Mood over argument: "Morning in America"

In one line: a Republican re-election ad in 1984 and a Democratic challenger's slogans in 2008 both sold a feeling (renewal, hope) more than a program; the 1984 ad pointed to a few chosen economic figures, while the 2008 slogans named none and were carried partly by a song and a poster made by people outside the campaign.

Official portrait of President Ronald Reagan, 1981

Ronald Reagan, official portrait, 7 February 1981. Michael Evans, White House. Public domain (U.S. government work).

Official portrait of President Barack Obama, 2012

Barack Obama, official portrait, 6 December 2012. Pete Souza, White House. Public domain (U.S. government work).

What happened

1980. Reagan's first campaign uses the slogan "Let's Make America Great Again" on buttons and posters.
1984. For the re-election race, the campaign assembles the "Tuesday Team", a group of advertising executives including Hal Riney, Phil Dusenberry and Jerry Della Femina.
17 September 1984. "Prouder, Stronger, Better" first airs. Riney wrote and narrated it. Its script: "It's morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It's morning again in America, and 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?" The pictures show Americans going to work, buying houses, raising flags and at a wedding.
October 1984. "Bear", also written and narrated by Riney, airs: "There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear." It ends on a photo of Reagan and the line "President Reagan: Prepared for Peace." It never names the Soviet Union, Mondale or defence spending. Focus-group viewers were reportedly unsure what the bear stood for.
6 November 1984. Reagan wins 49 states and 525 electoral votes to Mondale's 13, with about 58 percent of the popular vote.
2007 to 2008. The Obama campaign runs on "Change We Can Believe In" and "Hope". David Axelrod is credited with making "change we can believe in" and "yes, we can" hallmarks of the race.
8 January 2008, Nashua, New Hampshire. On the night he loses the New Hampshire primary to Clinton, Obama gives the "Yes We Can" speech: "generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can." He calls it "a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation." The phrase is the English form of "Sí se puede", the United Farm Workers rallying cry coined by Dolores Huerta in 1972.
Late January 2008. Shepard Fairey, working on his own, makes a stencil portrait of Obama. The first version reads PROGRESS; after campaign concerns about that word it reads HOPE. By October 2008 Fairey and publicist Yosi Sergant say they printed 300,000 posters, most given away. In February 2008 Obama sends Fairey a thank-you letter: "I am privileged to be a part of your artwork and proud to have your support."
2 February 2008. will.i.am releases "Yes We Can", a music video directed by Jesse Dylan that sets the Nashua speech to music with celebrities mouthing and singing the words. It was not commissioned or paid for by the campaign. It wins a daytime Emmy in June 2008.
July to August 2008. McCain's campaign mocks the mood: the "Celebrity" ad asks whether "the biggest celebrity in the world" is "ready to lead", and the web video "The One" opens: "it shall be known that in 2008, the world will be blessed. They will call him 'The One.'"
7 November 2008. Three days after the election, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that payrolls fell by 240,000 in October and unemployment rose from 6.1 to 6.5 percent.
2009 to 2012: the AP dispute. The poster's source is identified as an April 2006 Associated Press photo by Mannie Garcia, taken at a National Press Club event on Darfur. Fairey sues AP first (February 2009), claiming fair use. In October 2009 he admits he had named the wrong source photo and had destroyed and faked documents to hide it; his lawyers withdraw. AP and Fairey settle in January 2011, agreeing to share rights to the image. In February 2012 Fairey pleads guilty to criminal contempt; in September 2012 he is sentenced to two years' probation, 300 hours of community service and a $25,000 fine.

How it works

Glittering generalities: "prouder and stronger and better", "morning again", "Hope", "Change We Can Believe In" and "Yes we can" are virtue words with no stated measure. Apply the tell to both: swap the word for a metric and see what is left. The 1984 ad does carry three testable figures (jobs, interest rates, inflation); its tagline and its closing question do not. The 2008 slogans carry no figure at all; the policy platform lived elsewhere, and this page does not assess it.
Transfer: the 1984 ad pairs Reagan's name with flags being raised, a wedding and a new home, so feelings about those scenes flow onto the incumbent. The 2008 speech ties "Yes we can" to the founding documents and to earlier movements, and the phrase itself carries the prestige of the farmworkers' "Sí se puede". Scored the same way for both.
Card stacking: the 1984 ad measures the economy against 1980. It does not mention that unemployment passed 10 percent in late 1982, or the federal deficit of about $170 billion that Mondale's campaign made its central issue. Each figure it uses may be accurate; the choice of baseline is the device. This is scored only for 1984: the 2008 slogans cite no figures, so there is nothing selected to test.
Fear appeal: "Bear" stages a possible danger ("vicious and dangerous") and offers one remedy (strength, and Reagan). It also says outright that "no one can really be sure who's right". No 2008 item on this page uses fear; the Mondale campaign's own 1984 ads did (see Then and now).
Bandwagon: "Yes we can" is a crowd chant, and "we" makes the listener part of a movement already under way. The 1984 ad's closing question ("Why would we ever want to return...?") treats the national mood as settled. In both, momentum stands in for a reason.
Testimonial: the will.i.am video lets celebrities vouch for the speech by performing it. It was made outside the campaign, so this is a supporter's testimonial, not a campaign one. No Reagan item on this page uses celebrity endorsers.
Plain folks: not scored for either main case. The 1984 montage shows ordinary Americans, but Reagan does not present himself as one of them, so this archive reads it as transfer. Plain folks fits better Clinton's 1992 convention film "The Man from Hope" (below).

