Surely I am not the only one who thinks that the hundreds of millions of dollars being sunk into thirty-second television ads this year by both sides is a colossal waste of time, money, and effort?  The Bush campaign has spent (figuring that about 2/3’s of money spent goes for paid ads) about $100 million on television ads to date.  The Kerry campaign has spent a little less, probably $80 million or so, but this has been more than made up for by the additional $50 million or so spent by Democratic 527’s like MoveOn.org.  Plus, earlier this year and last year, I’d guess that the various defeated Democratic primary candidates spent another $50-$100 million on paid media.  So, in other words, a total of something like $250 million has been spent on paid ads in the Presidential race alone.  And, of that $250 million, did any of it make any sort of real difference?  Whenever I see a political ad (for anyone) I typically hit mute or change the channel: and I like politics. 
 
Frankly, I think that the television ads have become more of a pissing contest between competing factions that any actual bid to win votes.  They remind me of the signs posted on public property during any Canadian election.  Since individual candidates for Parliament in Canada don’t have enough money to advertise on television like candidates for Congress, the local “sign war” becomes an obsession of the various campaigns, with each side spending great sums of money and unbelievable amounts of time placing, maintaining, and safeguarding their signs.  Yet, to the best of my knowledge, not a single person has ever decided to vote for someone based upon a lawn sign.  It isn’t a productive effort: it’s merely something that everyone is expected to do.  A ritual of sorts.
 
Political ads, especially those in Presidential campaigns, have ossified into a boring mess of nonsensical accusations and claims that no serious person believes.  The only time an ad can get any real attention is when it’s so negative and extreme that it stands out from the crowd (the NAACP ad linking President Bush to the killers of James Byrd and Saxby Chambliss’ ad featuring a picture of Max Cleland along with Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden being notable examples). 
 
What seems to lay beneath the sort of simple, cookie-cutter ads that each Presidential campaign pushes through the door with startling regularity is a single shared premise: the people are too stupid to understand even slightly sophisticated arguments.  This has been one of the main problems with the PR side of the Iraq War: the Bush Administration deliberately choose to overemphasize the idea of Weapons of Mass Destruction because they figured that they were a point that the public could easily grasp.  In so doing, they essentially abandoned several of the better (and, in my opinion, more convincing) arguments in favor of the war. 
 
Sooner or later a major candidate for national office is going to try an alternative strategy.  We’re already seeing a little bit of that on the left, with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and the liberal Air America radio network.  But these aren’t really focused or well co-ordinated.  They’re outside efforts and, they’re ones mainly with an appeal to people who were going to vote for John Kerry anyways. 
 
Think about this for a moment: it’s been an age-old ritual that every Presidential candidate writes (or, rather “writes”) a book at campaign time that no one reads.  Why doesn’t a major Presidential campaign take $10 million or so and use it to hire a first-rate director and produce a campaign film for commercial release?  The film could be produced in the spring, released in the early summer (with plenty of advertising) and then given out for free on DVD in the fall. 
 
Another proposal: someday a Presidential campaign should examine British “party political” broadcasts as a model for extended paid television ads.  Design two and a half-minute television ads in which a serious pitch is made about a serious issue and buy up entire commercial breaks on various cable and local stations. 
 
Hell, if Presidential candidates can get various musicians to endorse them, why don’t they get them to write them campaign songs as well and then create “music videos” and run them as extended commercials?  Anything to break up the sameness of every single campaign.  I know that some people would protest that such carnival antics would take away from the discussion of “serious issues”, to which my response is as follows: ha!  Everyone knows that campaigns are not the time for the discussion of such matters.
 
The last few decades have poisoned the well of American politics.  The level of hatred felt by Democrats against President Bush long ago slipped the atmosphere of absurdity and soared into the stratosphere of insanity.  Don’t get me wrong: I have little doubt that most Republicans would feel the same way about a President Kerry from the first day he enters into office.  Because of this politics have become too much about shouting and not enough about talking.
 
This sickness has infected the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party, largely because events of recent years have left Democrats with a feeling of being under siege.  The monotone sameness with which virtually the whole Democratic Party speaks is, to say the least, a frightening thing.  It smacks of a sort of voluntary totalitarian rule of mental conformity.  It’s as if the Democrats have all become Stepford politicians, programmed to spit out talking points on command. 
 
Conservative Republicans (such as myself) are often frustrated that the efforts of our party are impeded by our own internal disagreements and the way they tend to be manifested in public.  To that I say: well, at least we can still have such discussions.  The Democratic Party has reached a state of ideological uniformity which has troubling implications for the future of democratic government.  Gradually, over a period of years, all offending thoughts have been purged from the mainstream of the party, leaving behind a hard-core whose unity has hardened into a sort of strange fanaticism.
 
Look at the Sandy Berger case.  By his own admission, the former National Security Advisor removed (and his in his jacket, pants, and socks) handwritten notes containing ultra-classified information.  He admits to have committed this act, a probably criminal offense, knowingly.  He also (“inadvertently” he claims) grabbed several drafts of the same thirty-page classified report and then (“accidentally” according to his lawyer) discarded them.  Yet Democrats still doggedly defend the man with every weapon at their disposal, just as they defended Bill Clinton when he took Red Chinese money for his re-election, and just as they’d defend some future Democratic President whose hobby was sodomizing little boys in the Oval Office (“It’s all just about sex!”). 
 
The only way I see out of this quagmire is for some candidates to try another tack.  Instead of quick attack ads, let’s use extended ads to pitch real arguments.  Instead of trafficking in paranoia and dull talking points, let’s talk some sense.  Let’s put the nation first and make politics exciting again.