The 30-second campaign: television ads have assumed an enormous role in presidential elections. While they're carefully scripted and visually arresting, they often shade the truth in an effort to sway your vote.

• Author: Elliott, Stuart
• Position: National

Can a candidate be sold like a soap, soup, or soft drink? That's the goal of political advertising, which ha some ways is similar to, but in others is very different from, its product-peddling counterparts.

Like all advertising, political advertising is subjective, presenting a biased point of view. Just as a Ford ad is selling Fords, not other car brands, a political ad is selling a specific candidate. That can sometimes be obscured by the noble trappings in political ads, which are often filled with images of American flags, Mount Rushmore, amber waves of grain, and the White House.

"Don't expect you're going to get objective voter information" from political ads, says Christopher Malone, a political scientist at Pace University in New York. "That's definitely out of the question."

Political advertising has been around since the mid-19th century, but it took the arrival of the major media in the 20th century to elevate its importance. Before there were large daily newspapers, national magazines, or coast-to-coast radio and TV networks, political ads were mostly limited to buttons, banners, and posters intended to generate local turnout at candidate rallies and at polling places on Election Day.

That began to change when radio's reach became widespread. The first national commercials on the fledgling medium aired in 1928 for Republican Herbert Hoover and Democrat Al Smith. But the seismic shift came when television entered the picture in the presidential election of 1952.

TAKING TO THE AIRWAVES

That year, Dwight D. Eisenhower was promoted in cartoon-style commercials featuring the upbeat slogan "I Like Ike." And he became the first presidential candidate to appear in TV ads, after a Madison Avenue advertising executive convinced him that the sights and sounds of TV offered the quickest, most effective way to get his message to voters.

There were concerns that appearing in commercials as if he were a product would diminish Eisenhower's stature, but the results proved otherwise. The short commercials, themed "Eisenhower Answers America," ran before and after popular series like I Love Lucy and were a huge hit. (Eisenhower's opponent, Democrat Adlai Stevenson, thought such commercials undignified and ran half-hour speeches on TV instead. Four years later, when he challenged Eisenhower again, he too appeared in TV commercials.)

ANSWERS BEFORE QUESTIONS

Telling]y, it was at the dawn of TV campaign ads that their reputation for shading the truth began to develop. While Eisenhower was seen replying to questions from typical voters on issues like the Korean War and the cost of living, it turned out the answers had actually come before the questions. Questioners had been recruited to read the questions from scripts after the Eisenhower "answers" had been filmed, with the order reversed in the editing process.

"Political commercials pretend to be like...