Sort through 60 years of presidential campaign ads and what will you see? Maybe you’ll find that everybody’s still stuck on the same subjects.
That’s the conclusion we’ve arrived upon after taking in the new Hugh Atkin video “Ike to Obama—60 Years of Campaign Ads,” a 4:25 supercut that sorts through campaign messaging from such notable presidential candidates as Bill Clinton, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush, and Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Though it’s not explicitly stated, the video makes alarmingly clear that presidential candidates in 1952 were basically talking about the same issues that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are sorting through today: welfare, warfare, and the “strength of this country.”
If you need more evidence, check out that “47 percent” sequence that starts at the 3:15 mark: Mitt Romney’s not the first candidate to grow intimate with that number.
Posted to YouTube Saturday, Atkin’s video has currently been seen more than 25,000 times. Such a quick spread isn’t surprising to Atkin, however, because he’s somewhat of an urban legend around the YouTube world.
Entrenched in a post-grad law program at the University of Oxford, the Australian video maker never fails to pop up with a new round of widely circulated mashups and supercuts that offer his, quite liberal views on the presidential campaigns happening in America. In March, his Eminem-evoking “Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up?” rap supercut went nuts to the tune of 6.6 million views.
Photo via Hugh Atkin/YouTube