Campaign Ads

I was pleasantly with the election results last night. It would have been nice if it had happened two years ago, but better late than never. The best thing about the elections being over is that I won’t have to see any more political ads for about a year.

I have an idea in regards to fixing political ads. Everyone hates them. 9/10 ads are viciously negative and misleading which turns everyone off of the whole political process. We always have to choose between the better of two evils because each candidate repeatedly tries one up the other in showing how evil their opponent is.

While I’d like to see negative prohibited, I don’t know how realistic that is. If your opponent really is a douchebag you should be able to point that out. You should also be able to talk about his record even though he may see that as a negative attack. You should not however be allowed distort things he may have said or done in an effort to make him look like more of a douchebag than he is.

I remember in the last presidential campaign they wanted to paint Kerry as a chronic tax increaser and said that he had voted to increase taxes some 280+ times (Yes I pulled that number out of my ass. I think it’s reasonably accurate but not worth the time to look up. First person to try to correct me and tell me they only said 267 times gets a kick in the balls). Where was I? Right 280 tax increases. That number was technically correct, but incredibly misleading. He had been in the Senate for 18 years and they counted every single line that related to an increase in taxes as voting to increase taxes. If there was a bill to legalize online poker and it among the many lines of pork that got attached to it was a line that instituted a $0.01 tax on all purchases of private jets, that was counted as a vote to increase taxes. It wasn’t. It was a vote to legalize online poker which happened to contain a tax related item. The point is he that while technically he may have voted to increase taxes that many times, he wasn’t specifically trying to raise taxes as the ad implied. I would bet that anyone else who had been in the senate as long as him would have a similarly high count. Both sides do it. I’m not trying to say that only Republican’s do, it’s just the first example I thought of.

My point is that kind of advertising should be stopped. Its destroying the country’s desire to participate in the democratic process.

Here’s my solution. Every ad has to be run by some auditing body such as factcheck.org. They would then rate the ad for accuracy and the ad would have to include a disclaimer. Similar to the “My name is John Doe politician and I approve this message” this would say: “The preceding ad has been rated as 34% accurate by FactCheck.org” or “The following ad has been given 4/10 stars for honesty by CrazyPoliticalClaimAuditors Inc”.

If they had to admit how full of crap their ads were, maybe they’d be less likely to sling mud and more likely to talk about themselves and their plans. If you talk about what you plan to do in the future, you can’t get bad honesty ratings because there’s no way to refute your claims. So not only do we get to stop listening to the vicious verbal assaults, but we might actually get to find out what candidates actually stand for. These rules would also apply to the various party commissions, and PACs that purchase ads on behalf of candidates.

So there’s my idea. Now someone else go do the work and get it implemented. Just make sure you call it the new law the “ZeRat11 guideline for accuracy incampaign advertising” Or something.

Originally posted at blog.pokerwords.com