ven now, in a new century, in a period of impatience with politics, these cries echo across history: He kept us out of war. Rugged individualism. A new deal for the American people. Let's get America moving again.
And then there are these, from this election year, slogans without power, punch, or passion: I'm for the people, not for the powerful. A reformer with results.
As a genre, the American political slogan, the art form that allowed Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy to encapsulate an entire election with a single, telling phrase, may be dying.
And the death of the political slogan - whether conjuring an image, like William McKinley's ''full dinner pail'' during the prosperity of 1900, or asking a question, like Ronald Reagan's ''Are you better off than you were four years ago?'' in 1980, or drawing on the power and pith of a single word, like Warren G. Harding's ''Normalcy'' in 1920 - may have a significance far beyond the rhetorical.
At root, political slogans are nothing more than advertising gambits and political campaigns are little more than marketing offensives. The irony is that in this age of advertising and heyday of mass marketing, Al Gore and George W. Bush are falling so flat.
Consider, for example, the raw materials of this campaign. One nominee, a two-term vice president, is the son of one of the lions of the Senate - enough to make ''Gore'' one of the most resonant names in politics. The other, governor of a large state, is the grandson of a senator and the son of a man who was both vice president and president - enough to render ''Bush'' one of the most enduring brand names in American life.
And yet in an era of ''branding'' - when the most prosaic products, even water - have a strong marketplace identity, both Gore and Bush have fumbled at developing a brand of their own.
''This is what happens when you take one candidate, Vice President Gore, who is not sure of who he is, and another, Governor Bush, who was anointed by the power brokers,'' said L. Sandy Maisel, a Colby College political scientist. ''There is no there here.''
Part of the colorlessness of this campaign derives from the particular appeal of both men, who from the start of their political lives have prospered in the center. It is hard to coin fighting words for a battle over the middle.
Part of it comes from the times, with the public seeming to almost welcome blandness in their would-be presidents, if only for the contrast to the colorful but also deeply flawed figure the two nominees are trying to succeed.
And part of it comes from the nature of contemporary culture, which is crowded with media images in a way that would startle William Henry Harrison, who rode to office in 1840 on his (completely false) image as the ''log-cabin-and-hard-cider'' candidate, and would astonish Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose entire political persona seemed in 1952 (simplistically, it turned out) to be summarized in the phrase ''I like Ike.''
''Everything in this country is marketing,'' said Richard Norton Smith, a prominent presidential biographer. ''It is highly unlikely that a slogan in this climate would move people or inspire people. We're bombarded by so much sloganeering that it is hard to get through the clutter.''
It hasn't helped that both candidates seem to be running through slogans at marathon speed. In recent months, Bush has conducted a ''change-the-tone-tour,'' vowed that under his administration there would be ''no child left behind,'' and said his goal was ''renewing America's purpose.'' He has spoken of ''prosperity with a purpose'' and of ''compassionate conservatism'' and then, when Senator John McCain won the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 1 with an insurrectionary campaign, portrayed himself as a ''reformer with results.''
Just last week, Bush unveiled yet another new slogan, ''Real Plans for Real People.'' If the Bush slogan has a familiar sound to it, it's because a dozen years ago John Hancock ran an ad campaign called ''Real Life, Real Answers,'' which was followed by a Winston cigarette campaign called ''Real people, real taste.''
As a result, Bush may have crowded his one potentially enduring slogan - compassionate conservatism - with rhetorical emphemera and permitted the nation to sidestep a potentially important discussion about the nature of both compassion and conservatism.
Gore has swapped slogans as often as he has changed wardrobes. In the primaries, the refrain was ''I want to fight for you.'' In the general election he has turned to ''I'm for the people, not the powerful.'' But in recent weeks that has faded, replaced by a new slogan, ''Fighting for working families.''
The candidates are switching slogans in part because they haven't yet cemented their identities.
''In Bush's case, he hasn't been able to brand himself because he can't yet find a rationale for his candidacy,'' said Michael Sandel, a Harvard political scientist. ''This is a time of peace and prosperity, and his only argument is that he would provide leadership with a higher moral standard than Clinton. Gore's campaign has a rationale - keep things the way they are - but he lacks branding because he can't do what brands do: say that they have something new and improved.''
Indeed, some of the most compelling slogans in American political history have been two-word program descriptions, in almost every case (important exceptions were Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society) beginning with the word ''New.'' Thus American history can be explained in outline form by simply the phrases New Nationalism (Theodore Roosevelt), New Freedom (Woodrow Wilson), New Deal (Franklin Roosevelt), New Frontier (Kennedy), New Beginning (Reagan), and New Covenant (Bill Clinton).
The quick changes in persona and slogans undertaken by both candidates have failed to convince in large measure because they are so fleeting. One of the most compelling political slogans of the postwar period was one of the most unlikely, the New Nixon slogan that was so effective in 1968. Gore's efforts to project a New Gore isn't nearly as convincing because his image isn't nearly as fixed as Richard M. Nixon's was in the mid-1960s. The New Nixon came after 25 years of exposure to the Old Nixon, first on Capitol Hill, then in the vice presidency, then in a presidential campaign, and finally in a doomed gubernatorial campaign in California.
Critics of American elections have long cited the slogan (and its soulmate, the bumper sticker) as the symbol of one of the evils of the nation's politics, its tendency to favor the simplistic over the serious. Moreover, many American slogans have been neither honest (Harrison was no poor, cider-swigging frontier lad) nor original (Governor Alf Landon of Kansas spoke of a ''new frontier'' 24 years before Kennedy's campaign). In most cases, political slogans have had almost no ideological content. Slogans such as ''Give 'em hell, Harry'' (Truman, 1948), ''All the way with LBJ'' Johnson, 1964), and ''Nixon's the one'' (1968) are little more than grandstand cheers.
Slogans can have unexpected political side-effects, too. Hoover, realizing that ''rugged individualism'' seemed harsh at the time of great economic hardship, tried unsuccessfully to disclaim the phrase as the Depression deepened. The Republicans ran their 1936 campaign around the sunflower, the symbol of Kansas, the home of their nominee, Governor Landon. The Democrats countered with their quip, ''Sunflowers die in November.'' They were right; FDR beat Landon, taking all but Maine and Vermont. In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican nominee, chose a slogan intended to show his ideological purity: ''In your heart you know he's right.'' The Democrats countered with, ''In your guts you know he's nuts.'' Goldwater lost 44 states.
But all politicians, regardless of whether they have a compelling slogan, have one thing in common, particularly as Election Day approaches. They still believe in a place called Hope.
