I spoke with my parents today, who have been travelling around Florida for the past couple of weeks. They have seen no political ads on television or heard any on the radio. TV is not much of a surprise; they’ve been staying with and visiting friends who have DirecTV, so they wouldn’t have been seeing any local commercials anyway. The only signs they’ve seen have been for Romney and Ron Paul and politics has apparently not figured prominently on peoples’ minds, at least as far as the people they’ve been interacting with have gone. This seems amazing to me, since my parents and their peers with whom they would have been interacting are all demographically high-propensity voters who should be directly targeted by any intelligent campaign, and they’ve been in areas with dense enough populations (the Palm Beach area, the I-4 corridor, and now up in the Panhandle) that those areas should all be in saturation coverage only one week before an election.
All the campaigns seem to be broke right now. Haven’t the four biggest campaigns raised something like a hundred million dollars each? And media buys in Florida? One week before the primary there? Where did all the money go?
Then again, with retail politics like this, I can’t imagine how going wholesale would be an improvement. Willard… dude. You’re a sixtysomething white boy from Massachusetts, and you’ve got no business complimenting an African-American teenager in Daytona Beach about his “bling bling.” If you don’t know when to use one “bling” or two, you aren’t going to be able to keep it real in the first place. You won’t know that a Baha Men reference is so eight years ago. Just be yourself instead, people will at least respect you more.
