Socialized Politician Commercials

[brandondrury]

I read recently that we are one of the only western countries that doesn't provide for X TV slots for each political candidate. (I think it was in Gore Vidal's "Prepetual War For Perpetual Peace"...awesome little read!....even if I don't agree with everything he says.)

All this bullshit merchandise and advertising costs millions. Because of it, Mr. Needs-To-Impress-Daddy-Regardless-of-His-Low-IQ (how I see political candidates) has no problem making favors for the big donators. He can bend his idealogies a bit if it gets him elected so he can push his other good views (Yeah right!).

I'm not entirely convinced that socialized commercials are the way to go, but I wanted to discuss it. I hate everything with socialism in the title. I dont even like being social. But let's discuss this.

My Idear
What if every main candidate for congress, senate, governor, and president was alloted X slots on their local TV station. We'd have to pay the TV stations and that would be the usual socialist nightmare (that's another story), but there would be a huge benefit.

1) Enron contributions are no longer a factor...or at least less of a factor. We won't have to worry about an asshole donating $2 million to a candidate so he can get away with robbing 50,000 people of their pensions (we should have tarred and feathered Jeff Shilling on national TV. Maybe we could have gotten the guillotine out) in a scam that generated enormous cash.

2) The little guy has a fighting chance. If I decided I had had enough and was going to make a difference, without funding from somone rich I'd have a 2% chance. I could boost that to 5% if I had the public speaking skills of Hitler or Jesus.

3) Another possibility would be to ban political commercials. The only people who like them are the people who get elected and the TV stations getting paid.

The thing that set this off, which was mentioned in another thread, was Ron Paul mentioning the gold standard in one of his rants on the floor of congress. Afterwards, another congressman came up to him and asked "We aren't on the gold standard anymore?".

It seems to me that the problems with the US stem from poor leadership that, in many ways, represents the serf system of medieval times. If more little guys who weren't lawyers or Senator's sons, but could actually think (not something overly common in lawyers, Senator's sons, or anyone implied by John Foggerty in "Fortunate Son") could raise some hell in congress, I could see our policy changing dramatically in a short period of time.

Brandon