Opinion

Campaigns worth the cost

There’s a lot of anger about SuperPACs pouring more money into campaigns, with even President Obama embracing them. This is unfair — because, as they say, politics isn’t bean bag. Bean bags cost a dollar or so apiece; politics is way more expensive.

It’s not as if politicians are buying votes — if they were, campaigns would be much cheaper. No, they have the much tougher task of getting people to want to drag themselves to the polls and vote for some mediocre politician.

It’s not as if campaigns can be cheap, with just a pamphlet explaining all the facts about each candidate, which everyone would read to weigh the pros and cons of each candidate.

That might work for robots having an election. But with people, we always end up with two groups. One is the die-hard partisans, who decided how to vote decades ago; the other (the one all elections focus on) is the more malleable group between the partisans: the undecideds.

Undecided voters don’t really like reading about news or politics; they prefer shows like “Dancing with the Stars” and “Hoarders.” And they’ve somehow gone all these years watching Obama be president without forming a solid opinion of him. You may think they’re lazy, but that’s not fair. Try to not have an opinion about Obama. It’s hard.

But it’s basically up to these low-information voters to pick our next president. So how do we get them informed enough to make that choice? We can’t just give them a dry sheet of facts — they won’t read it. The most they’d do is draw mustaches on the pictures of the candidates, which doesn’t really get us anywhere.

That’s why we need political ads, which reduce all that long, boring nonsense into simple statements like, “Obama wants to raise taxes.” In case that itself isn’t clear, there is ominous background music so the undecideds understand that’s a bad thing.

Conveniently, these ads play during the undecideds’ normal TV shows.

Of course, the other side will respond with, “The Republican wants dirty air” or something similar and turn a picture of the candidate to black and white and zoom in on his face, which is somehow scary. And so it becomes an increasingly expensive competition of who can have the most ads scaring the undecideds away from electing the other guy.

It’s a bit like when two people try to call a dog to them at the same time, except in this scenario they’re using firecrackers and other loud noises to scare the dog from going to the other side. It seems cruel — and under the barrage of negative ads, many undecideds do end up whimpering in a corner — but no one said democracy is pretty.

Now, I can see why some people think that having politicians and SuperPACs spend the gross national product of a small country to terrorize uninformed people into going to the polls may seem like a bad way to pick a leader, but this system has lasted us 200-plus years so far. The way the cost of campaigns is increasing faster than inflation, it will probably last us another good 20 to 30 years more.

Consider: If we took all the money out of campaigns, there’d be nothing to motivate the low-information voters to go to the polls. Then elections would be decided by the people who by their own volition read about politics all year long. And we don’t want those people picking our leaders; they’re weirdos.

Fr
ank J. Fleming is a political satirist.