Texas Would Like Your Commercial Break

Some pro-Paxton advertising is running nationally because Texas airtime is crowded, CBS reports.

This is an excellent development for Americans who turned on a football game without realizing that they also needed to participate emotionally in someone else’s Senate race.

You might live nowhere near Texas. You might have made no request for information about its political candidates. Nevertheless, the commercial break has found you, and it would like to discuss a man you cannot select on your own ballot.

If you do live in Texas, you at least have the consolation of being qualified for the job the advertisement is assigning. The rest of the audience is receiving an unpaid internship in regional anxiety.

Imagine a job applicant running out of interview appointments and deciding that your family wedding now qualifies as a recruitment event. Nobody at the reception is hiring. You will nevertheless hear why the other applicant is dangerous before anyone cuts the cake.

Campaigns have every reason to buy space where they believe it will help. Political advertising is not an exotic intrusion into American television. But the sheer industrial effort devoted to selling candidates deserves occasional inspection as a product in its own right.

A public office is supposed to involve doing a job. The marketing can become so large that the job starts looking like a complimentary accessory included with the ad purchase.

I would like at least one commercial in this imaginary national festival to spend its precious seconds explaining a useful thing the candidate intends to accomplish. Not the terrifying nature of the other candidate’s existence. A task. A plan. Something that could plausibly fit between arriving in Washington and recording the next advertisement.

No amount of airtime guarantees a victory. It can, however, guarantee that a person in another state learns a candidate’s name while trying to find out whether the replay shows a catch.

The receiver got one foot down. Texas would like thirty seconds to explain why the other foot is a radical.

Source: CBS Texas, October 25.