These days we are all being bombarded by political advertising, almost all of it useless.
Picking at random, just this second, I received in my messages: “It’s Nikki Haley: [Is it really?] Before you exit this, Roger, please take 30 seconds to read this important message. stop=end”
I love the “stop=end.” I’ve tried but to no avail.
The “important message” in this case was the “journey” (that modern cliché—are we supposed to pity her for this?) that Ms. Haley “has been on” and why she’s “running for president.”
The candidate’s answer to the latter, you will be astonished to hear, is, “I was frustrated when I saw how hard it was to make a dollar and how easy it was for the government to take it away.”
For this observation and her insistence, in italics, that she will “Do something about it” we are, of course, asked to contribute through WinRed.
Politicians, running or not, almost never communicate with us without asking us to pay up.
Does it ever enter their minds that this might be a turn-off, that it’s often, in fact, contraindicated?
Another common rip-off is the “information poll.” They want to know what your most important issues are—the border, taxes, and so forth. But when you click on the poll, you find it’s just another solicitation. (One wonders whether anyone actually reads the poll. Maybe an intern.)
I would love to know who writes these things—if it’s the candidates themselves, heaven help us.
Years ago, director Paul Mazursky and I wrote a screenplay (like many, never filmed) about a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who is forced to make a living writing fortune cookies.
This is worse.
We are inundated by something we might call computer pollution, tantamount to brain litter and more threatening to our actual welfare than mythological “climate change.”
Actually, I suspect I know who does the writing here.
A whole industry is behind this that has more influence, in most cases, on our politics and the future of our country going forward than most candidates.
This is the political strategist industry that governs most campaigns. These strategists determine all advertising from internet to television as well as the candidate’s “message.”
It’s a very risk-averse business, intent on preserving its own power, and likely to choose the most conventional approach, reaching out to the public in the most simplistic, lowest-common-denominator fashion. They follow the principle of more is more, as should be obvious to all of us.
Motivating their risk-averse, conventional approach is that this has been for some time an extraordinarily lucrative business, fraught, I have been told, with kickbacks.
The strategist has his or her favorite advertising firms and so forth. They wash each other’s hands, get as much as they can on both ends, and move on to the next campaign. It doesn’t matter who or what they represent.
When you wonder why American political campaigns at practically all levels cost so much, more every year with no end in sight, look to the political strategists. They have inflated them and continue to do so.
This is why I have written elsewhere that candidates such as former President Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, who finance at least some of their own campaigns, are freer to say what they think.
They aren’t quite as trapped in what amounts to a PAC mega-donors to political strategists network.
Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t stop them from littering our inboxes as well.
As I was writing this, the following came in post-Haley:
“Roger – this President Donald J. Trump ... I’m asking my most loyal supporters for a small favor. Can I count on you to sign my official petition DENOUNCING Joe Biden’s corrupt weaponizing of the government? Sign your name here ...”
I clicked on the link and naturally found a solicitation with the opportunity to donate from $35 to $2,500.
I didn’t, though I support, and have supported, President Trump for a long time.
Enough already.
Can you imagine how it is for the citizens of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina now?
Every television ad must be some simple-minded political blather when it’s not for Ozempic.
Their heads must be spinning—and ours soon enough.
We have to find a way out of this, but it will be far from easy.
Government-sponsored political campaigns are dangerous, the road to totalitarianism.
Maybe there is some way to put the brakes on the political strategy business.
