important contribution to our understanding of negative campaigning in American presidential elections in the last half century. Students will welcome the treatment of the individual elections and practitioners will appreciate another contribution to our understanding of modern electoral politics. Perhaps future scholars will draw from Buell and Sigelman but will learn to trust their own interpretations, shorn of the artifice of creating models that can only statically (and thus falsely) capture the dynamic and theory-defying world of politics.

Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet.

By Sharon Marie Ross.

Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, September 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1405161237, $84.95; paper: ISBN 978-1405161244, $26.95. 280 pages.

Review by Novotny Lawrence, Southern Illinois University

In Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet, Sharon Marie Ross examines tele-participation, an emergent trend in which viewers are utilizing the Internet to become more actively engaged with television programs. Significantly, Ross goes beyond an exploration centrally focused on merely watching a program and includes discussions of fandom, save the show campaigns, and how network executives are now taking the tele-participating audience into consideration when developing new content. The introduction of the book effectively outlines the methodology utilized throughout the study explaining the styles of “invitations” or calls that encourage tele-participation: 1) overt, or situations in which writers’ and producers’ intent to activate viewer participation is easily discernable within the text of the series; 2) organic, a completely natural style designed carefully to appear as if the show (or in some cases the network) is not asking the viewer overtly to extend the text; and 3) obscured, which suggests that any invitation to participate resides primarily in the narrative structure and content [sic] of the show itself through a certain “messiness” that demands viewer unraveling (8-9). Used in conjunction with scholarly discourse and data collected from bloggers and industry executives, Ross examines the ways in which the “invitations” operate in popular TV programs throughout the book which is organized into four primary chapters: “Fascinated with Fandom: Cautiously Aware Viewers of Xena and Buffy,” “Power to the People, or the Industry: American Idol Voting, Adult Swim Bumping, and Viral Videoing,” “Managing Millennials: Teen Expectations of Tele-Participation,” and “No Network Is an Island: Lost’s Tele-Participation and ABC’s Return to Industry Legitimacy.”

In “Fascinated with Fandom,” Ross explores “the relationship between notions of taste and quality in terms of fandom/cult fandom” (36) and “the role that the Internet played in the enjoyment of Xena and Buffy” (36). Ross makes valid assertions in this chapter, contending that Xena contains organic invitations, featuring several episodes that offered storylines that focused on the existence of Xena fans (39). She provides solid examples to validate this claim discussing two episodes in particular, “You are There” and “Send in the Clones,” both of which allude to fans’ curiosity regarding the true nature of the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. In contrast, the discussion of Buffy is not quite as effective. While Ross establishes the fact that the producers of the series often visited fansites to “listen in” on discussions of the show, “The Wish” and “Dopplegangland,” two episodes from Buffy’s third season, used as examples to illustrate their reaction to the chatter are thin. Both episodes center on a character named Willow who becomes a “sort of gay vampire” which Ross explains that online fans who had been engaged in fiction writing centering on similar themes, saw the storyline as a direct response to their narratives. Unfortunately, the argument is speculative, making it difficult to fully engage in the material offered in the remainder of the chapter.

Although chapter 1 is a bit problematic, chapter 2, “Power to the People, or the Industry,” more than makes up for its shortcomings. This chapter “explores more specifically, television viewer’s experiences with and thoughts about tele-participation, focusing on . . . overt invitations” (71). Ross blends the discussions of Idol, “Swim” programming, and viral videoing together, examining issues of authenticity, community, and the complexities that can potentially arise for networks when extending overt invitations. For instance, the discussion of viewer in-fighting about “true” fandom and websites such as VotefortheWorst.com which seemed to interrupt the invitation extended to audiences by America Idol are critical to understanding the drawbacks of tele-participation.

As the Box evolves, it becomes increasingly apparent that an additional strength of the text is Ross’s examination of peripheral questions intersecting with socioeconomic and cultural issues which include but are not limited to, race, class, and gender. This is most obvious in chapter 3, which is perhaps the strongest in the text. Here Ross’s primary focus is on two teen-oriented shows— FOX‘s The O.C. and the Canadian produced series Degrassi: The Next Generation. The author effectively correlates the “Millennials” upbringing in a more technologically advanced environment with media producers, who in order to make programming that relates to them, must create TV products that can cross-platform or “thrive in different media forms, most crucially television and via the Internet, the cell phone, and the iPod/MP3 player” (127). Ross thoroughly explains that The O.C., and Degrassi depict characters frequently utilizing new media technology and that producers of both series created sites where fans could discuss the shows. Although significant, the strength of this chapter lies in the questions that Ross raises in regard to The O.C. and Degrassi’s depictions of pressing social concerns such as school shootings and underage drinking, as well as the representation, or lack thereof, of race and class in U.S. programming versus Canadian TV. Significantly, Ross challenges U.S. television by juxtaposing the lily-white cast of The O.C. (which mirrors the majority of America TV) with Degrassi’s multicultural cast. Thus, the text also addresses a pressing concern that U.S. television has struggled with since its emergence as a form of popular entertainment.

