>> coming up, the bush institute hosts a discussion on the evolution of presidential campaigns. donald trump campaigns in milwaukee. that is followed by ted cruz at a campaign rally in waukesha, wisconsin. campaign 2016 continues today with the wisconsin primary. live coverage begins tonight at 9:00 eastern. tune in for complete election results, speeches, and viewer reaction. c-span's washington journal live day with news and policy

issues that impact you. coming up tuesday morning, host of the drive home with sly joins us to discuss his endorsement of senator bernie sanders for president. and to preview tuesday's key gop and democratic primaries in wisconsin. barnes, executive editor of the weekly standard, will be on to talk about the latest on the nominating process for the republican party and the presidential contest. watch washington journal beginning live at 7:00 eastern on tuesday morning. join the discussion. >> inside look at the evolution of presidential campaigns. the george w. bush presidential center hosted presidential campaign managers, white house advisers, and one of the creators of showtime's the circus.

this is about 90 minutes.

>> ladies and gentlemen, please welcome kevin sullivan. kevin: let me offer our sincere apologies for embedding that ike for president -- it is going to be in your head for two or three days. a nice way to set the tone for our conversation tonight. by the way, it is being recorded by c-span. tell your friends. thank you for being here for another sold-out event at the george w. bush presidential center. in addition to the presidential museum and library, the bush

center houses the bush institute, an energetic policy center that addresses the most pressing challenges by developing leaders, fostering policy, and taking action that improves the quality of people's lives at home and all around the world. the bush institute focuses on policy areas most important to the president and mrs. bush during their public lives. it is one way they continue their service to our nation. it is an honor to have them with us tonight. [applause] before we continue, i want to call your attention to a special exhibit which explores the history of campaigns and elections, lots of interactive things you can do. it will be open until 9:00 p.m. please check it out after the event. i am really excited about the

program tonight. you are in for a treat. we will begin with a conversation about presidential campaign advertising. we have two experts. we have mark mckinnon and dr. patrick meirick of the university of oklahoma. [applause] mckinnon is a ut guy so we balanced out the equation. mark has been a chief media advisor on a number of successful campaigns. president bush once said of mckinnon, i was impressed with mark's creativity and i was impressed by his honesty. high praise. he is most famous as the cocreator of the hit "the circus," which chronicles the current campaign action every sunday night on showtime. >> this is the story about john kennedy. here is the situation.

you have the flu, snowing heavily, it is your daughter's birthday the next morning and you are supposed to be at a soup kitchen at 6:00 in the morning. the question is not would you go -- the question is would you want to go? >> the show is incredible. if you have not seen it, use the showtime anytime app to get caught up. also happy to have a former journalist who heads up the political communication center, home of the most comprehensive archival political advertising. a real expert on presidential campaign advertising. second half of our program,

mckinnon will moderate an elite panel. this is going to be fun. we are pleased to have sarah with us. she was senior strategist for president bush in 2004. we also have rnc veteran and former senior adviser in strategist on governor romney's campaign in 2012. and the campaign manager for president obama in 2008. david later served as senior advisor in the white house. let's welcome our three panelists. [applause] as a nonprofit, the bush center does not participate in politics, but that does not mean we cannot have some fun with some of today's best-known political insiders.

join me in welcoming to the stage our guests. [applause] >> you just saw one of the very first ads, the eisenhower ads. one of the first things i did was go back and study the history of advertising presidential campaigns. what you see over time is that it really evolves. voters get used to seeing something that is not as effective. you can see these different phases. the first phase was like selling soap. >> absolutely. running the first eisenhower campaign in 1952. you saw the jingle. >> although some things change, other things stay the same.

