Daisy, sometimes known as Daisy Girl or Peace Little Girl, is an infamous campaign television advertisement. Though aired only once (by the campaign), during a September 7, 1964, telecast of David and Bathsheba on The NBC Monday Movie, it was a factor in Lyndon B. Johnson's defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election and an important turning point in political and advertising history. Its creator was Tony Schwartz of Doyle Dane Bernbach. It remains one of the most controversial political advertisements ever made. The advertisement begins with a little girl standing in a meadow with chirping birds, picking the petals of a daisy while counting each petal slowly. (Because she does not know her numbers perfectly, she repeats some and says others in the wrong order, all of which adds to her childish appeal.) When she reaches "9", an ominous-sounding male voice is then heard counting down a missile launch, and as the girl's eyes turn toward something she sees in the sky, the camera zooms in until her pupil fills the screen, blacking it out. When the countdown reaches zero, the blackness is replaced by the flash and mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion. As the firestorm rages, a voiceover from Johnson states, "These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." Another voiceover (sportscaster Chris Schenkel) then says, "Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home." As soon as the ad aired, Johnson's campaign was widely criticized for using the prospect of nuclear war, as well as the implication that Goldwater would start one, to frighten voters. The ad was immediately pulled, but the point was made, appearing on the nightly news and on conversation programs in its entirety. Johnson's line "We must either love each other, or we must die" echoes W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939" in which line 88 reads "We must love one another or die". The words "children" and "the dark" also occur in Auden's poem. "These are the stakes" was also used at the end of advertisements for the Republicans in the United States general elections, 2006, advertisements claiming that the Democrats would be soft on terrorism and expose the country to danger and featured Al Qaeda members and a threat of a nuclear bomb. In 1984, Walter Mondale's presidential campaign used ads with a similar theme to the Daisy ad. Mondale's advertisements cut between footage of children and footage of ballistic missiles and nuclear explosions, over a soundtrack of the song "Teach Your Children" by Crosby Stills Nash and Young.
