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EMIL
FRANZI |
What we've learned from presidential nominating season
March 12, 2008
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This is
a great election cycle so far,
because it’s destroying so many
myths.
That God is on the side of the biggest checkbook is no longer applicable. Thank you, Mike Huckabee, thank you, John McCain. Both proved how little you really need and how much is squandered on stuff not worth any votes. Rudy Giuliani spent $60 million, mostly on arrogant consultants who never told him to quit taking phone calls from his wife in the middle of a speech. While a basic cadre of paid folks is necessary in any campaign, too many look like the bloated governments they fail to control after they’re elected. America is over-managed. So are political campaigns. McCain did better when he was broke than when he was fat. More money is sucked up by television ads being seen by less people. The millions spent on electronic advertising are about as effective as most shells fired in World War One were at hitting anything that matters. The most effective television ads were the ones the media discussed and played for free, like Huckabee’s supposed background cross and Hillary’s 3 a.m. phone call. The Iinternet is taking up some of the slack from declining TV viewers, radio listeners and newspaper penetration. Direct mail gets proportionately more expensive and less useful, while more of those overpriced consultants put graphics ahead of the content they compromised over. Robocalls have replaced live phoners because most of those consultants don’t know how to use them any more. States that went for early primaries mistaking precedent for principle found out that doesn’t makes you more relevant after all. Candidates banking on all those new voters that never came out before, as Kinky Friedman predicted about Obama in Texas, end up losing like Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Kinky himself. Pollsters need to admit they can’t tell who’s lying. As Mike Royko noted years ago, when a perfect stranger calls you in Chicago at 8 p.m. and asks who you’re voting for next Tuesday, you always pick the machine candidate because you don’t want a brick through your window at 3 a.m. Media bias is obvious. So is media laziness. Worst of all is media cluelessness. It’s one thing to con some local reporter just out of J-School, but the network gang and the Beltway bunch are even bigger marks. Their genuine knowledge about what they’re reporting is abysmal, and they don’t ask tough questions because they don’t know how. Fortunately, most voters have noticed. Media credibility is even lower than some of the candidates. Democrats have evolved this convoluted “method” of picking a nominee via a classic example of “pathological egalitarianism.” This from the people who want to dump the Electoral College? In their usual pandering to minorities, they’ve designed a system that not only makes the Electoral College seem rational, but downright democratic by comparison. At least with the electoral college you can tell who’s winning. The incoherency chosen by Democrats to govern themselves also gives a clue about how they’d govern the rest of us. Finally, the “System is Broken” mantra carried to its logical extreme in a recent column by that pompous blowhard, the Rev. Andrew Greeley. He is just so put out by the long campaign, the nasty ads, the failure of the media to act responsibly, that he’d tear up the First and some other amendments to enforce cogency and niceness. Bad mouth an incumbent and go to jail! Talk too early or too much and suffer the consequences! Those claiming America is headed towards fascism can start with this twit. Unfortunately, there are plenty more. America’s just fine. Our system still works better than most. It’s chaotic, fickle, unpredictable and sometimes even contradictory. That’s called freedom. We need to keep the thugs and their intellectual allies from taking it down.
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BUT WATCH WHAT YOU SAY! |
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