mr. mckinnon: let's see some of the standard introductory ads. dr. meirick: these are ads, if you have humble roots, tout them. if you can tie yourself to the american dream, you have got to do it. mr. mckinnon: should we just play both of them? dr. meirick: ok. >> out of the heartland of kansas, came dwight d. eisenhower. >> general, if war comes, is this country really ready? >> it is not. the administration has spent

billions of dollars for national defense. we haven't enough for fighting in korea. it is time for a change. eisenhower knows how to deal with the russians. >> eisenhower has met europe leaders. elect the number one man for the number one job of our time. november 4, vote for eisenhower. a paid film. >> i was born in a little town called hope, arkansas. three month after my father died. i remember that old two-story house where he lived with my lived with my grandparents. they had a very limited income. it was in 1963 that i went to washington and met president kennedy. i remember thinking what an incredible country this was. someone like me who had no money would be given the opportunity

to be president. -- to meet the president. i decided i could really do public service. i worked my way through law school. part-time jobs. anything i could find. after i graduated, i did not really care about making money. i just wanted to go home and see if i could make a difference. we worked hard on education and health care to create jobs and we made real progress. it is exhilarating to me to think as president, i could help to change all of our people's lives for the better and bring hope back to the american dream. mr. mckinnon: first impressions are important. these were introductions. i want to tell a quick story about when we introduced president bush at the convention. we interviewed mrs. bush and president bush and there was an exchange about the delivery room and when your daughters were born and you completely scrambled it up.

we all laughed and we reshot it a couple of times until we got it right. we started to fix it. it is great, so funny, let's leave that in. it was so you. it was a human great moment. you can imagine the response we got at the campaign. you cannot that in there. people hunger for authenticity. we also did not want to raise the bar of expectations. [laughter] the ads that are really powerful are those that play on people's -- what they fear and their security. the next ad is the most famous ad in american politics. ask 100 political consultants -- 100 will say -- which ad would you guess?

let's do a quick setup. the reason this is brilliant, the creative is so incredible. strategically, so powerful. polls had come out saying johnson was probably going to win big. the johnson campaign realized that was a problem. all of our voters got the message that this thing is already done so why come out and vote? they show what the potential consequences might be. dr. meirick: this is picking up on a statement goldwater made talking about the possible use of nuclear weapons in vietnam and this was a fear they really wanted to pick up on. mr. mckinnon: here it is. >> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 9

-- >> 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 -- >> these are the stakes. to make a world in which all god's children can live. we must either love our children -- love each other or we must die. johnson.or president the stakes are too high for you to stay home. mr. mckinnon: vote or die, that is pretty compelling. dr. meirick: visually, it is absolutely stunning.

such an outcry, the ad only aired once. mr. mckinnon: great ads -- great campaigns tell a story. this is called the bear in the woods. if you boil this down in 28 seconds, it does a perfect narrative. it talks about a threat or an opportunity and establishes a victim of the threat, a villain imposing a threat, a resolution to the threat, and a hero. it does all this in 28 seconds. this is ronald reagan. >> there is a bear in the woods. for some people, that bear is easy to see. others do not see it at all. some people say that bear is tame. others say it is vicious and dangerous. since no one can really be sure who is right, isn't it smart to

be as strong as the bear -- if there is a bear? mr. mckinnon: that is so great. not a wasted breath. it is part of my exercise. i talked to the guy who made that ad. he did the narration, too. i went and had lunch with him, too. i understood where it came from. keep the -- he smoked a pack of cigarettes and had three bourbons. i ran into the campaign manager a couple of years ago and i talked about this and he said, we had to rent that bear and it cost us $10,000 to rent the bear. that was a trained bear. we taught him to back up. that was a good investment of $10,000. dr. meirick: he had an amazing voice. they are often considered

negative ads, but you never hear a name. it is all implicit. that is pretty rare. in your updating of the bear ad, we do not want to leave anything to the imagination. mr. mckinnon: we do what we call stealing. [laughter] great ideas, we borrow from the best. we did a version of a bear in the woods ad. the same kind of metaphorical reference. the interesting thing about this ad, we cut this together very early on in the campaign and we tested it and it was so effective, so good, we said, we decided to wait until a critical

moment in the campaign to deploy the ad. the power of imagination, in some earlier iterations, we had them attacking a carcass. it was pretty on the nose. we discovered if we left the wolves in the woods, that worked better. that is kind of like a horror film. if you leave a little bit to the imagination, it has more power. john kerry voted to slash the intelligence operations. 's defenses.ericans

>> i am george w. bush, and i approve this message. dr. meirick: do you want to set up the next one? mr. mckinnon: i think we can talk about some other kinds of strategies in negative ads. some time they sense that negative ads, negativity is a brand-new thing that only started in 1988. this next ad goes to show that that is not necessarily the case. in the 1952 campaign, mr. eisenhower said this. >> that must be changed. >> how was that again, general?

