Does political advertising compromise democracy?
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I believe there actually is a sort of conspiracy afoot among people inside the Beltway, political consultants. It’s very clear that the American electorate has been disaffected by years and years and years of this attack advertising and the state of coarseness and obnoxiousness of political discourse as exemplified by TV commercials. It’s very, very clear that fewer and fewer people show up for elections, and they constantly explicitly cite the tenor of the debate. Well, if you’re a political consultant and your business is to mobilize the masses of people you can depend on — for example, the religious right — and you want to maximize their influence, how do you maximize their influence? By simultaneously mobilizing your people and diminishing the overall electorate to give your mobilized forces a disproportionate influence on the outcome of the campaign. I believe that part of the strategy of the Republican revolution in the off-year election in ‘9
