ABSTRACT
The television advertising of Michael Dukakis was judged a failure on nearly every count both by campaign insiders and by members of the popular press. McCabe (1988), briefly a member of the Dukakis advertising team, claimed that the campaign's advertising “was perhaps the greatest single marketing and communications disaster of the twentieth century, of far greater and more lasting significance than the fiascoes of ‘new Coke’ and the Edsel combined” (p. 33). Drew (1988) assailed the poor timing and blurred message of the Dukakis advertising, and Edwin Diamond (1988) observed the advertising failed “to add up to a coherent whole.” Moreover, he noted that it “[was] isolated and unrelated to what the candidate [was] saying at his news events” (p. 36). Some of the harshest criticism of the candidate's advertising originated within state party organizations, where dissatisfaction grew so pronounced that some organizations began to produce their own spots. Furthermore, Rothenberg (1988) reported that near the end of the campaign, “Dukakis ads [were] subjected to a barrage of criticism in the advertising and political communities” (p. 43).
