Rick Santorum voiced his belief that Iowans are prepared to once again play their critical role in the nation's presidential selection process. (Photo: Lynda Waddington/The Iowa Independent)

“There are a lot of people today who pull out their Constitution and hold it high and say, ‘This is how America should function. These are our constitutional principles.’ And, they are right. That’s the how of America. It’s important. It’s the process. But it is the how, and not the why. The why is in that other document that is also usually in their Constitutional book — the Declaration of Independence,” Santorum told the roughly 80 people gathered at the Clarion hotel.

“America is a moral enterprise. People say, ‘Why do you talk about the moral issues, Senator? Why don’t you just talk about jobs and the economy?’ Because America is not just about jobs and the economy. America is a moral enterprise at its core.”

Philosophers and theologians, he said, had opined for centuries about how man was endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights, but America was the first country to put such a statement “rooted in Judeo-Christian understanding of our relationship with god” into writing and practice. Although the founding documents don’t come right out and say so, he said, the object of America, the how in the Constitution, was to create a limited government whose sole purpose — “the one thing America is about” — is to keep citizens free.

“Our founders understood that … freedom is not to do what you want to do. Freedom is to do what you ought to do — to serve god, to be your brother’s keeper and to love and support your family,” the Pennsylvania Republican said. “That’s the ‘ought to.’ That’s freedom. That’s liberty. When you hear our founders talk about liberty, that’s what they mean.”

To define freedom as people being allowed to do whatever it is they want to do “to pursue their wants and passions,” he said, would result in anarchy. And, because America’s founders had the foresight and vision to create a nation built on such unprecedented principles, Santorum took particular exception to recent remarks made by Obama that the U.S. became a great nation when it enacted programs to provide for elderly and vulnerable citizens.

“So, it offends me. It upsets me when the President of the United States says that our country was not a great country until people like him, people who believe in government, say that they are going to do things for you,” Santorum said. “That doesn’t make us great. It makes us like every other country in the world where authoritarians believe that they can better provide for you than you can provide for yourself.”

On April 13, during an address on fiscal policy, Obama said:

… Part of this American belief that we’re all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security and dignity. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff may strike any one of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we say to ourselves. And so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, those with disabilities. We’re a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further. We would not be a great country without those commitments. …

Many conservatives pointed out that all three programs highlighted by Obama were instituted in 1965, and have inferred that Obama was claiming the U.S. was not a great nation until that time.

Santorum also offered Obama some back-handed praise, saying that if it wasn’t for the President’s “radical agenda” citizens might have been content to sit like frogs in a slowly heating pot until they died. The policies being enacted by the Obama administration, he said, have drastically turned up the heat, causing many citizens to realize what was happening before it was too late.

“You know what’s at stake in America today? America is at stake in America — what we are all about, what generations of veterans have fought and died for, the ideals that made us different,” said Santorum.

Calling the upcoming 2012 election the most important since that of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, Santorum pleaded with local activists to do their due diligence in vetting presidential candidates. In addition to selecting a candidate that can win the general election, Republicans also need to be true to their conservative principles, and they need to apply their energy and focus to every federal seat on the upcoming ballot.

“You want conservatives to make big changes in Washington? Then you better get about sending us the horses that can get it done,” he said, noting that during the three times in the past 100 years when Democrats held the White House with a visionary president, controlled the U.S. House and had a super-majority in the U.S. Senate that significant change occurred (such as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society).

“Has it ever happened that we had a conservative president, a majority of the House and a filibuster-proof U.S. Senate in Republican hands? Answer: never. … So, you want to see some big changes? [In] the U.S. Senate — I served there — if you don’t have 60 votes, you need Democrats to pass almost anything. If America wants to see a big change, it can’t just be electing a president. We have to elect United States senators across this country.”

Santorum visited Cedar Rapids as part of the Iowa GOP Chairman’s Speaker Series. On Monday, Santorum will again be in eastern Iowa when he keynotes an event at the University of Iowa for The Family Leader, a religious conservative organization led by Bob Vander Plaats.

The demographers estimate the poverty rate will increase year-on-year from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent. That means one in seven Americans, some 45 million people, lived in poverty last year, the “highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959.” The rate is already above the previous high of 13 percent, which came during the energy crisis in 1980. From The AP’s report:

Among the 18-64 working-age population, the demographers expect a rise beyond 12.4 percent, up from 11.7 percent. That would make it the highest since at least 1965, when another Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the war on poverty that expanded the federal government’s role in social welfare programs from education to health care.

