# Morning in America "It's morning again in America." With that line, read in an unhurried voice over film of people heading to work at dawn, a family moving into a house and a wedding, [[Ronald Reagan]]'s 1984 campaign made the most admired positive ad in American politics. Its official title is "Prouder, Stronger, Better." It attacks no one by name. It was also, underneath the warmth, a comparative ad: its last line asks why anyone would want to go back. ## The ad For about a minute nothing happens except ordinary life. People go to work. A family moves in. A couple gets married. The narrator recites a short list of numbers, all of them about four years: interest rates about half what they were, inflation less than half, thousands of families buying homes and couples marrying that day. Then the turn. Under Reagan, the voice says, the country is prouder and stronger and better, and it closes by asking why anyone would want to return to where the country was less than four short years ago. The viewer is left to supply the names [[Jimmy Carter]] and [[Walter Mondale]], who had been Carter's vice president. It was filmed in Petaluma, California. ## Who made it and who paid The Reagan campaign did not hire a political firm. It assembled its own agency, called the **Tuesday Team**, from Madison Avenue advertising people who normally sold consumer products. Its members included Hal Riney, Phil Dusenberry and Jerry Della Femina; Sig Rogich, who went on to make ads for George H.W. Bush in 1988, was a co-director. Riney wrote the spot and read it himself. His voice was already familiar to viewers from commercials for cars and insurance, which was part of the effect: it sounded like an ad for something people already trusted. By one member's account, Reagan greeted the team by saying he understood they were the ones selling the soap, and that he thought they might like to see the bar. The Museum of the Moving Image dates the ad to September 17, 1984, and notes that the "Morning in America" series ran heavily much earlier that year, while Reagan was unopposed for the nomination, to set the tone before a Democratic opponent existed. ## What happened next Reagan won 49 states. No one attributes a landslide of that size to a commercial, and the economy the ad described was real: inflation and interest rates had fallen sharply from their 1980 peaks. What the ad did was give the recovery an image and a sentence. The sentence has been in use ever since. - In 2016 two Republican presidential candidates borrowed it, and one of them opened his version with footage that turned out to be Vancouver. - In 2020 the [[Lincoln Project]] inverted it as "Mourning in America," an attack on the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic that borrowed the original's structure and tone. ## Why it's on the map - **It is the positive ad that works as an attack.** Nothing negative is said, and the opponent is never named, yet the whole argument is a comparison with the previous administration. Campaigns have tried to reproduce that balance ever since. - **It sold a feeling, with consumer-advertising craft.** The Tuesday Team's method was to treat the presidency as a brand with an emotional promise. Politics had used ad agencies before; this campaign is the best-known example of the approach. - **The feeling was the past.** The ad's pictures are small towns, front porches and church weddings, a country that looks like a decade or two earlier. It is an early, gentle statement of the theme the wiki tracks under [[Nostalgia]], and the distance from "morning again in America" to "Make America Great Again," a slogan Reagan's 1980 campaign also used, is short. See [[MAGA]]. - **It is the foil.** Almost every other ad in this collection works through fear or grievance. This one is here partly so the contrast is visible. ## Connections - [[Ronald Reagan]] · [[Walter Mondale]] · [[Jimmy Carter]] - [[1984 Presidential Election]] - [[Nostalgia]] · [[MAGA]] - [[Lincoln Project]] — maker of the 2020 inversion - [[Dukakis Tank Ad]] — the next Republican campaign's ad team, four years later - [[Political Ads Hub]] · [[Daisy Ad]]