PHILADELPHIA — Senator Barack Obama is days away from breaking the advertising spending record set by President Bush in the general election four years ago, having unleashed an advertising campaign of a scale and complexity unrivaled in the television era.
With advertisements running repeatedly day and night, on local stations and on the major broadcast networks, on niche cable networks and even on video games and his own dedicated satellite channels, Mr. Obama is now outadvertising Senator John McCain nationwide by a ratio of at least four to one, according to CMAG, a service that monitors political advertising. That difference is even larger in several closely contested states.
[From Obama’s Ad Effort Swamps McCain and Nears Record - NYTimes.com]
Politicians are a lot like generals, always fighting the last war. True, this election is a must-win-at-any-cost for Democrats (and for the American people), but Obama's legacy of nuclear-grade spending, like Bush's radioactive depleted-uranium dust in Iraq, will be around to haunt us for a long, long time. So will his refusal to accept public financing put an end to the halcyon hallucination of reformers who dreamt of campaigns uncorrupted by cash. The ante for the next one has been irrevocably upped.
2 comments:
The following is inaccurate - "Bush's radioactive depleted-uranium dust in Iraq" - the writer obviously does not know much about depleted uranium. Here is comprehensive scientific report of all of the international research in the Balkans, Kuwait and Iraq to date.
http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/showRecord.php?RecordId=26677
From the document cited above:
"Depleted uranium (DU), the main by-product of uranium enrichment, is a chemically and radiologically toxic heavy metal. It is mildly radioactive, with about 60% of the activity of natural uranium."
So maybe "mildly radioactive" is like "a little bit pregnant," ya think?
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