Persona and the Modern Republican: Constituting and Deconstituting Republican Ideals in Two Republican Political Ads

Ronald Reagan’s iconic, 1984 advertisement, “Morning in America,” has served as an ideological pole star for Republican identity for the past four decades. More recently, the political action committee, The Lincoln Project, a group of ex-Republicans, produced a number of ads highly critical of President Donald Trump’s administration. One specific ad, “Mourning in America,” uses the form of the original 1984 ad to communicate a set of radically different ideas from the original. This article fuses Black’s second persona and Wander’s third persona to Charland’s idea of constitutive rhetoric to explore how “Morning in America” constitutes a Republican identity via a matrimonial symbolism that connects candidate to a gauzy, constructed community and imagined culture. We argue that the Lincoln Project’s “Mourning in America” deconstitutes the very ideals promulgated in the original ad through a stark funereal symbolism. The implications of this symbolism on the Republican identity are discussed in the conclusion.

Introducing P.A.C.

This chapter examines the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO’s) political action committee or P.A.C. in 1943, following the collapse of Labor’s Non-Partisan League and passage of a new law restricting union money in elections. This was a critical point in the CIO’s embrace of a “dynamic partisan” electoral strategy. Through interventions in primary elections and the targeted provision of general election support to sympathetic Democratic candidates, P.A.C. sought to reshape the Democratic Party along more pro-labor and liberal lines. As this chapter reveals, P.A.C. leaders hoped to elect supportive lawmakers in the 1944 and 1946 elections, seeking out candidates who were strongly committed to labor’s goals. Despite public pronouncements of nonpartisanship, however, they chose not to look for allies on both sides of the aisle, instead favoring liberal Democrats over liberal Republicans—hoping to impress Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal vision onto the Democratic Party as a whole.

Tax-Exempt Lobbying: Corporate Philanthropy as a Tool for Political Influence

We explore the role of charitable giving as a means of political influence. For philanthropic foundations associated with large US corporations, we present three different identification strategies that consistently point to the use of corporate social responsibility in ways that parallel the strategic use of political action committee (PAC) spending. Our estimates imply that 6.3 percent of corporate charitable giving may be politically motivated, an amount 2.5 times larger than annual PAC contributions and 35 percent of federal lobbying. Absent of disclosure requirements, charitable giving may be a form of corporate political influence undetected by voters and subsidized by taxpayers. (JEL D22, D64, D72, L31)