This Ad Paid For By the Committee to Elect Morons

Political ads are back once again to remind us just how painful watching live broadcast TV is. 

At the Emmys this year, there were a number of jokes about the death of broadcast television. Is there any way that someone could pull the plug before the mid-term elections?

On Sunday, I was tricked into watching live television on my actual TV. OK, I wasn't technically tricked, but the Philadelphia Eagles were on so I didn't want to just watch NFL RedZone, and I was doing other things so I leaving the channel on during commercial breaks.

By happenstance, my sons were in the living room even though neither of them likes football. but something on screen did catch their eyes and it wasn't Carson Wentz.

They noticed that there were back-to-back political ads where fist the Democrat accused the incumbent Republican of being "too Washington," and then the Republican accused the Democrat of being "too Washington" for having worked for a lobbying firm.

Their reaction was that the dueling ads seemed stupid. I casually agreed that it is, in fact, stupid. Why do they do it then, they asked.

I found myself explaining that from a marketing perspective, you hope that if you just bombard people with the same message -- "I'm good, my opponent is bad" -- that when the time comes for a "buying" decision, that's the main thing that a consumer will remember. Changing the words to "voting" and "voter" just makes it more compressed and emphatic. And, both sides have to do it because, asinine as it might seem, it's been proven that the strategy will work if only one side employs it. Further, it can still work if one side does it significantly better than the other (looking at you, Democrats). 



I only briefly explained that the whole "too Washington" part is moronic because if you're going to serve in Congress and you don't know how to navigate the federal political system then you're going to be wholly ineffective. Don't want to become "too Washington"? Run for state office then.

The only saving grace is that it wasn't one of the recent trends in political ads, which seems more prevalent with Senate campaigns, where they basically say, "Don't vote for him/her... he/she's a Democrat and sides with Democrats on issues!" and then the other party does the same thing in reverse. Thanks for letting us know that Democrats behave like Democrats and Republicans behave like Republicans, geniuses. I hate "preaching to the choir" strategies.

Since if one side does it that means the other has to follow suit, I told my kids, then the rest of us are made to suffer while watching broadcast (and some basic cable) TV or listening to the radio for two months before any election. It happens every single time even though political ads are universally despised by everyone except the individual candidate, their family, and the poor souls working on that campaign.

Really, though, what it made me think of is that were I running Netflix, I would totally be encouraging every politician in the country to run as many ads as possible. If there's ever been a stronger argument for abandoning broadcast TV than the threat of having to listen to one politician who sucks, tell us why another politician, who also sucks, sucks worse than they do... well, I've not heard it.