Campaign Finance Reform

The elections are over and we may now begin to assess the good and the bad of the election cycle.  One sure thing is that there will be an inevitable clamor for Campaign Finance Reform legislation as a result of the vast sums of money spent during this campaign season.

We won't know for a while, if ever, exactly how much was spent and by whom.  It's certainly to be in the millions, probably in the hundreds of millions.  Many point to these vast expenditures as a huge waste, money spent for TV and other advertising air time serving no useful purpose.  Of course, the advertising agencies that created the ads, the actors and other talent that appeared in the ads, and the TV stations that ran the ads all reaped a benefit through increased sales or income.  These are obvious, but extremely limited, benefits

Other than the fact that we as TV viewers have been harassed and harangued for months by these incessant advertisements and the dirty mud-slinging inherent in much of them, what is wrong with them?  To my mind, there is a fundamental and critical fault in television political advertising: it is highly prejudicial. 

Madison Avenue marketing techniques have been let loose on the electorate through the medium of television and it is virtually impossible to obtain reliable, credible, and independent information about issues and candidates through this medium.  Just as a product line (e.g., soap, foodstuffs, automobiles, etc.) can be made to look like the best, the brightest, the most efficient, the most tasty, and the most desirable, so too can a political candidate or campaign issue be painted as the best and brightest--or the exact opposite.  Slick advertising can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.

If there were a way to draft campaign finance reform legislation that would pass muster with the U.S. Supreme Court (at least as currently constituted), I would make it illegal to run political advertisements of any kind on television.  Exceptions would only be made for independent and unbiased organizations (the League of Women Voters comes to mind as a good example) to run information advertisements on candidates or issues.

Radio advertisements would be acceptable, as would print advertisements.  But no TV commercials.  It would return us to a time of political campaigning when everyone got their information and made up their mind by reading about the candidate and his/her positions on issues, or hearing the candidates speak directly in an assembly or town hall meeting.

Removing television advertising from the mix of political advertising would help stem the increasingly expensive price tag associated with running for political office, help eliminate the distortion from political advertising, and begin to move us back to a time when we looked at the issues and not how well groomed the candidate appears.