>> i know how the law might be used to break unions. >> that was one more promise mr. eisenhower did not keep. he did nothing about changing the unionbusting. let's think it through. let's get an administration that means prosperity for everybody. mr. mckinnon: now he was a natural. [laughter] dr. meirick: the notion of being telegenic was a new idea. i think bernie sanders would really like that. mr. mckinnon: we are going to

move ahead to 1972 and the next couple of ads are going to show a kind of ad that deals with the flip-flop. this one was attacking the governor. -- attacking mcgovern. >> this is a classic campaign ad where you show your opponent saying something differently. this is a great ad against john kerry in 1984. we discovered, we got some video of john kerry windsurfing. not a lot of people in america windsurf and he is wearing these outrageous purple shorts and doing this out near some yachts. ross came up with this brilliant

ad with great music and it proved very effective. >> in 1967, george mcgovern suggested regulating marijuana along the same lines of alcohol. now he is against legalizing it and says he always has been. last january, he suggested a welfare plan that would give a thousand dollar bill to every man, woman, and child in the country. now he says the thousand dollar figure is not right. he has proposed unconditional amnesty for all draft dodgers. now he claims he proposed no such thing. last year, this year -- the question is, what about next

year? [laughter] >> which direction would john kerry lean? [laughter] he voted for education reform and now opposes it. john kerry -- whichever way the wind blows. [applause] mr. mckinnon: i want to spend a second on that one. we had completely different strategic challenges in both elections. in 1999, we were in a period of relative economic prosperity and

in the usual dynamics of status quo election, it really looked like a status quo election. people agreed with al gore on all of the issues. it was a good environment for a democrat to run. thanks to a great candidate with a clear vision, we change the context of the election. flash forward four years, we were arguing in a time where people were not happy about our foreign engagement. this was a status quo election and we were arguing to keep it the same. we were blessed by the opposition in john kerry. there was a critical moment in the campaign when john kerry, after having pledged to support

the troops, and we were able to take advantage of that. that and the fact we had a candidate that even if people agreed more with john kerry, they liked president bush because he was clear and had compelling for convictions and -- core convictions and was consistent, the opposite of john kerry. that was a big power and how that collection turned out. -- how that election turned out. dr. meirick: that is one of the advantages of the flip-flop approach. you have an attack on the policy and whichever side someone is on the policy, by pointing out this campaign has been either side of them, you arrange everybody. and then you point out the inconsistency. mr. mckinnon: one of the differences in campaigns in the last few years, separate

committees who run on your behalf -- supposedly. it creates a lot of dissonance because sometimes these organizations are doing things that are counter than what you want to be saying. sometimes they are helpful. in 2004, there was an effort, ad that ran in ohio in the midst of a lot of negative campaigning and this was a great ad. it goes back to my thing about the bear in the woods. it tells a story. it was a very sweet and compelling ad with a powerful and positive message. got into the frame of who is going to keep you safe. wife was murdered by

terrorists on september 11. >> when president bush came to ohio, she went to see him. >> mr. president, this young lady lost her mother in the world trade center. >> he turned around and came back and said, are you all right? >> our president took ashley in his arms and just embraced her. we saw her eyes fill up with tears. >> he is the most powerful man in the world and all he wants to do is make sure i'm safe and ok. >> it is what i want to see in the heart and the soul of the man who sits in the highest the man who sits in the highest electied office of our country. [applause]

mr. mckinnon: the anti-evolution of advertising that we lose control enough, we have running ads and we don't have control over them. because of the online capabilities of social media, it is not just committees, but adbody out there can make an ad on your behalf. if it is good enough, it will power up. david, you will remember this. the great ethyl ad produced by barack obama. you might know more of a back story on this. it was technically not an ad at all. it never aired on television to my knowledge. host: it was a viral video. so, we kind of a stretch the definition of political