Night-Time Must-Read: Ezra Klein: I Don’t Quite Understand the Model of Politics in Which There Is Assumed to Be a Huge Scarcity of Lines to Use in Attack Ads…

Ezra Klein: Comment on Paul Krugman’s “Who’s Savvy Now?”: “I don’t quite understand the model of politics underlying the backlash-to-the-backlash over the CBO report.

The theory is that though the GOP’s initial spin on the report was wrong it’s meta-right because the lies will be used to power effective attack ads in the fall–and in politics, what’s true, and what voters can be tricked into believing is true, are two equally valid categories for inquiry. You see this model of politics… particularly during elections… wall-to-wall coverage of gaffes not because anyone believes the gaffe was important, but because they believe it might end up in attack ads. Beneath that model of politics lies an assumption that an important scarcity in politics is ‘lines that can be used in attack ads’, and so every time one party or the other finds one of those lines, it’s a big deal. This seems to me to wildly underestimate the creativity of the people who make attack ads….

The parties often don’t have enough money to air the attacks ads they want to air. They often lack candidates with the credibility to make the attack ads stick. They’re often lack the economic conditions that predispose the electorate to listen to them. They’re typically chasing voters who lack any interest in watching another nasty political commercial. There are plenty of real scarcities in American politics that could really change elections if one party or the other solved them. But “things to say in an attack ad” just isn’t one of those scarcities.