1996 Presidential Campaign

Political campaigns are highly complex and sophisticated communication events: communication of issues, images, social reality, and persons. They are essential exercises in the creation, re-creation, and transmission of significant symbols through human communication. As voters and others involved with the campaigns attempt to make sense of the political environment, political bits of communication inform voting choices, world views, and legislative desires.

The essays in this book examine the key elements in that process throughout the 1996 presidential campaign. Each focuses on a specific area of political campaign communication: the communication functions and activities across the campaign phases from nomination conventions through the debates, political advertising, the discussion and framing of issues, images of the candidates and their wives, the role and impact of network and local news, political cartoons, and the digital/on-line arena. This text will appeal to students and scholars alike as well as to concerned citizens involved with presidential politics and political campaigns.

A thorough examination of the 1996 presidential campaign as a communication event.

Booknews

Eleven articles examine such aspects of the 1996 campaign as the low public interest level, the conventions, the debates, the advertising, cartoons, digital democracy, parallels in the rhetorical constraints of First Ladies and Vice Presidents, political coalitions, and the electoral college and popular vote. They focus on politics as an aspect of communication and on the presidential election as a type of national conversation, thus interpreting the low public involvement as a failure to communicate. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

ROBERT E. DENTON, JR., holds the W. Thomas Rice Chair of Leadership Studies and serves as Director of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets Center for Leader Development at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.