Campaign 2000: Campaign Ad Nauseam

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Growing up in Michigan, I did not exactly feel as if I were at the white-hot center of the media universe. The big Oscar movies opened on the coasts long before they hit the multiplex. New Hampshire had the sexy primary. No one set sitcoms in Detroit. (Well, there was that Martin Lawrence show, but we don't like to talk about that.)

Turns out I packed up and moved to New York City too soon. In its final days, this year's presidential campaign finally got good--which is to say it got bad. In battleground states like Michigan and Florida, with presidential and local contests tight as pre-washed jeans, campaigns and interest groups flooded radio and TV with ads and filled voters' answering machines with celebrity-voiced automated phone calls. And the best part was that they went negative, big time.

Let me explain. Elections are not feel-good exercises in which people "finish less than first." People lose elections, and negative ads serve the positive purpose of clearly arguing which candidate should. As this magazine's TV critic, I always like to see a new generation pay homage to the classics; for instance, that pro-Bush group's "remake" of Daisy, the 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson ad that targeted Barry Goldwater as a dangerous extremist. Both ads cut from a little girl picking petals off a daisy to footage of a nuclear explosion. The new version accused Clinton and Gore of making America vulnerable to nuclear attack from "communist red China" (reminding voters under 45 what "red" means). A new pro-Gore ad assailed Bush's policies in Texas, but its real message was the visuals--a clueless-looking Bush standing at a microphone--and the tag line, "Is he ready to lead America?"

In state races, the eleventh-hour attacks got even wilder. The fur flew in Georgia as an animal-rights group slammed Representative Bob Barr for opposing legislation to ban fetish videos in which women crush animals with their heels, coining a classic of American political discourse: "Bob, animal crushing is not common sense."

And that's just a taste. All told, air time for campaign 2000 TV ads may have cost $1 billion. And as TV repeated the same presidential, single-issue, House, Senate and ballot-proposal ads hour after hour, it became nearly impossible to receive vital information on which fast-food chain has the Backstreet Boys promotion. Some pitch-drunk voters say this is a bad thing. I say this: Anyone who whines about being deluged with political ads is a crybaby who does not deserve to live in the greatest country on earth. Complaining about having a disproportionate voice in choosing the leader of the world's only superpower? Being feared and courted? Cry me a river, pal. You'll get your hemorrhoid-cream commercials back on Hollywood Squares soon enough. (Those automated phone calls, though, are indeed tools of the devil--but we'll get to that later.)

That said, living in a swing state became exhausting in the last days of the campaign. Just ask Dave Shand, 45, of Saline, Mich., who was constantly pestered by pollsters, like the one he told he was a registered voter planning to go Republican. Shand is a left-leaning Canadian citizen. "You know that 3%-to-4% margin of error?" he says. "That's me."