On trail, a push to brand foe, self

Candidates strive to establish image and make it stick

WASHINGTON - This year's presidential campaign is shaping up as a case study in how the race for the White House has turned into a form of marketing warfare, featuring advertisements and gimmicks seeking to brand the opposing candidate with a series of indelible negative images.

In recent days, John McCain's campaign has mocked Barack Obama's supposed "celebrity" status by comparing him to Paris Hilton, delivered tire gauges designed to deflate Obama's energy plan, and taunted the Illinois Democrat as a Moses-like figure who believes he can part raging waters.

Obama, in turn, has put his rapid-response team into overdrive, pounding out press releases that seek to rebut every criticism from McCain, while delivering what it considers the ultimate, most politically powerful putdown: asserting that a McCain presidency would equal a third term for President Bush.

Yesterday, McCain tried to deflect Obama's effort to link him with Bush, unveiling a television ad designed to protect McCain's brand as an independent willing to buck the party line. "We're worse off than we were four years ago," the announcer says. "Only McCain has taken on big tobacco, drug companies, fought corruption in both parties. . . . He's the original maverick."

Often lost in the back-and-forth is the real debate over issues that both campaigns promised voters. But the recent history of presidential elections shows that the branding strategy can work. A single, mocking image - the more outrageous, the more effective - can define a candidate. In 1988, it was Michael Dukakis riding in a tank, and four years ago John F. Kerry on his windsurfing board.

On the flip side, candidates try to put out a single, celebratory image of themselves: Ronald Reagan's "morning in America," George W. Bush's bullhorn moment at the World Trade Center site, and McCain as a wounded former prisoner of war.

Over the course of a long campaign, the image makers hope that the positive portrait of their candidate and the mocking picture of the opponent stick in voters' minds.

If McCain is successful, voters may picture the race being between a courageous war hero and someone unqualified to lead. But McCain may be damaging his own brand - that he is a straight talker above partisan politics who puts "Country First," as his new town hall backdrops declare - by running ads such as the one that compared Obama to Britney Spears.

If Obama is successful, voters may see the campaign as a choice between change and more of the same. Obama's campaign and Democrats have tried to brand the 71-year-old McCain as an aging Bush clone and the puppet of Big Oil. In one recent ad, a picture of McCain and Bush is shown with the text, "Same Old Politics."

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a specialist on the media and politics and co-author of "Presidents Creating the Presidency," said the campaign ads use a "sledgehammer" approach that lacks the subtlety of some past commercials. "The assumption now in advertising is you have to be fairly obvious in what you do because the media environment is so cluttered," she said yesterday.

Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant who worked for Kerry's 2004 campaign, said that the images in the ads are vital because they serve as the prism through which voters view the candidates.

"We are a visual culture and these are arresting images," Shrum said.

Todd Harris, a Republican consultant who worked in McCain's 2000 campaign, agreed that both candidates are striving to form ideal images of themselves and harrowing visages of their opponent.

Obama "has done something fairly miraculous," Harris said. "He has virtually branded the words 'hope' and 'change' to mean Barack Obama."

McCain has struggled to combat that message - one reason that his campaign decided to try to rebrand Obama as a shallow celebrity. The mocking of Obama continued this week when the McCain campaign seized on the Illinois senator's suggestion that Americans could save gas by properly inflating their tires by handing out tire pressure gauges with the slogan, "Obama's Energy Plan."

While the Bush administration has made a similar suggestion and Obama's energy plan has many other features, the McCain campaign is betting that the symbol will stick with voters.

Yesterday, Obama delivered a spirited, somewhat sarcastic response. "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant," he told voters in Berea, Ohio. "They think it is funny that they are making fun of something that is actually true."

Michael Kranish can be reached at kranish@globe.com.