The Living Room Candidate

I learned about The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials from 1952-2004 from an article in the July 1, 2004 New York Times Online.

The site is hosted by the American Museum of the Moving Image. You can look over commercials by campaign year, type (biographical, attack, response, and so on), and issues. Commercials include a transcript, so the text can looked at.

Useful exercises might include looking at the role candidates' wives play in commercials, looking at the visual rhetoric of attack ads, defining an attack ad, how issues are framed, or the role of the political advertisements in civic discourse to name a few ideas.

This WWW site would make a good compliment to the Photoshop exercise outlined in today's earlier post.