The Next Hurrah

Whither Political Advertising?

By DHinMI

In a recent article for the New Yorker, media writer Ken Auletta examined the increased difficulty of cutting through the advertising clutter, and how the advertising industry is changing its approaches and their business models in reaction to these challenges.  These changes are obviously important for economic reasons--1 trillion dollars is spent worldwide annually on advertising, half of it in the U.S.  But the changes are also important for us politicos to consider, especially those who kvetched about how much money went to the firms of Joe Trippi and Bob Schrum.  What Auletta describes is an advertising industry that will continue to move away from advertising and into marketing, leaving behind the business model still used by political consultants, and making it more difficult and more expensive than ever to reach prospective voters and educate them about candidates and public policy.

Nothing is more crucial to a major election campaign than the television advertising.  Sure, the candidate has to be good, she has to raise enough money to be competitive (mostly to pay for television), the underlying demographics and issue dynamics have to combine to create a competitive political environment, and the other components of the campaign--press, field, scheduling, etc--must be effective.  But in a statewide or national campaign, it's usually the effectiveness of the television ads and the number of times the ads are seen by the target demographics that have the greatest effect on the final results.  A standard assumption among campaign professionals is that in a close race a strong field effort can take you from 47% to 50%, but without television you'll never get to 47%.  Television advertising usually accounts for at least 60% of any campaign budget, and voter contact (including other forms of advertising and message delivery such as direct mail) should ideally make up 80% or more of a campaign budget. 

On some blogs people have been calling for a new way of paying consultants to--depending on the person's perspective--redirect resources into other areas of voter contact, to keep money out of the pockets of supposedly undeserving consultants, or just to save the campaign money.  One of the favorite solutions offered up is fee-based payments, which is in fact gaining support in corporate advertising.  An ad executive Auletta focuses on addresses one obvious problem with looking to hourly-fees as the panacea: “I sometimes worry that clients are paying us for the hours we spend working on projects rather than the worth of the ideas.”  But there are plenty of other problems specific to political campaigns that don't have corollaries in commercial advertising. 

Notes on the Nuclear Option -- Part IX

by Kagro X

It is the assumption of most nuclear option proponents that the filibuster, as practiced by Democrats against Republican judicial nominees, is unconstitutional. It's an argument that ignores the past use by these same proponents of other counter-majoritarian procedural maneuvers that have had the same result -- i.e., the blocking of an up-or-down vote that they claim is constitutionally mandated.

But while there are certainly tit-for-tat issues that need addressing, how sound is their constitutional argument?

New Mexico children are left behind

by Plutonium Page

In September 2004, the Committee for Education and the Workforce reported that the $27 billion the Bush administration had promised to New Mexico for the "No Child Left Behind" program had not materialized.

The effects of this negligence are starting to show:

New Mexico student performance on fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math tests is well below the national average, according to a new educational Web site launched Tuesday.

The site also shows New Mexico has a higher percentage of low-income, special education and limited English-proficient students than most states, highlighting the hurdles public schools face in trying to meet federal No Child Left Behind requirements.

Seventeen percent of the state's fourth-graders who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress test in 2003 scored proficient in math, according to SchoolMatters.com, produced by Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services. That compares to the national figure of 31 percent.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as "the Nation's Report Card," is given annually to about 20,000 selected schools and 1.2 million students nationwide. The schools and students are chosen to provide a representative sample of the state as a whole.

(bold emphasis mine)

More below the fold.

Lakoff Inverted, Revisited

by Kagro X

In yesterday's discussion of Lakoff Inverted, Crab Nebula made the valuable observation that Lakoff did not in fact suggest, as I wrote, that "the Republicans had successfully built their base by providing the image of themselves -- i.e., 'framed' themselves -- as 'the strict father' party." Rather, "they activated the strict archetype, which is dominant in conservatives."

And while the point I was making yesterday didn't really rely on the hows and whys of the strict/nuturing dichotomy, I only extracted half of the benefit of Crab Nebula's correction. In fact, his response raises a new question framed by paraphrasing yet another popular political title, that is, What's the Matter with Everybody?

Bird Flu Takes Another Step Towards Disaster

by DemFromCT

North Korea, the country that cna't feed its people may lose all its poultry. It isn't just Effect Measure, the public health blog, that's following this. It''s the UN. Via Reuters:

A top United Nations bird flu expert has flown to North Korea to help assess and contain outbreaks of the disease among poultry in the secretive state, the Food and Agriculture Organization said on Wednesday. Hans Wagner, a senior FAO official based in Bangkok who has played a prominent role in Asia's battle against the deadly H5N1 virus, flew to Pyongyang on Tuesday, a day after North Korea told the agency of outbreaks without saying which strain caused them.

As Effect Measure reports:

The context is grim. A great deal of money, effort and hope was invested in poultry production by the North Korean government. Struggling to feed its undernourished population of 23 million, a special state agency was established for breeding chickens and ducks in December of 2001 (UPI via World Peace Herald). While poultry was one of the few growing sectors of the economy, the country produced only about 25 million birds in 2004, just over one per person/year, far short of Kim Jong Il's promised one kilogram of chicken meat and 60 eggs a month for every household in Pyongyang. The number of chickens estimated in North Korea is about 19 million. Now mass culling is reducing this already inadequate source of protein.