Then and now

We Can Do It! (1943)

We Can Do It!, Westinghouse / War Production Co-ordinating Committee, 1943. Public domain.

The 1943 poster was an internal Westinghouse morale poster that was later taken up as an emblem it was not made to be. The Fairey poster followed a similar path: made by an outside artist, then adopted by the candidate, sold and collected (the National Portrait Gallery acquired a version in January 2009). Both carry a single virtue word or line ("We Can Do It!", "HOPE") with no target attached.

Mood slogans cross party lines. Reagan's 1980 "Let's Make America Great Again" came back as Donald Trump's 2016 "Make America Great Again": Trump filed a trademark application for the phrase in November 2012 and said he had not known Reagan used a near-identical line. In 1992 the Clinton campaign showed "The Man from Hope", a convention film about his childhood in Hope, Arkansas, produced by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason; Clinton closed his acceptance speech with "I still believe in a place called Hope." That is the plain-folks move: the candidate's own small-town origin as the warrant. Mondale's 1984 ads went the other way, with dark scenes (a father digging a bomb shelter) that asked viewers to look past the recovery figures to the risks they saw behind them.

Positions on the record

Reagan-Bush '84's stated position: in the ad's own words, the country was "prouder and stronger and better" and should not "return to where we were". Tuesday Team member Phil Dusenberry said the ads aimed at emotion rather than argument: "That's the most powerful part of advertising." "Bear" was the campaign's answer to charges that Reagan had built up the military without need.
Critics in 1984: Mondale said the incumbent was hiding his fiscal plans: "Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." His campaign attacked on the deficit, arms control and the gap between rich and middle class. The Washington Post reported that the roughly $170 billion deficit masked hard choices Reagan's own advisers expected after the election.
Obama for America's stated position: "change" was the campaign's central contrast with its rivals, and the speech presented "Yes we can" as an American creed. Obama answered the charge that he offered only words: "Don't tell me words don't matter! 'I have a dream.' Just words." He had himself written, in The Audacity of Hope (2006): "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."
Critics in 2008: Clinton, in Rhode Island in February 2008: "the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect." After the "just words" lines turned out to echo Deval Patrick, she added: "If your whole candidacy is about words, then they should be your own words." (Patrick said he had suggested the lines.) McCain's "The One" and "Celebrity" ads made the same vagueness point from the right.
The economic record each message pointed to: 1984: inflation fell from 13.5 percent (1980) to around 4 percent, after a recession in which unemployment passed 10 percent (October 1982). 2008: October payrolls fell 240,000, with 651,000 jobs lost over three months, and unemployment reached 6.5 percent.
This archive's reading: the scripts, the speech text, the dates, the court outcomes and the BLS figures are documented. That either message "won the election" is not shown: both ran alongside other ads, events and economic conditions. The two cases differ in one plain way: the 1984 ad offered selected figures that can be checked, and the 2008 slogans offered none. Whether that makes one more honest than the other is a frame, not a finding.

Same-method test

A tagline of pure virtue words with no measure attached ("prouder, stronger, better"; "change we can believe in") gets Glittering generalities whoever says it. Economic figures that start the count at the other side's worst year get Card stacking whoever says it. A celebrity chorus performing a candidate's speech gets Testimonial for either party, whether the campaign made it or a fan did.

How to spot it

Ask what the slogan commits the speaker to. If you cannot write a number or a bill after it, it is a mood.
When an ad cites statistics, check the baseline year. Ask what happened between the start date and today.
Note who made the item. A fan video or an artist's poster is not a campaign ad, even when the campaign later thanks or adopts it.
A symbol with no named referent (a bear, a sunrise) asks the viewer to supply the meaning.

Images

Image	Source	Licence
Ronald Reagan, official portrait (1981)	Wikimedia Commons, Michael Evans, White House	Public domain (U.S. government work)
Barack Obama, official portrait (2012)	Wikimedia Commons, Pete Souza, White House	Public domain (U.S. government work)
We Can Do It! (1943)	FRAME gallery, from Wikimedia Commons	Public domain

Image gaps

Frames from "Prouder, Stronger, Better" and "Bear". Not included: campaign ads are copyrighted broadcast works. Both are viewable at the Museum of the Moving Image's Living Room Candidate (linked below). Not fillable with open material.
Fairey's "Hope" poster and Mannie Garcia's AP source photo. Not included: both are copyrighted and were the subject of the lawsuit described above. The National Portrait Gallery shows the collage version. Not fillable.
Stills from the will.i.am "Yes We Can" video. Not included: copyrighted music video. Not fillable.
A period photo of each campaign. Commons holds public-domain White House photos of 1984 Reagan-Bush rallies, but no equally licensed photo of an Obama 2008 campaign event was found, so the page uses one official portrait of each man for parity. The 2009 transition portrait of Obama is CC BY 3.0, not public domain, and was not used. Partly fillable if a public-domain 2008 campaign photo is found.

Mood over argument:"Morning in America" (Reagan-Bush 1984) and "Hope" / "Yes We Can" (Obama 2008)