ough in the past that recovery was no longer a sufficient theme. Faced with uncertain prospects at the polls, the Bush campaign went negative, and as effectively as Reagan had gone positive four years earlier. The most famous single ad, featuring African-American convict Willie Horton (supposedly released from prison to commit further crimes by Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis) was not actually made by the Bush campaign but by a nominally independent group. It was so controversial that it was quickly pulled, but the Bush campaign followed it up with slightly vaguer ads emphasizing the same theme. One ad showed convicts passing in and out of a prison through a revolving gate. The attacks were never answered, and Bush went on to win by a wide margin.
One prominent advertising sector for which it was not Morning in America in the 1980s was the domestic automobile industry. Always a major advertiser, since a car is likely to be a family's largest purchase short of a house, the automobile industry has often had to struggle with an element of love-hate relationship between consumers and the product. Used-car salesmen remain a byword for slippery business practices, while at the corporate level the Ford Edsel remained a symbol of design and marketing missteps for decades after its debut and debacle. The 1980s, however, were a particularly difficult decade for American car manufacturers. Moving into the bridgehead established by the Volkswagen in the 1960s, Japanese car makers had by the end of the 1970s firmly established themselves as makers of cars that were everything the Detroit product was not--inexpensive, reliable, and fuel-efficient (still a major consideration in the early 1980s, in the wake of the "oil shocks" of the 1970s). In the face of this competition, the domestic industry could no longer depend on simple sex-and-power symbolism.
Quality also had to be symbolized; something effectively done in Ford ads ...