Forty-five years after its publication, this account by Joe McGinnis of the TV advertising campaign to get Richard Nixon elected president is both quaint and startling. Quaint, because today all candidates use the image-building techniques detailed in these pages. Roger Ailes was proven entirely correct when he said that this was the way campaigns would be run "forevermore." But the book is also startling because of the candor from Nixon's team and the access they gave McGinnis. It is hard to imagine any of this material today escaping from the closed conference rooms of public relations or advertising firms. And what was true in 1968 seems even more true today: If the voters have become hypnotized by this kind of substance-free politics, it is because they want to be.
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