from my point of view (which is one i rarely take up), the worst thing about "post-citizens united political ecology" is that it makes bad television. you get the same idiotic hatchet-jobs, the same mindless formulas, a thousand thousand times. thepost-citizensunitedpoliticalecology is just boring.
i sort of can't believe these things have any effect: after all the focus-grouping etc, for one thing, they approach their audience in an extremely insulting manner, as mindless robots who think whatever you want them to think if you just repeat yourself enough. i'm sort of tempted to say that if an ad by karl rove convinces you to believe or do anything, you deserve what happens to you after that. at most it should piss you off and make you think about voting the other way just to irritate the fuckheads who made the ad.
i would have thought that every american, having been barraged continuously by advertising since before they were born, has a nicely basically indifferent approach to advertising in general. i suppose political advertising of this 'we're-all-idiots-together' variety must demonstrably have some effect, magnified when elections are very close, in which moving 3% is decisive. at any rate, we could control this potentially by just being extremely cynical about the whole thing, which is really in some sense the only possible quasi-rational response. if the crap works, like i say, we're getting what we deserve.
either way, political advertising needs to get a lot funner, more entertaining, more creative: stop messing up my tv!
