Far from costing taxpayers an estimated $300 million, CHML’s Scott Thompson wants to know if a Canadian federal election will amount to a stimulous package by the time you factor in all the negative ad campaign spending on television. There may be truth to that just counting what seems to be a bottomless “Harper Government” war chest. The Harpies have been running that “He didn’t come back for you” spots so many months already it seems as if Ignatieff came back and went several times already.
They’ve also been on long enough to parody:
All these elections every two years have to be great news for TV networks who rake in big bucks from all the campaign advertising. It’s not exactly great news for viewers who have to stomach the hockey fight that passes for political discourse these days. As Rex Murphy said Thursday night on The National, the federal party leaders have become “as familiar to us as the Jersey Shore crowd”–and about as impressive.
TV, or course, can unmake a politician, a point John Doyle made in Wednesday’s Globe and Mail. Doyle feels the Tea Party is over for Sarah Palin, no longer the Republican 2012 presidential frontrunner according to recent polls. Doyle thinks Palin blew it because her conservative fan base got to see she wasn’t so much the aw-shucks presidential candidate-next-door as a woman of privilege who take her kids camping in rock star sized tour buses and uses fancy choppers to go fishing.
Maybe Mark Burnett snuffed out her torch with Sarah Palin`s Alaska. I’m not sure that forgettable travelogue did as much damage as her daughter’s cheesy overstay on Dancing with the Stars or Palin’s own recent Charlie Sheen-level drive-by media mis-steps.
In any case, politicians who live by the sword of television die by the sword of television, as we’re likely to witness over the coming weeks.
None of this occurred to me when I was live on the radio talking to Scott. Don’t believe me? You can listen in here.
