Monique Corzilius Luiz, the "daisy girl" from the iconic 1964 political ad for former President Lyndon B. Johnson's re-election campaign, has reemerged — to support Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Or perhaps more accurately, she's opposing Republican candidate Donald Trump.
"The fear of nuclear war that we had as children — I never thought our children would ever have to deal with that again, and to see that coming forward in this election is really scary," Luiz says in a minute-long ad featured on the Democratic presidential nominee's Twitter. "Vote for Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8th. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."
The ad features footage from an August episode of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" in which host Joe Scarborough said Trump, in a meeting with "a foreign policy expert on an international level," thrice asked why he couldn't take a smoke-'em-if-you-got-'em approach to nuclear weaponry.
According to Scarborough, Trump "asked, at one point, 'If we have them, why can't we use them?'"
In the original 1964 ad, Luiz — then 3 years old — counts as she plucks petals from a daisy she's holding. When no petals are left, a non-diegetic voice counts down from 10 to zero as the camera zooms closer and closer in on her eye. At zero, a mushroom cloud materializes in the blacked-out frame of her pupil.
"These are the stakes," Johnson says in a voice-over. "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."
Democrat Johnson pummeled his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, in the presidential election that year, winning 44 states and 61.1 percent of the popular vote.
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