redblueamerica.com

The tightening of the Democratic race has brought, in recent days, allegations of subliminal dirty tricks in campaign advertising.

About 11 seconds into the Hillary Clinton spot above -- the infamous "3 a.m." advertisement challenging Barack Obama's qualifications -- a child is seen sleeping in alphabet pajamas. Ann Althouse publicized questions raised by a commenter:

On pausing, staring, and thinking, I believe these are pajamas that say "good night" all over them, but the letters "NIG" are set apart by a fold in the fabric. ... Is the campaign responsible for sending out a subliminal message to stimulate racist thoughts in the unsuspecting viewer? It is either deliberate or terribly incompetent.

Bloggers have raised questions about a more recent Clinton advertisement, saying it appears that an image of Obama, taken from a debate, appears to have been darkened to make his skin appear more black:

I went and got the original footage from the Clinton ad, and then compared it to 3 different video clips of the same debate from 3 different sources. I did this so as to take into account any editing, or quality issues, that might have accounted for Obama having darker skin in any particular video. None of the 3 video sources I found showed Obama nearly as black as the Hillary ad does. Click the image above to see a larger version. Look at his lips. Look at his eyebrows. Look at how the red MSNBC background has turned more purple. Clearly the image was darkened. The question is "why."

Voters with slightly longer memories also remember the "RATS" incident in a 2000 ad targeting Al Gore. CNN explains:

A political stir erupted Tuesday when it was discovered that if the ad was slowed down, the word "RATS" appeared clearly while an announcer criticized Gore's prescription drug plan as one in which "Bureaucrats Decide."

Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee, told reporters on Tuesday that he believed the appearance of "RATS" in the RNC ad was accidental.

But Gore, the Democratic nominee, said he was "disappointed" by the ad.

In every case, campaigns and their surrogates deny any malicious intent. But the ads raise the question: Does subliminal advertising work?

Probably not.

Snopes.com tells the tale of James Vicary, who claimed to improve popcorn sales at a theater by using subliminal advertising in movie images:

When he was challenged to repeat the test by the president of the Psychological Corporation, Dr. Henry Link, Vicary's duplication of his original experiment produced no significant increase in popcorn or Coca-Cola sales. Eventually Vicary confessed that he had falsified the data from his first experiments, and some critics have since expressed doubts that he actually conducted his infamous Ft. Lee experiment at all. As usual, the media (and thereby the public) paid attention only to the sensational original story, and the scant coverage given to Vicary's later confession was ignored or quickly forgotten.

The old "subliminal advertising" controversy was stirred up again by Dr. Key's book, leading to the 24 January 1974 announcement by the FCC that subliminal techniques, "whether effective or not," were "contrary to the public interest," and that any station employing them risked losing its broadcast license. For neither the first nor the last time, a great deal of time and money and effort was expended on "protecting" the public from something that posed no danger to them. As numerous studies over the last few decades have demonstrated, subliminal advertising doesn't work; in fact, it never worked, and the whole premise was based on a lie from the very beginning. James Vicary's legacy was to ensure that a great many people will never be convinced otherwise, however.

So: Subliminal political advertising influences voters through their subconscious. Truth or not?