The following is the last of four guest posts by Prof. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, writing about her new book, Political Brands.

Professor Hasen offered me the opportunity to excerpt my new book Political Brands on ELB. My publisher Edward Elgar Publishing gave me permission to excerpt the books introductory chapter “Branding Itself.” These excerpts have been edited for continuity.

The results of the 2016 presidential election motivated me to write Political Brands. How, I wondered, could America have elected a brand as president?  The other occurrence that motivated me to write this book is a sense that Americans are suffering from “truth decay.”  To me, electing a brand president and the decay of truth are intertwined, because the more that voters rely on flashy branding to dictate who is electable, the more they are likely to fall for a slick, media-savvy candidate over a competent and truthful one.

I am a campaign finance lawyer by training. And one of the drivers of the high price of political campaigns is the exorbitant cost of advertising. What first got me interested in branding was a statement from Senator Russ Feingold, who warned in 2011 that “We’re going to have Republican and Democrat toothpaste.”  His quote inspired me to look at commercial branding, political advertising and how these two spheres intersect.  And that was all before Trump was elected president.

The criminal and congressional investigations into Trump’s election in 2016 have provided a treasure trove of information for a researcher like me. In a typical election, political ads that were placed on Facebook for a millisecond could be lost to history. But now some of those ads, because they are suspected to be part of a foreign attack on the integrity of our elections, are part of a permanent and public Congressional record. Like the Congressional investigation into Watergate, which gave the public a rare peek behind the curtain into the 1972 election, the investigations into the 2016 election provide a chance for a deeper dive on how modern elections are transforming.

A final reason that I wanted to write this book is to show the artifice of political branding. Typically, the people using political branding techniques are just trying to manipulate the public. When President Trump calls his Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida the “Winter White House,” that is branding and not original branding either. President Nixon (1969-74) called his Florida home the “Winter White House.”   When Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into the 2016 election is called a “witch hunt” by Presidential Advisor Kellyanne Conway, that is branding.  Again, it’s not original branding. This phrase harkens back to the dark days of the Salem witch trials—the original American “witch hunt.”  When White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon said, “drain the swamp,” about limiting the power of Washington insiders, that was branding. Again, it wasn’t original.  Senator Richard Neuberger used the phrase “drain the swamp” in a piece in the New York Times urging the adoption of public financing for federal elections back in 1956.   The original Mother Jones (the woman whom the magazine is named after) also said “drain the swamp” in 1913.  Even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in 2006 called for Democrats to “drain the swamp.” 

But when working for a firm called Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon tested the phrase “drain the swamp” years before it was used in the 2016 election campaign by candidate Donald Trump.  Clearly, what Mr. Bannon was doing was brand testing, and “drain the swamp” hit the right chord for his target market.  My hope is that perhaps when Americans see that “Winter White House,” “witch hunt” and “drain the swamp” are all just basic branding trying to sell something, they can be less gullible about falling for messages designed to tug at our emotions and obfuscate the truth. 

“Branding” has been called “a process of manufacturing meaning.”  I don’t disagree, but that is precisely why branding’s power needs to be interrogated. Manufacturing meaning is a scary power in the wrong hands. During the Third Reich in Germany, propagandist Joseph Goebbels “manufactured meaning” too. It led to genocide and a World War.