The $1 Billion Election Reform Dare for Dems: Cancel Your Paid Media
Submitted by willow on Mon, 2007-08-20 16:34.
I was thrilled to get through as a caller on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" today with Matt Bai, writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.
Matt cautions that it's time for the Democrats, who won the majority largely on a platform of, 'we're not them,' to "define where it stands, and to come up with an argument."
Absolutely. Yet the most critical point I thought Matt made on today's "Talk" was that Dems' modeling campaign strategies after winning conservatives and focusing on tactics comes at the cost of discussing, debating and challenging orthodoxy.
Our election campaign system needs wholesale reform. The unprecedented era of digital connection means that change at the ideological and tactical levels can occur efficiently and effectively.
So back in February when I saw that the 2008 U.S. presidential race will be a $1 billion election, "the most expensive election in American history," I devised this 7 Point U.S. Presidential Election Campaign Reform Plan. Naive and hopeful as it may seem, it's intended as a conversation-starter, as one alternative to irresponsibly, systematically burning through such a heinous amount of cash.
The Problem:
The U.S. political marketing machine resists campaign reform (publicly) on the grounds that it limits freedom of speech. Elections are huge business. Privately, politicos are disincented to risk their paycheck on a better way.
The second problem: voters' experience. We are already fatigued by a campaign that's started two years out from the election. We are cynical and mistrusting of political rhetoric. Especially of political advertising. We are overloaded, and find it challenging to be adequately educated about the candidates in the age of blogging, YouTube and the 24-hour news cycle.
What about a less is more approach?
What if each citizen knew that they could do just three to five things to be informed? For instance:
- Watch 2 to 3 nationally televised town hall meetings among all candidates (available online following the live event)
- Read their local newspaper, say, every Wednesday when each candidate would respond in-depth to one key issue facing the country (also archived and available online);
- Watch video clips produced around each Wednesday's focus issue on television or the web; and
- Visit the web sites/blogs of each candidate between traditional media events for interim updates and information to satiate the more is more crowd.
One Solution:
The Dems should make a gutsy move to win back voter trust and optimism: they should voluntarily quit participating in paid media events, and change the rules of the election game forever.
How could Conservatives carry on the way they always have? Wouldn't they have little choice but to meet the Dems on the high road they've pioneered with their...
7 Point U.S. Presidential Election Campaign Reform Dare for Dems
- Talk real, more naturally. Act like a human, not a politician.
- Self-regulate campaigning across all their candidates. Announce this immediately.
- Slash all planned paid political advertising for each candidate (which few citizens believe nor learn anything valuable from anyway).
- Commit to communicating less: let citizens know that they need only pay attention to just 3 to 5 media events (see above) to do their civic duty.
- Enlist the help of traditional and citizen journalists to reinforce who is running and which media events citizens should not miss.
- Invite constituents to follow their candidates on the campaign trail as often as they like -- and interact with the candidates -- via each candidate's socially souped-up web site, as is being done supremely well now by Barack Obama.
- Divert saved dollars to the winning candidate to address a substantive, real problem, post-election. A problem people can respect.
Dems, don't just talk progressive. Be progressive. And find your argument.
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technoratiAnother Look, Redux
Submitted by willow on Fri, 2007-09-07 13:53.
Steve- Thanks for your comment, and for making several additional intriguing points. Your questions, paraphrased, are addressed below:
SD: Self regulate: self-regulate what, exactly? That there will be no negative ads?
WL: That there will be no paid ads. Period. It's time to change the political-(paid) media industrial complex. If both political parties were mandated to tie their media buying hands behind their proverbial backs, they could find alternative means to voluntarily level the awareness-building playing field. The commercial sector is proof. The liquor industry had a 50-year voluntary ban on broadcast advertising until 1996. The premise: advertising contributed to alcohol consumption and abuse. This July, 11 of the nation's largest food and drink companies -- Cadbury Schweppes, Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Hershey, Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Mars, McDonald's, PepsiCo and Unilever -- promised to curb advertising to children 11-and-under. A regulatory defensive move? Likely, since the Federal Trade Commission announced in April that it would subpoena 44 food and beverage marketers for detailed information on how they market to children.
SD: Negative ads work. Especially when they expose the truth about a candidate's lack of judgment, character or leadership.
WL: The horse and carriage worked, too. Negative advertising isn't our only option. There are "high roads" to be taken in exposing truths. Why not form a bipartisan ethics panel that has final say on holding candidates accountable for their campaign (mis)statements. Any candidate deemed to be lying would face consequences: say, disqualification from the race. Earned and social media are free to report on the findings throughout.
SD: We need candidates to answer questions both on and off line, in front of cameras and in front of keyboards. We need to know how they react under pressure.
WL: Precisely. Paid media accomplishes none of this. Earned and user-generated media can. Through debates, and planned (then archived online) media coverage around a specific issue that compares one candidate's position to another's. Through user-generated video captured on a mobile phone at a political rally, uploaded to YouTube.
