politics

I was going to write more context, but got too sleepy. Essentially the ad for LBJ showed an innocent little girl counting flower ~~pedals~~ petals and then they imply that she gets nuked. Then a voice says that these are the stakes.

No one had seen a political ad like that and it upset a lot of people. But it did its job. It actually only played once, but was considered the ad that win LBJ the election over Goldwater. It was essentially the atom bomb of political ads.

While seeing something like this nowadays is relatively normal in media, an ad like this from the Lincoln Project has yet to be seen in political media. It's a daughter saying "if you vote for Trump, then you don't love me." I think Lincoln Project know that there will be no going back from this ad but also suspect it'll swing the election. I think that projection is overly optimistic, but I've been wrong before and I'd love to be wrong this time.

The advertisement begins with three-year-old Monique Corzilius, standing in a meadow in New York City's Highbridge Park picking petals off a daisy, counting from one to nine while birds chirp in the background. She makes several errors as she counts. When she was unable to count to ten successfully during filming, it was decided that her mistakes might be more appealing to the voters. After she reaches "nine", the girl pauses, as if trying to remember the next number. A booming male voice is heard counting the numbers backward from "ten" in a manner similar to the start of a missile launch countdown. Seemingly in response to the countdown, the girl turns her head toward a point off-screen, and the scene freezes.

As the countdown continues, a zoom of the video still focuses on the girl's right eye until her pupil fills the screen, eventually blacking it out as the countdown simultaneously reaches zero. A bright flash and thunderous sound of a nuclear explosion, featuring footage of a detonation, replaces the blackness. The scene cuts to footage of a mushroom cloud, and then to a final cut of a slowed close-up section of the incandescence in the nuclear explosion. A voice-over from Johnson plays over all three pieces of nuclear detonation footage, stating emphatically, "These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." At the end of the voice-over, the explosion footage is replaced by white letters on a black screen, written all in capitals, stating "Vote for President Johnson on November 3". A voice-over reads the words on the screen, then adds "The stakes are too high for you to stay home."

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_(advertisement)