Election Ads: Giving Politics a Bad Name

In the United States, 'politics' is often used as an epithet. If a report about pork-barrel legislation, or congressional corruption, comes out, people shake their head knowingly - 'that's politics'. In many ways, this attitude is justified. Consider the strategies for the mid-term elections that each Party has taken. As various papers report, the Democrats have taken their familiar, and remarkably unsuccessful, Anybody But Bush message and developed it into a series of advertisements associating vulnerable Republican congressmen with the President. Even non-national elections, like the governor's race in California, have been swept up in the national anti-Bush strategy. In response, Republicans have distanced themselves from Bush, and even substituted an invented likeness with the more admired Senator John McCain.

With both sides playing such a starkly strategic game, it's no wonder that people have a negative view of politics. It's hard not to think politics is about mere power when politicians represent nothing more than personal ambition. What's more, the obviousness of the political strategies, on both sides of the aisle, communicates a profound contempt for citizens themselves. Neither party makes much of an effort to conceal the obvious power calculations behind the advertisements, which communicates to the viewer that he is seen not as a thinking citizen but merely as a political resource in the various attempts to be re-elected. If political parties took their voters seriously, they would attempt to convince them with ideas and arguments, not ply them with empty rhetoric and manipulative images.

The most corrosive aspect of this way of conducting politics, however, is not that it strips politics of its higher ideas, but that it also pushes people towards thinking politics could never have a higher purpose than mere re-election. Apathy, withdrawal and cynicism, though understandable reactions to real problems, do nothing to change the reality to which they respond. This is the predicament with which the current political constellation presents us. It is not easy to see how to refuse this choice, but at least one alternative suggests itself to us: political activity that is not sucked into the constant strategic calculations of the two-year election cycle, activity that insists on debating principles and ideas, not merely electorally successful 'common sense'. Politics, especially political leaders, should do more than reproduce the doubts and suspicions the public already has ('Bush is bad', 'the war isn't going well', 'Dems aren't Bush'). It should strive to elevate common sense into serious argument and debate.
A more effective critique is not to take politics as it is, but push to make politics what it could be.