SD: Divert saved dollars to the winner so they can launch a major program: if I'm a donor, I don't want to support some other guy's program.
WL: Hence, the 7 Point Plan calls for rewriting most of the rules, as donors, citizens, media and politicians have come to accept them. Expectations for donors would change along with voluntary reforms. Donor's prerogative to draw, or fold.
SD: Where's the beef: each candidate should be required to answer the same 99 questions as selected by popular vote AND a panel of pundits. And there should be case study questions.
WL: I love this. An exercise like this should help candidates and citizens alike get beyond the rhetoric. It's exactly the kind of taste-off our political parties should have the courage to initiate.
election reform
Submitted by bucko (not verified) on Wed, 2007-09-26 22:43.
once you start hhe election reform bandwagon going...
other countries have a limited time frame for elections... the election date gets called six weeks before the election in england. we can do this here too, with the political will.
other countries will also limit political ads and appearances in the 2-3 days before the election. this is sound as well... less is more.
lastly, if increased turnout is actually a goal (not for Republicans, historically, unless with selective disenfranchisement, like Ohio in '04 and FLA in '00), we should not have election day but election weekend.
dave
Another look (another opinion, too)
Submitted by SH Denny (not verified) on Wed, 2007-08-22 14:44.
Willow:
The Dems should clearly make a move to win some – any – trust from the voters. To put things in perspective, if you think George W isn’t doing well, his approval ratings dwarf the Dem controlled congress. The best way they can do this is to stand for something. Thus far, they’ve failed to do this. No one elects an angry candidate and the Dems seem solely focused on running against the incumbent president, who is someone I can say with certainty is not running in the up-coming election.
To your points:
Talk real, more naturally: apparently, our current crop of candidates has decided that slapstick is the only way to achieve breakthrough and are turning towards being “funny” as their platform of choice. Not the best way to win hearts and minds when you’re running for a fundamentally serious job.
Self regulate: self-regulate what, exactly? That there will be no negative ads? Negative ads work. Especially when they expose the truth about a candidate’s lack of judgment, character or leadership. Knowing that John Kerry got a purple heart for an injury that required a band aid (literally) took a lot of the gloss off of a fake war record. Good to know.
Slash paid advertising: you know, this is more about awareness than changing minds. Let’s look at another great every-four-year event, the Olympics. The top 11 sponsors paid a total of $886 million in ad spending for Turin plus Beijing. I’d argue that being elected the leader of the free world is more important than selling Big Macs. Few of the candidates will be spending what Toyota spends on supporting its Camry mid-sized car. Communicating less probably isn’t what is needed: we need them to communicate more. They need to answer questions both on and off line, in front of cameras and in front of keyboards. We need to know how they react under pressure. This is an important job.
Enlist citizen journalists: I think they already have, for better or worse. You can’t pick which ones will like you and you can’t stop them from hating you.
Invite constituents to join them on the road: they can if they like, and probably do already.
Divert saved dollars to the winner so they can launch a major program: if I’m a donor, I don’t want to support some other guy’s program. If I want to support a program, unfortunately I can’t. Dennis Miller recently discussed the idea of launching a War Bond, where citizens could buy bonds to be used exclusively to fund the war on terror; unfortunately, it isn’t possible to do this kind of thing.
=================
Here’s a few absolutely impossible wishes for campaign reform that I’d put on my list:
Experienced candidates only: each must have been the governor of a state (political P&L management), served in congress for more than two terms (political survivability and knowledge of the process), and served as an ambassador (foreign policy). This is not a job for a rookie. You aspire to this kind of job. You don’t start here. Understand that your competition in most of the world got to where they are because they killed a lot of their enemies.
Each voter must explain why they are voting for their candidate: this stops the nicest looking fellow from being elected. If you can’t say why you think John Edwards would be a good president of the US, you can’t vote for him. And things like, “but he played sax on SNL” won’t cut it.
Where’s the beef: each candidate should be required to answer the same 99 questions as selected by popular vote AND a panel of pundits. And there should be case study questions. Hey, quick: Putin decides he’s got enough political capital to march into Czechoslovakia – what do you do in the first 24 hours, 1 week, 1 month, and 6 months? Have members of the military, foreign service and private sector judge the answers over a period of hours. No sound bytes. Those candidates who don’t make the cut are eliminated from the election. Just vote them off the island. Kick them out of the presidential cash cab. On the spot.
I could go on, but it would chew up the rest of my day.
Not that this isn’t fun, though.
Regards.
80%+ Money Candidates Raise Will Be Wasted on TV Ads in 2008
About $2 billion -- representing approximately 80 to 90 percent of money candidates raise -- will be spent on television ads during the 2008 election cycle. In his recent essay "Assault on Advertising" for Fast Company Tim Manners makes the point that this is a "colossal waste of money."
The money quotes from Tim's article, in my opinion: