Excerpts from an April 2008 post:
You can consider it a rule of thumb: over-reliance on a campaign consultant’s bag of tricks means the political office holders aren’t getting the job done. If politicians aren’t accomplishing enough, they then have to rely on expensive and shallow p.r. efforts to fool voters into giving them another term.
[…]
A recent news story reported this:
“With eight months to go before the U.S. presidential election, the candidates have raised almost $1 billion to fund their campaigns—more than the size of the economies of several African countries,” Reuters reports. “The unusually long race for the White House—which began in earnest more than a year ago—has been a cash bonanza, especially for Democrats who are breaking all records.”
Make no mistake: despite all the money spent, public opinion probably won’t be impacted to any meaningful degree.
After all the campaign spending records are set, very few Americans will understand that government taking more money out of the productive sector of the economy is not conducive to economic growth. And few voters will have a better grasp of how health care should be reformed or how hiring more federal bureaucrats hurts rather than helps.
[…]
Let’s carry this a step further. You don’t hire a mechanic unless you’ve got a mechanical problem. In politics, our leaders still haven’t figured out that what they have is a serious communications problem that will never be fixed by consultants who profit from its continuation.