Beyond the Box is a significant contribution to the existing and growing discourse on new media which continues to profoundly affect the media landscape. Ross’s research is thorough, and the inclusion of blogger responses adds tremendous insight into the fact that viewers are tele-participating as well as the ownership that they take over their programming. Of equal importance is the fact that Ross blends a number of other elements into the examination and concludes by detailing some of the implications that tele-participation may have on the TV industry. While the conclusion goes on a little too long and relies too heavily on feedback from industry executives, it presents an array of potential directions for future research on the topic. Indeed Box demonstrates that the industry has taken a dramatic shift from traditional broadcast TV and includes pertinent information for fans, industry executives, and scholars alike.

Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier.

Edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran.

London and New York: I.B. Tauris, October 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-1845116545, $22.50. 304 pages.

Review by Madeline Muntersbjorn, University of Toledo

“Yes. Yes, this a fertile land, and we will thrive” (Serenity 1.1). This line from the first episode of the short-lived television series Firefly (2002-2003) opens this review, as this anthology demonstrates the scope of scholarly discourse on both the television series and the movie Serenity (2005). When Wash, the pilot, speaks this line, he plays with plastic dinosaurs on a spaceship dashboard, saying much with few words. Joss Whedon, writer and director, does not play on a ship, but on a soundstage, feeding his lines to beautiful talent. Whedon’s space-western features nine outcasts and heroes just trying to keep flying on the edge of civilization. Carey Meyer designed the 10th character of the show, the Firefly class spaceship called Serenity; just as there are fourteen Firefly episodes, there’s only one Serenity film. Whedon and his gifted crew bring our fond ambitions and fraught anxieties to life in a post-apocalyptic future wherein alien planets are rendered suitable for human habitation by mining, farming, terra-forming and civil war. While much changes in the next 500 years, people are still human. Well, most of them are: some of them might be monsters! In any case, “Earth That Was” is just a history lesson for the kids, a creation myth of dubious relevance.

“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” The dinosaurs fight, misled by greed only to be swept aside, their fertile land destroyed by forces beyond their control. Who could have known, when the scene was first shot, of the FOX network betrayal that would cancel the series, loose ends of narrative thread waiting to be woven into the rest of the story? Could anyone have predicted that fan support, from DVD sales to online activism, would be so voluble and vociferous that Universal Studios would help Whedon produce the film? (Serenity: Those Left Behind, a Dark Horse comic published in 2006, bridges narrative gaps between the series and the movie.) The story behind the story calls for further inquiry into this science fiction on the frontier. Given the eclectic academic community that coalesced around Whedon’s most famous series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, complete with peer-reviewed journal, Slayage, this anthology is inevitable if not altogether sudden.

Wilcox and Cochran quote the pilot near the end of the beginning of their book and at the close of their introduction to the special issue of Slayage. For just as the show is one story in two formats, small screen and silver screen, their editorial project yielded two texts. The twenty-fifth issue of Slayage features five articles, while this installment in I. B. Tauris’ Investigating Cult TV series presents nineteen essays. Yet these contributions represent less than 17% of submissions received in response to the call for papers. The integrity of these collections is explained, in part, by the quantity of discussion these shows have inspired among educated viewers. The editors chose writers from diverse disciplines yet generated a coherent whole wherein lines of dialog, images, episodes, and characters are examined from several points of view: theology, ethnomusicology, aesthetics, anthropology, and gender studies, among others. Firefly and Serenity do not come to us ex nihilo. They descend from the Star Trek series, and the 1939 film Stage Coach, both of which were subject to subsequent remakes. These essays reveal meaningful connections between these direct ancestors as well as Plato’s Symposium, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Orwell’s Citizen Kane, and Sartre’s Nausea, to cite but a few more distant relations.

The word “reveal” is important. People like stories with pretty girls, scary monsters and explosions. Firefly and Serenity have gorgeous girls, terrifying monsters and awesome explosions—enough said? Yet the writers in this collection are not so much piling it on as peeling it back, exposing layers of meaning and depth. They challenge questionable elements of the show including legalized prostitution, racialized villainy, and summary execution. Since no one who reads this volume will have expertise in all of the disciplines, everyone will have to look something up. Perhaps future editions could follow the lead of Cricket magazine for children, wherein vocabulary is defined as marginalia. What would be lost in convenience at the press would be gained in accessibility. Reader effort is rewarded: The code-switching of the characters between English and Chinese is an abrogation of a monolingual form of discourse (Mandala 38). When “competing but co-existent status systems…arise when independent hierarchies from different cultures interact” tensions are bound to mount between high-class hookers and working-stiff cowboys (Aberdein 70). The inconclusive dichotomy between brute pragmatism and blind faith teaches the value of pluralistic approaches to humanity as, “Meaning is not in things…but between them, in the interplay, the connections, the empty space” (Erickson 179). Mayhem abounds but, “the film is able to dazzle its audience with a beautifully conceived and thrilling space battle…and to provide them with a more intimate struggle as the crew fights on the surface of the planet to reveal the truth” (Abbott 232).

The truth? Really? What role could such an old-school notion play in this postmodern post-mortem of a polysemic post-colonial pastiche? Why, the premise of the show is “nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things” (Whedon quoted on 168). Well, maybe the truth is not out there; it’s just a plot device, a cheap plastic toy that’s swept away when the complex danger of the real world bears down upon us. But perhaps, “Firefly is effective because it uses science fiction without losing sight of the human and embodied concerns that are unlikely to be swept away by technology, even if we become more scientifically advanced and cyborg as a species” (Bussolini 140). Maybe the truth is not something we assign to any one view but something relational that emerges from the intimate struggle between people “who trust each other, who do for each other and ain’t always lookin’ for the advantage” (“Our Mrs. Reynolds,” 1.6; quoted on 59). Neither the characters nor the critics see the same things—but that’s an asset, not a liability, for our ability to thrive may depend more on how we do for each other than whether we are right or come out ahead. To investigate Firefly and Serenity closely is to see many things in this fertile future myth of resonant relevance.

Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television and Politics

By Gordon B. Arnold. Westport, CT: Praeger, September 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0275994624, $44.95. 189 pages.

Review by Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey

This book considers how notions of conspiracy theory have remained ever-present in American popular culture since the Cold War. Partly this is due to events – the anticommunist witch-hunts of the 50s, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11 – but the ideas have also been widely disseminated through film and television. Arnold combines political and historical narrative with analyses of several films including Suddenly (1954), Advise and Consent (1962), Chinatown (1974) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) to show how conspiracies shape some events, hide others, and ultimately dictate the course of American history since the 1940s. The first chapter – “Conspiracy Theory in the American Imagination” – argues that the theory explains “the reality of the modern world” for many people (2). Many people suspect that major institutions pay little or no heed to the individual, preferring instead to feather their own nests and seek governmental assistance if they run into trouble. This arguably caused the recent financial crisis both in America and elsewhere. Arnold contends that this belief gained currency at the end of World War II, as “Americans exhibited a new apprehension about [the power of] the Soviet Union,” and the destructive potential of the atomic bomb (13). This gave rise to the so-called “Domino Theory” which held that “if many nations succumbed to communist rule, in the not-too-distant future the United States would be surrounded by an angry sea of malicious communist countries” (17-18). Arnold continues by examining some of the films produced at that time, including Red Menace and Conspirator (both 1949), as well as Suddenly, Lewis Allen’s 1954 melodrama starring Frank Sinatra about a foiled attempt to assassinate the president. The chapter concludes with an analysis of late 50s conspiracy films including North By Northwest (1959). Arnold’s choice of films is certainly eclectic: certain overtly anticommunist works such as High Noon (1952) have been ignored, while attention could have also been given to Roman and/or Biblical epics of the period, such as Quo Vadis (1951) and Spartacus (1959), that feature an all-American hero battling against the conspiratorial forces threatening to overwhelm him. This omission highlights one of the book’s major flaws: Arnold does not offer a working definition of conspiracy theory – what it includes and omits, and whether our understanding of the term has changed over time. For example, I do not subscribe to the idea that recent fears of a so-called “Middle East plot” are in any way similar to those expressed during the McCarthy era. A glance at the ways in which both events have been reported in the media can confirm this. Nonetheless, if one treats the book as a selective account of the ways in which specific films deal with the idea of conspiracy, then there is much to recommend it. I liked Arnold’s comparison between the original Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Dr. No (also 1962). The earlier film follows Suddenly in showing how a brainwashed ex-prisoner of war (Laurence Harvey) is involved in a plot to assassinate a politician. The entire conspiracy is attributed to the communists, “an enemy that can deceive and control the people” (52). While Dr. No deals with similar themes, its tone “is not cynical. . . the problems [posed by the communists] can and will be solved and. . . potentially destructive technologies can be harnessed for the greater good” (57). Likewise, Arnold draws a suggestive link between Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (also 1974) as responses to the Watergate crisis. Coppola reflects “the growing sense of alienation that Americans came to feel in the wake of a divisive and sometimes violent decade” (94). Pakula returns to the theme of assassination and how the finger of suspicion can be pointed at anyone, particularly if they dare to question the system (96). Arnold subsequently shows how Chinatown, ostensibly a 1970s film noir, shows how “unknowing people can be manipulated and become involved in conspiratorial schemes they know nothing about” (99). In a concluding paragraph to the book, Arnold suggests that while the conspiracy theory metaphor continues to influence American life, it is no longer shocking to suggest that “complex forces . . . influence and shape the world” (172). This, he believes, is due to the frequency with which the metaphor has been used in the media, which has denuded it of significance. The book left me feeling much the same: while analyses of individual films are often interesting, the lack of an overall theoretical framework left me wondering why conspiracy theory should have remained so fundamental to American popular culture in the past six decades.

