Analysis of work rhetoric and economic vision in selected television ads from the 1984 presidential campaign showed that the ads of both Mondale and Reagan appropriated traditional "work ethic" appeals in presenting the candidates' economic visions, although each candidate emphasized different aspects of the American Dream. Mondale's surprisingly strong union, blue collar vision was materially grounded in the idea of work and stressed entitlements, fairness, and class division. Mondale ads featured material gains such as houses and stressed the worker/drone distinction--the difference between honest work and skimming off the profits of others. His most compelling ad featured a roller coaster, depicting the dizzying effects of Reagan's economic policy on working Americans. However, Reagan's vision emphasized hope, opportunity, upward mobility, and unity, seeking to hegemonize by bringing all Americans under a single ideological voice in pursuit of Reagan's definition of the American Dream. Reagan ads included business and managerial classes in the American Dream by depicting a unity between small business and labor. Nothing was guaranteed in Reagan's ads; rather he offered a chance to earn one's own way. These ads also played to Americans' sense of individualism and upward mobility and stressed that Reagan was rebuilding a lost dream, not creating a new one. Though slickly made, Reagan's ads were much less concrete than Mondale's and projected an abstract vision. (SKC)