Democrats are smiling through their tears, determined not to waste an opportunity and figuring out how to channel grief over the death of Teddy Kennedy into a campaign to save President Obama’s health-care scheme … Celebrity grief, real and not so real, will pass. A moment always does. The next celebrity death is just around the corner.

One quick note. Pruden snarks that “President Obama once more demonstrated a community activist’s knowledge of American history with his description of Teddy as the greatest senator in history.” But the president did not say that. He said that Kennedy “became not only one of the greatest senators of our time, but one of the most accomplished Americans ever to serve our democracy.” This pretty clearly scotches Pruden’s argument that Obama was too stupid to realize that LBJ (who left the Senate in 1961) and Daniel Webster (1850) were better than Kennedy.

I’m sure The Times will issue a correction.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Wikimedia)

Republicans have unveiled their closing argument. Desperate to prevent a huge Democratic landslide, Republicans warn that one-party government under Democrats would surely mean liberal extremism.

Raising the specter of an “Obama, Pelosi and Reid” government, Sen. John McCain refers to the combination of Sen. Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as a “dangerous threesome.” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) warns, “Liberals are bent on handing Barack Obama a filibuster-proof Senate majority to rubber-stamp his radical agenda.”

The argument is based on a misreading of American history. For, during periods of one-party government, when Democrats controlled both the White House and the Congress, history demonstrates that they have not shifted radically toward a leftward agenda.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Few observers, other than those on the far right, characterized the New Deal as liberal extremism in action. Most perceived President Franklin D. Roosevelt as an experimenter who tried to please everyone. FDR and his Democratic counterparts did everything in their power to save capitalism from the threat of totalitarianism and communism during the Great Depression.

The period between 1933 and 1938 witnessed a dramatic expansion of government. But with each and every policy, Democrats were careful to constrain the ability of government officials to control capitalist institutions and to protect the power of state and local government.

The economic regulations passed in the 1930s allowed private economic institutions to maintain power and profit. Wall Street regulations primarily curbed dangerous and unethical transactions, while the Securities Exchange Commission was set up to monitor wrong-doing. This left the basic decisions to investors.

The major effort to manage pricing and production was the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933. In the worst economic moment of the nation’s history, the legislation essentially asked businesses to voluntarily adhere to codes that would be enforced through voluntary compliance combined with public pressure. The program collapsed by the end of 1934, before the Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional, because so many business leaders were not living up to their promises.

The farm programs, created in 1933, subsidized agribusiness as opposed to taking it over. The New Deal offered the agriculture industry financial incentives to make decisions that benefited the larger economy. The government paid for crops. The Communist Party leader, Earl Browder, lamented that Roosevelt was “carrying out more thoroughly and brutally than even Hoover the capitalist attack against the masses.”

Social Security, passed in 1935, only covered a limited portion of the workforce — excluding farmers, domestic workers, professionals and others — while relying on a regressive, self-financed tax to pay for benefits.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (Wikimedia)

Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democratic Congress in 1964 and 1965 were also quite timid. The War on Poverty received meager funding. Democrats had given priority to passing an across-the-board tax reduction to stimulate the economy, rather than spending on the poor.

Congress allocated $500 million for the Community Action program, a figure that paled in comparison to what Washington spent on Social Security, agricultural benefits or defense. The War on Poverty focused on developing self-sufficiency among the poor, a far cry from socialism, and the programs relied on civic organizations and local government rather than centralized control in Washington.

The civil-rights bill that Democrats passed in 1964 emphasized the protection of individual rather than group rights. The more aggressive program of affirmative action would not emerge until a Republican was in the White House, in 1969, and then there was divided government.

When Democrats controlled the White House and Congress, in 1964, they insisted on civil-rights legislation that focused on the more moderate goal of eliminating racial discrimination against individuals. This, they said, respected American principles. The government remained reactive under their plan, responding when individual rights were violated, rather than proactively combating institutional racism.

When it came to health care, the Medicare bill of 1965 was a watered-down version of the far bolder health-care proposals that Democrats floated in the 1940s — unsuccessfully. To avoid another defeat, Democrats decided to narrow their ambitions with a limited program to provide hospital insurance coverage just to the elderly. Medicare was created within Social Security to bolster political support, using its regressive self-financed tax system. The government refrained from regulating the prices hospitals could charge. Blue Cross and Blue Shield handled the insurance.