True West: An Illustrated Guide to the Heyday of the Western

By Michael Barson. Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press, November 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-0-87595-379-2, $29.95. 178 pages.

Review by Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey

This is a true aficionado’s book—the product of an author who grew up in New England but developed a liking for the West as represented on television and in the movie theatre. Barson recalls how he experienced firsthand the craze for Davy Crockett that swept America during the mid-1950s; like millions of other American kids, he bought one of Crockett’s coonskin caps. Other role models included Rowdy Yates (Rawhide), Sugarfoot, and Mark McCain (The Riflemen). As he grew up, Barson realized that while the West as portrayed on television might differ significantly from the “real” West--Texas, Colorado, California—it provided a means for him to reflect on “the sources of our native pluck and resilience. They [television Westerns] were part of the […] process by which Americans define—and revise, and define again—a national self-image” (21).

True West tells the story of the West as represented in films, television series, pulp fiction, music, comic books, and other souvenirs. It begins in the 1920s, when stars such as William S. Hart and Tom Mix produced a steady stream of silent films for admiring audiences; by 1929 Mix had made nearly 330 films. In the era of the talkies A-list stars such as John Wayne made classics like Stagecoach, while William Boyd, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers turned out a steady stream of B pictures. Barson demonstrates just how powerful a hold these stars exerted on the American public, with their images being reproduced on sheet music, paperback books, posters, and other goods. I especially liked the advertisement produced under Boyd’s name offering his young fans the chance to “win a Hoppy [Hopalong Cassidy] bike, or cowboy outfit, or shootin’ irons, absolutely free” (22).

In the early 1950s the vogue for B-pictures subsided with the growth of television. Both Autry and Rogers responded by creating their own series: The Gene Autry Show debuted on CBS in July 1950, with The Roy Rogers Show following a year later. Both ran until the middle of the decade, when the aging stars hung up their spurs and lived on their royalties.

Barson offers a personal choice of one hundred favorite Western films ranging from Stagecoach (1939) to comedies such as The Paleface (1940) and Oklahoma! (1955), but excludes modern Westerns such as Blazing Saddles (1974) and more recently The Assassination of Jesse James (2007). The author concentrates instead on the television series that dominated the screens during the 1950s and 1960s—Wyatt Earp, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and Bonanza. He argues quite rightly that the genre lost its popularity during the 80s, but expresses the hope that contemporary miniseries such as Comanche Moon (2007) might signal a revival of interest: “[I]t [is] possible to capture the epic scope of the best Western films even on television, given a good script, top-shelf acting, and quality directing” (109).

The book’s concluding chapters cover classics of Western literature, music, and comic books. Featured authors range from pulp-fiction specialists such as Elmer Kelton and James Warren Bellah, to modern authors such as Cormac McCarthy. The songsters include Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, and Johnny Cash. Barson’s fondness for Western themes is obvious; he even provides the lyrics to the theme from Rawhide, described as “three minutes of two-fisted gumption” (134). The song has affected legions of filmmakers; it provides the basis for one of the most memorable sequences in The Blues Brothers (1980), where the eponymous heroes perform it (repeatedly) in front of an audience of rowdy hillbillies.

True West might not be a very scholarly work, but it provides an entertaining read. The beautifully reproduced color plates give an idea of the sheer range of artistic talent than went into producing posters, comic books, and other ephemera. If nothing else, this should render the book appealing to anyone interested in Westerns and their influence over twentieth-century American popular culture.

from University Press of Kentucky

Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture

by Stanley K. Schultz and Joseph J. Foy

under review by Charlene Etkind, Ph.D

from A Hodder Arnold Publication

Television, Cult, and the Fantastic

by Sara Gwenllian Jones

under review by Gregory Thompson, Rogers State University, Oklahoma