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Mon, 21 Jun 2004
Every morning I check my e-mail and read the headlines from the New York Times. And it seems lately like every day I read something that profoundly disturbs me. Today I read about how George Bush has spent $85 million dollars on discrediting John Kerry.
Now, I know that in comparison to, say, the amount spent on the Iraq war, 85 million is not that much. But in comparison to the annual budget of AS220, or my annual salary, it's a lot of money. So I came up with this idea: what if a candidate were to forgo spending any money on fancy television ads, and just put a small text announcement in the newspapers or online saying that they've decided to take that 85 million and spend it on education. I just consulted the calculator, and for that amount of money you could hire about 2000 teachers.
Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes also has an interesting viewpoint about campaign spending, and I think he's onto something. After all, with the national budget deficit where it is, don't we want a president who can spend money wisely?
John Kerry isn't any more miserly. He's spending $100 million on his campaign. I guess in an ideal world people would be able to do their own research and determine what candidate best fits their ideals. And candidates would have a presence in our mental space not because they spend millions on airtime, but because they are active and involved individuals (if you want to be on TV, why don't you do something newsworthy?). In this age of information proliferation, it's not that hard to find out what someone is up to.
I feel like I'm giving the American people too much credit. Sound bytes work really well as pacifiers for a lot of voters. All it takes for some is the reassurance that Bush is a religious man, and they'll ignore all the reasons why he's incompetent.
Unfortunately, the idea of voting for the least bad canditate just doesn't get me excited about politics. I was never into popularity contests in the first place.