Even when Southern Democrats lost their power in Congress, united government did not result in a dramatic swing to the left. President Jimmy Carter struggled with the various factions within the Democratic Party over energy independence, welfare reform, defense spending and more. United government did not help the president overcome horrible relations with legislators in his own party. Carter’s concern with inflation trumped his worries about unemployment.

Conservative grass-roots activists took advantage of these problems by allying with the GOP congressional minority in the Congress to stifle measures like SALT II.

Bill Clinton (Flickr: World Economic Forum)

President Bill Clinton did not fare much better. Democrats controlled Washington, but Clinton decided to start his term with deficit reduction and free trade. When he proposed health-care reform, it was a far cry from the single-player, national health insurance models that had been championed by Democrats like Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. And even that legislation did not make it through Congress.

The best case for Republicans to show how one-party government produces extremism comes from the period of GOP rule between 2002 and 2006. One-party government allowed Republicans to pass a massive tax reduction in 2001 that severely cut into the coffers of government and provided significant tax relief to wealthier Americans. After 9/11, the Bush administration authorized a huge expansion of the national security state.

Yet much of what George W. President Bush actually accomplished still relied on executive power and secrecy. Signing statements, covert national-security programs, executive orders and misleading information were all instrumental to how Bush achieved his goals. Bush has continued to rely on these tactics under divided government as well.

The historical record is clear. One-party government does not lead to political extremism — and a look at the past contradicts GOP claims that Democratic control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would produce a dramatic shift to the left. Democrats will face all sorts of pressures, from internal factions to budgetary restraints to the 2012 election, that will serve as a powerful check on what the party can accomplish.

Disappointment, not extremism, is a more realistic prediction of what the party could ultimately face.

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is the author of “On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and its Consequences, 1948-2000″ and the editor of “The American Congress: The Building of Democracy.” He is finishing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II and another on the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

House Minority Leader John Boehner and House Whip Roy Blunt (WDCpix)

As congressional leaders scramble to resuscitate the $700-billion financial bailout plan that died a stunning death in the House this week, many historians and political experts ascribe the bill’s failure to a lack of political leadership in Washington.

This power vacuum was revealed in a lame-duck president who went virtually ignored; congressional leaders who neglected the importance of counting votes; and a slew of lawmakers more concerned with re-election than the fate of the economy.

Indeed, despite pleas from the White House, House leaders and the major presidential candidates, no one had the influence to rally public sentiment — or push the rank-in-file — in support of the bill.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“It’s a crisis of leadership,” said former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Cal.), a House majority whip for several years in the late 1980s. “The country’s in trouble, and they just didn’t rise up to get this done.”

That diagnosis bucks the conventional wisdom. In the wake of Monday’s vote, Washington’s prognosticators have, at various times, attributed the defeat to public outcry, election-year politicking, ideological entrenchment and even a partisan floor speech just before the vote. Exempting the last, all these factors were certainly in play. Yet the bailout plan has also lacked an influential champion — someone with the credibility to sell its importance, the persuasiveness to unite both parties and the political savvy to secure votes from even the most reluctant lawmakers.

The result: A surprising failure that sent lawmakers scurrying and stocks plunging.

John Morton Blum, history professor emeritus at Yale University and a Roosevelt scholar,” summarized this power vacuum, asking ruefully: “Where are you, Franklin Roosevelt, when we need you?”

Chief among the impotent is President George W. Bush. The bailout strategy — a product of the Treasury Dept. — is essentially his adminsitration’s. Yet he failed miserably to convince even members of his own party to support it. Of the 198 Republicans who voted Monday, only 65 (not even a third) sided with Bush.

“The core of the problem here is the president,” said Julian E. Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “He’s a weak, lame-duck president — the worst of all combinations. He can’t mobilize public opinion.”

“Bush is not a lame duck, he’s a dead duck,” offered Blum. “[Herbert] Hoover was about as unpopular, but at least he was intelligent.”

Vice President Dick Cheney, once a powerful influence on Congress’s conservative Republicans, also proved to be an ineffective promoter of the bailout plan. After Cheney stormed the Capitol last week to rally support, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) summarized the meeting with a not-so-subtle rebuke. “I do not appreciate,” Barton said, “being told that I have to vote for something in one week, with no limitations … to solve a problem that the average constituent in my district has never heard of.”

Then there’s Congress. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), who supported the measure, still spent much of the last week disparaging it. At one point, he called the plan a “crap sandwich” — hardly a persuasive sell to on-the-fence lawmakers. Instead of urging Republicans to follow his lead, Boehner freed them to vote their consciences. Many did just that — leading, in large part, to the bill’s failure.

“Republicans are just used to having party loyalty carry the day,” said former Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R), now a visiting scholar at Brown University. “It just didn’t happen. The president cried wolf one too many times.”

Of the other actors in the bailout drama, none was convincing enough to push the financial rescue through the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.), one of the most liberal members, had only partial influence with keeping fellow liberals in the fold, and even less over the conservatives who fled the bill in droves. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, an openly gay Massachusetts Democrat, commands great respect on financial matters, but his signature abrasiveness is also known to alienate.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the presidential contenders, showed only mild support before the vote, with neither coming to Washington to sway votes. And Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson Jr., who crafted the plan, is a former Goldman Sachs CEO, leading to endless criticisms that his blueprint represents Wall Street helping Wall Street — the fox guarding the henhouse.

It wasn’t always this way. Congress has a long history of persuasive giants — lawmakers who got what they wanted despite the better inclinations of those they were asking. In his book “Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism,” Bruce J. Schulman, a history professor at Boston University, relates how one such master was able to secure the passage of favored legislation:

LBJ’s legislative strategy rested, as it had during his days as Majority Leader, on his sure and certain knowledge of every congresssman’s needs, inclinations, problems and convictions. When aides told him that they “thought” they had lined up a particular representative’s support, LBJ exploded: “Don’t ever think about those things. Know, know, know! You’ve got to know you’ve got him, and there’s only one way you know.” Johnson looked into his open hand and closed his fingers into a fist. “And that’s when you’ve got his pecker right here.” The president opened his desk drawer, acted as he if were dropping something, emphatically slammed the drawer shut and smiled.

Congressional leaders going into Monday’s House vote hadn’t taken Johnson’s advice, and fell 12 members shy. “This was just a classic case of, ‘You don’t go to a vote unless you know you’ve got them,’” Schulman said in a phone interview Wednesday.

There are other examples. An infamous 2003 vote leading to the creation of Medicare’s controversial prescription drug program, for example, relied on GOP leaders leaving the 15-minute vote open for three hours while they twisted arms on the chamber floor. One tactic of persuasion: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) offered one reluctant Republican, Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich), his endorsement of Smith’s son, who was running for his retiring father’s seat.

Coelho suggested that Pelosi and Boehner, in a similar manner, might have prolonged Monday’s vote. “It was only 12 votes,” he said. “Why wasn’t it held open until they got them?”

They will have another chance. The Senate is preparing Wednesday to vote on a slightly modified version of the bailout bill, with the House expecting to vote again Friday if the Senate passes it. Changes include new tax breaks for small businesses, which should inspire more GOP support, though it might also alienate fiscally conservative Democrats, already wary of the cost.

Injecting himself into the debate, Bush delivered yet another message from the White House Tuesday, urging a quick resolution to the stalemate. “It matters little what path a bill takes to become law,” Bush said. “What matters is that we get a law. …The reality is that we are in an urgent situation, and the consequences will grow worse each day if we do not act.”

Despite Bush’s unpopularity, statements like that — combined with an urgency among congressional leaders to forge a passable proposal — gave Wall Street a dose of buoyancy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average leapt 485 points Tuesday, after tumbling 778 points the day before. On Wednesday the Dow held steady, dropping only 19 points.

That rebound might encourage many House Republicans to continue opposing the bailout, which endorses new regulations, effectively raises corporate taxes and represents the greatest government intervention in private markets since the Great Depression.

“For Republicans, this is a mighty hard pill to swallow,” said Wayne Steger political science professor at DuPaul University. “I don’t know if even an LBJ could pull this off.”

Stills from Lyndon B. Johnson Museum and Library

In the annals of campaign advertising, it stands as a legend: A young girl plucking flower petals, counting each as it falls, is interrupted by a sinister voice counting down 10 … nine … eight … until a nuclear blast fills the screen, a fire-ball replacing the black terror in her eyes.

In the background, we hear the stern voice of President Lyndon B. Johnson: “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark, we must either love each other, or we must die.”

The year was 1964, and the ad, which aired only once, shifted the tone of Johnson’s successful bid against the sharply anti-communist Sen. Barry M. Goldwater. More than that, however, it ushered in a new age of political propaganda, highlighting the emotional power of advertising — particularly television advertising — to sway voters and decide races.

Political candidates have never looked back.

Indeed, it’s a sad truth of modern politics that campaign cash (ie, media funding) is prerequisite to any successful bid for higher public office — increasingly so. This year’s presidential contest will be the most expensive in history. The two leading presidential contenders have already spent roughly a quarter-billion dollars on advertising. If there’s one universal rule in politics, it’s that those who have trouble fund-raising need not apply.

“American politics,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, “has long ago shifted from an enterprise based on mass organization, to an enterprise based on TV and radio propaganda. It’s no longer labor intensive. Now it’s capital intensive.”

The reason is clear: ads work. And yet — considering all the hours of media attention, the public interviews, the endless campaigning, the viral Internet videos, the stump-speeches, the national conventions, the soon-to-be televised debates and the countless water-cooler arguments weighing the virtues and vices of the presidential candidates this very minute — the question remains: what causes voters to respond to short, one-sided bursts of un-nuanced messaging?

Why, that is, do ads work?

Clearly, the question cuts across disciplines, dredging to discover the countless reasons that folks behave the way they do, asking no less than what it is to be human. Faced with the question, Frank Ginsberg, chairman and CEO of Avrett Free Ginsberg, a New York-based advertising agency, said with a sigh, “We don’t have enough time.”

Yet there is a craft — dare we say a science — tested over decades, that allows advertisers to target specific audiences, appeal to their tastes and sensibilities, and predict with some degree of accuracy how they will respond. This is true whether it be a consumer buying a soft drink or a voter choosing a candidate.

A leading factor in this equation rests on emotional appeal. Ads are not just narrations; they attack the senses. In the case of Johnson’s “Daisy Girl” commercial (which never even mentioned Goldwater’s name) the intended response was clearly fear — a tactic repeated in the 1988 Willie Horton ad that helped sink Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’s White House hopes. Television is particularly suited to stimulate such an emotional reaction, combining images with music, text and narration to create an all-encompassing sensory experience.

“Ads are designed to have an emotional appeal that’s often more important than the actual information,” said Paul Freedman, a University of Virginia political scientist specializing in campaign advertising. “If you’re selling a car, you’re selling an image, you’re selling a state of mind. It’s not just a hunk of metal and plastic.”

In this way, Freedman added, candidates can brand themselves in the vaguest terms — an agent of change, for example, or a man of experience. The point being, Freedman said, that brands are “divorced from nuance.”

Campaign ads can also be effective by instilling confidence in voters seeking a reason to support a particular candidate. Marvin Overby, political science professor at the University of Missouri—Columbia, said many political ads fall in this category, aiming not to steal supporters from another candidate, but simply to mobilize those inclined to be their own. “Voters don’t want to feel like they have to flip a coin,” Overby said.

Darrell M. West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, echoed that message, saying ads frame issues in ways encouraging voters to feel a certain way about the candidates. “Political spots can’t create impressions that don’t already exist among the electorate,” West wrote in an email, “but they can encourage voters to see the candidates in particular ways. You can win by making people like you or dislike your opponent.”

In a prominent example this year, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican presidential nominee, attacked his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), for his celebrity, equating his superstar status to that of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

Repetition — the hammering away at an audience with a singular message — is also a powerful method of persuasion best accomplished through ads. In the modern political culture, these messages arrive “not just forcefully, but inescapably,” said Miller of NYU, who’s working on a book about the Marlboro Man, the ultimate in commercial icons. “Ideally,” he added, “you would have the commercial itself become a news story.” As was proven by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, even negative coverage is free advertising.

Finally, political advertisers are successful for the simple reason that many voters, for countless reasons, don’t follow politics very closely. Lynda Lee Kaid, professor of telecommunications at the University of Florida, said television ads allow candidates to lend an education (of sorts) that’s convenient to the viewer, providing “substantial amounts of information without great effort by the voter.”

Freedman, of UVA, agreed. “For many, many, many Americans, the campaign is coming to them only through these ads,” Freedman said. “They reach people who otherwise don’t have the time or the inclination to be plugged in to whatever’s going on with a political campaign.”

The candidates certainly know it. Through the end of July, Obama’s campaign had spent more than $152 million on advertising and related expenses, like media consultants, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog. McCain’s campaign, meanwhile, had spent nearly $54 million over the same span, CRP says.

And who would question their reasoning? If advertising can make a pair of blue jeans a symbol of social acceptance, turn a sandal into a walk down Hollywood Boulevard and transform a bottle of beer into a sexual fantasy, why would we doubt it couldn’t remake Sarah Palin into Joan of Arc? With the right image-making machine, anything is possible.

As Ginsberg said of his target audiences: “We know them better than they know themselves.”