Demographers also are confident the report will show:

• Child poverty increased from 19 percent to more than 20 percent.
• Blacks and Latinos were disproportionately hit, based on their higher rates of unemployment.
• Metropolitan areas that posted the largest gains in poverty included Modesto, Calif.; Detroit; Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla.; Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

To classify as impoverished last year, a family of four needed income of less than $22,025 — $17,163 for a family of three, $14,051 for a family of two and $10,991 for individuals.

This spring, the Obama administration decided to update how the government defines poverty, to give a clearer picture of how many families and individuals are really in need. In March, the Census Bureau started developing a new poverty measure, to go alongside the standard rubric. (The government plans to use the supplemental measure starting next year, with 2010 data.)

The current poverty yardstick, in place since the 1960s, gauges poverty by a family’s cash income. The new measure will take into account cost-of-living differentials, as it is much more expensive to live in, say, New York than Omaha. It also weighs the cost of utilities, child care and health care, and the amount of federal and state assistance — such as SNAP benefits (formerly, food stamps) — a person or family receives.

Even by the old yardstick, the data the Census Bureau will release this week should look grim, with more than 40 million individuals living in families with income below the poverty line.

Rebecca Blank, undersecretary for economic affairs in the Commerce Department, expanded on the rise in poverty in the recession in congressional testimony (PDF) last year. She noted that poverty did not fall during the economic expansion of the 2000s, as economists would have expected — more evidence of the 2000s as a “lost decade” for most working Americans.

“[T]he poverty rate always rises steeply during recessions, but falls during expansions,” she said. “[P]overty fell by 1.5 percentage points during the expansion of the 1980s and by almost 3 percentage points during the expansion of the 1990s. In the recession of 2001, poverty went up as anticipated, but never really came down. Rather than falling, poverty rose by eight-tenths of a percentage point during the expansion of the 2000s, so that a higher share of the population was poor in 2007 than in 2001.”

That means poverty increases during the great recession came on top of an elevated base.

“‘They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years’ with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s,” Balz wrote, quoting Gingrich.

That statement led to my short post yesterday, questioning why Gingrich would suggest that political expediency should trump reforms as vital as those ensuring basic human rights. More recently, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman also latched onto Gingrich’s comments, asking today: “Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality?”

Turns out Gingrich didn’t like the way his words were framed, and he let Balz know it in a series of emails yesterday. That exchange led Balz today to issue this separate addendum, in which Gingrich says the Civil Rights Act was a moral necessity.

Gingrich responded with several emails saying that the context misrepresented his views by implying that he believed Johnson was wrong to sign the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s. To the contrary, he said, the civil rights revolution of 1956-1965 was “morally absolutely necessary” for the country and Johnson was correct in pushing for the legislation. Other Johnson actions, he said, inflicted more damage to the Democratic coalition.

Johnson shattered his party, Gingrich went on to say, because he had “grotesquely overreached” in four areas: mismanagement of the economy, the failure in Vietnam, the cultural divisions that emerged in part over Vietnam and later civil rights initiatives. Johnson’s mistake on civil rights, he said, was not in signing major legislation but in later getting ahead of the country by supporting school busing and failing to take a firmer stance against racial violence in the cities.

“If LBJ had done nothing on civil rights,” Gingrich said, “he would still have been in trouble on the economy, Great Society big government, the counter culture and the war.”

For the sake of argument, let’s say he’s right about that. It still doesn’t clear up the issue. For one thing, Gingrich’s comments weren’t intended to be friendly advice for Democrats. (What does he care if they flail in chaos for the next 40 years?) They were lobbed as a Hail Mary attempt to kill the health reform by causing House Democrats to fear the political repercussions of their support. And what single vote under the Johnson White House would make that point most clearly but the one enacting the Civil Rights Act?

Joe DeSantis, a Gingrich spokesman, wrote in our comment thread this morning that “Gingrich was not drawing an analogy between the health care bill and civil rights legislation.”

Maybe not. But Balz is standing by it. Indeed, despite the separate addendum, the original story remains unchanged.

Former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill “the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times,” Gingrich said: “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

So by Gingrich’s logic, lawmakers should really just shy away from the toughest issues of the day because changes in the status quo might haunt their political careers. And this guy wants to be president?

Update (March 22): Gingrich has contested the Post’s characterization of his comments, claiming that he never meant to imply that the Civil Rights Act was a bad move on Johnson’s part. That claim led Post reporter Dan Balz to issue this addendum on March 22. (More about that here.) It’s worth noting that Balz did not change the original story, meaning that he stands by his characterization that Gingrich compared the health care vote directly to the civil rights votes of the 1960s.

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.”