Pyongyang's public admission of the previously denied bird flu outbreak is seen by many as a sure sign the problem has spiraled out of control and foreign help is needed. The epidemic has probably already hit the poor rural area and is spreading. North Korea has mobilized its military to cull and disinfect poultry farms around Pyongyang, according to the South Korean Unification Ministry:

Lakoff Inverted

by Kagro X

I'm indebted to the diarist InnerParty at Daily Kos today for pointing me to the NYT op-ed by former Senator Bill Bradley, entitled "A Party Inverted." Bradley takes on the lingering confusion among Democrats (is it still lingering, or just still hep to say it is?) about the future direction and vision for the party. He provides a brief backgrounder on the roots of the conservative movement -- i.e., the 1971 Powell "Attack Memo" -- and reminds us that the movement has succeeded where we have failed, that is, in building an apparatus that sustains an ideology rather than ad hoc campaigns that sustain (barely) individual candidates.

He's right, of course. And he knows that we've "probably heard some of this before." And he does an admirable job of pointing out the weaknesses of our "system," and generally what we ought to do about it. But there's something else we need to address.

Remember The Social Security Debate?

by DemFromCT

There was a time, oh, perhaps a week or two ago, that Social Security was actually being discussed in the national press. Sure, there wasn't much positive happing for the President, but at least the news was out there. well, since other things have been happening (especially in Florida), the number of repetitive stories has dropped to a trickle. Still, there are some good ones out there.

There's Charles Grassley adding to the president's headaches by asserting there's likely no bill without the AARP:

No organization has more tools or more money to wage such a battle. So both its friends and adversaries agree: AARP holds the key to how or whether Social Security will be restructured this year. "It will be very difficult to do anything without AARP's support," said Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "And it would be a heck of a lot easier if they came along."    

AARP's 35 million membership base is 10 times the size of the National Rifle Association's, and its $800 million budget is five times that of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country's biggest business association. In number of members, AARP is surpassed only by the Roman Catholic Church.

Some polls show that a majority of voters reject Bush's plan to make investment accounts part of the retirement program, a result that can be attributed in part to AARP's persuasiveness. "We're behind the curve right now," said Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.), a Bush ally and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee's Social Security subcommittee. "The momentum is with the other team."

There's Bloomberg News pointing out that the numbers don't add up for Bush:

Thirty-nine of 58 economists and strategists surveyed by Bloomberg News say that if the economy slows that much, Bush's stock outlook is too optimistic. Over the last 50 years, as the U.S. economy grew 3.4 percent a year on average, almost twice as much as the agency is forecasting, the Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index returned only 6.8 percent after dividends were reinvested.         

``A 6.5 percent real equity return is not realistic'' at the growth rates being projected, says Thomas McManus, chief investment strategist in New York at Banc of America Securities LLC. ``If it were, we will not have a Social Security problem in 2050 because shareholders will be so wealthy they could easily fund the shortfall.''   

Gloom-and-Doomers Say There's Hope

By Meteor Blades

I've always been an optimist. Even while Lyndon Johnson was sending 50,000 more troops every few months, even as Ronald Reagan began dismantling the social safety net, even as Newt Gingrich pushed his Contract on America, even on the night that it became obvious Dubyanocchio would get a second term, I didn't lose all hope. No matter how easy it might be to sink into its waiting embrace, despair is debilitating. So I don't give up hope and I don't give up fighting, even though, I must concede, defeats have outnumbered victories for "my side" over the past 25 years.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is today releasing a 219-page report which says that future generations - our children, their children and their children - face broad-scale environmental crises that could jeopardize their survival. But the 1,360 scientists who put the study together remain, like me, hopeful.

According to Knight Ridder:

What makes this study ... different from other reports is that it's based on evidence that's generally agreed upon by the consensus of scientists, rather than facts of the "he-said, she-said" variety, said study executive director Walt Reid, an ecologist.

Anybody who has even given a cursory reading to environmental matters over the past few years will not encounter any fresh shocks in the assessment. Its primary value is as a consensus of the hundreds of scientists who have agglomerated many environmental snapshots into the big eco-picture.

CIA "torture jet" flight logs: a case for rendition?

Remember the case of Mahar Arar?  A disturbing story in the New Yorker about "extraordinary rendition" told his tale of being "placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."  He was sent to Syria, where he was beaten and tortured.  He was finally released, and was never charged with any crime, except being on a US terrorist watch list. "Rendition" is the practice of outsourcing torture, where terrorism suspects are sent to countries where torture is legal... because, of course, torture isn't legal in the United States.

A lawsuit against the United States has been filed on Arar's behalf.

And now, his case has been significantly strengthened. Look below the fold to see why.

The Office: Believe the Hype

By DHinMI

Maybe you've seen the advertisements for NBC's new sitcom The Office and thought "yeah, yeah, they get critics to rave about every new show."  Well, in this case, the critics' raves seem justified.  They just did a scene where the white middle manager, in the middle of corporate-imposed diversity training, does the Chris Rock routine about the war in America between black people and niggaz in front of his staff, and I laughed so hard I almost wet myself. 

I'm afraid that such a deadpan show with (the other kind of) black humor is unlikely to last on network TV, so you might want to catch this show while it's still on.