Pulp Politics: How Political Advertising Tells the Stories of American Politics

Pulp Politics argues that the stories of American politics have found their most vivid expression in campaign advertising. It is the central argument of this book that adopting the readily identifiable audiovisual conventions of popular culture is particularly attractive to candidates and communicators, and that analysts can benefit from a closer study of the audiovisual narratives of campaign advertising than scholars have engaged in. From the audiovisual evocation of horror in 1988 ads that read as 30-second trailers for the nightmare on Elm Street that would be the Dukakis presidency to the Bush-Cheney spots in 2004 that drew upon the look and feel of the popular anti-terrorism thriller O24,O evocation of popular culture has proven an extremely effective tool of mass communication in a televisual age.