It would be so much easier if election laws specified a new tag line at the end of every candidate's campaign ad: a one-line summation of what, exactly, the candidate's overall goal, plan, and aim was all about.
I think you'll admit the current format doesn't help much, where the candidate is heard saying, "I'm M. T. Poseur, [or Ecoli Ebola-Zika, or whoever] and I approved this message."
This gets into trickier ground, though, of course. Who is to say what, exactly, any candidate really, truly stands for -- what he or she really hopes to accomplish? It triggers the whole who-watches-the-watchers Orwellian nightmare.
Still, I cannot help but be struck by how much more helpful it would be to have some human activity or artifice which would help us cut through all the smoke, fog, and baloney, and get down to cases.
Imagine how refreshing it might be to run across a campaign ad which ends with:
"I'm Carly Fiorina, and I'm desperate to make you stop thinking what a psychotic liar I am, and how I ran Hewlett-Packard into the side of a mountain because of my ignorance and ego!"
I mean, short of putting Sodium Pentothal into the air and water for all Americans, including all candidates and their campaign and advertising advisors, we're left with a do-it-yourself, onesy-twosy operation where each voter goes to the time and trouble of fact-checking each and every candidate's campaign statements, voting records, investments, stump speeches, debates, and so on.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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