Every two years, and much moreso every four years, we're bombarded with a ridiculous number of political advertisements, particularly in swing states. And everyone gets so sick of those advertisements that unless they're pointing out something extremely dramatic and revelatory (whether it's true or not), most folks I know tend to just ignore them.
Anyway, during the off-season, we still get plenty of ads like "Pot smokers support terrorism!" and "Golly, our new healthcare program is super nice!". Why no good old-fashioned issue ads from our side?
More below the fold...
Here's the thing. The reason we lost this race, I think, is that we allowed the George W. Bush fantasy view of the world to slowly set in and fester over the course of the last four years. Yes, we started advertising heavily on issues as the election drew near, but there was a heck of a lot of time in there where we had nothing on the air, and all the while our near-worthless national news media was parroting Republican talking points without any sort of credibility assessment.
All through that time, we could have been buying the occasional TV spot that pointed out the inconsistencies, the misrepresentations, the lies coming from this Administration. But we didn't. We just let the news media do its thing. And now we're going to pay for it.
Now, I know this sort of thing costs money. But the fact of the matter is, the vast majority of the hundreds of millions of dollars we've spent over the last year or so didn't work. And frankly, I think the simple act of seeing that there's opposition to some crazy Republican idea while it's going on -- as opposed to during the election season when everyone expects to hear each side criticized over everything -- is the sort of thing that could really help to plant the seeds of doubt into the minds of the 50% of the country that somehow believes Bush is credible.
Because the Republicans don't win just by airing ads and making statements full of lies and bile.
They win by airing ads and making statements full of lies and bile to people whose perceptions they have groomed carefully over a period of many years.
And that is what we need to do. We need to slowly convince the population of this country that when they hear a democrat telling them that Bush was wrong on Iraq, it's not coming from the point of view of someone whose real agenda is raising your taxes, confiscating your hunting rifle and bible, and forcing you to watch this year's gay pride parade while serving as bridesmaid to a lesbian threesome who are all getting married to a horse!
Campaigning is not our problem. We ran a great campaign! Our problem is that the issues and ideas of that campaign were dismissed by those who have already been "gotten to" by the other guys, and who simply aren't going to be convinced, no matter how good the campaign.