Great observation from John Carroll:
Best line of the political-ad season so far: the Kerry Healey supporter who says in one spot, “She’s consistent, she’s articulate, and she tells it like it is.” This, about a candidate who has yet to say a word in her commercials.
We’ve been flooded with political ads lately, from everyone except Deval Patrick and Christy Mihos. Politically, the strangest to me have been Tom Reilly’s. After spending the first flurry of debates playing centrist to his opponent’s liberalism, he now seems to brandishing his anti-Bush and anti-corporate credentials in an effort to win some support of the base of primary voters. Perhaps others will see this differently, I can’t help but see this as a defense from a position of weakness. If he hadn’t been so cavalier about party activists a few months ago, maybe he could be spending his money more wisely now.
Politically, meanwhile, Gabrielli’s ads are smart, perhaps the savvyist of the lot, but they push a policy pet peeve of mine: the fetishization of New Ideas. Look, we all want to think that smart people are running the show, and we’d like to think that if there is some innovation to be found that would make government better and its positive effects more powerful, we’d find it. But what’s this business with “no such thing as Republican ideas or Democratic ideas, just ideas that work”? Policy battles - and political battles in general - happen because people have different ideas of what will work. Utilities regulation, school vouchers, the Bush doctrine, workfare reform… these sorts of things are half struggles between opposing interests (some people win out, some lose), but equally they’re struggle between universalizing ideas (e.g., the market solves problem X vs. regulation of the market solves problem X).
Take higher education, since that’s what Gabrielli’s ad touts. Why are college saving tax credits such a good idea? First, some, like Brad Delong and the TAPPED folks, have made the excellent point that while seemingly progresive such credits simply fund middle-class spending on college that would take place anyway. Second, if we’re concerned about making college affordable for working families, why not, you know, fund higher education itself? If there was political will, this state could make UMass free or virtually free for many qualifying students (say those with A or B average in high school). Not only has there not been the will to do that, but the tax credit route siphons away support from public universities toward private schools whose costs escalate more quickly. Gabrielli may sell credits as bold new idea, but to me they seem like a half-measure that accomplishes little appreciable, except a partial tax transfer between voters in order to win support among a given sector. That’s not bold, that’s either craven or misguided.
New is nice, but sometimes old ideas work fine.
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