We pay the cost of campaign season

THE Viennese satirist Karl Krause once remarked that “the demagogue’s secret is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he really is.”

He wrote those words nearly 100 years ago and thousands of miles away, but the dyspeptic Krause would easily recognize the old-fashioned demagogic assumption that people are most easily conned in crowds as the force behind the tsunami of negative political advertising that will wash back and forth across this country until the polls close Tuesday night. Similarly, as the guy who could be credited with creating both media criticism and the blog -- he published a magazine consisting entirely of his own work -- he’d probably be struck by the interplay between those negative ads and a media increasingly divided over what political news should be.

If negative advertising disturbs you, in fact, you might want to stay away from the television this weekend. Over the next two days, the two political parties will spend tens of millions of dollars to air more than 600 new ads and, this late in the campaign, you can bet that nearly all of them will have something bad to say about somebody. Those spots will come on top of the 942,900 political ads that the Nielsen Monitor reports have run since Aug. 1. The Democratic and Republican National Committees already have paid to air 110,000 television ads, which is more than double the number they bought in the last midterm election.

Friday, Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group told the Washington Post that this weekend’s spending spree will push the two parties’ combined spending on broadcast advertising in this election cycle over $2 billion, which is $400 million more than they spent on the last presidential campaign.

ON top of that $2 billion-plus, you’ve got the so-called “527s,” groups named for the provision in the tax code that allows independent political expenditures for causes of various sorts. Some of these are funded by business or professional interests; many are financed almost entirely by wealthy individuals. Nearly all of their money goes to negative advertising.

For example, according to the Federal Election Commission, this year’s single biggest individual political contributor is Bob Perry, the 74-year-old Houston homebuilder, who gave the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth $4.5 million so that group could produce ads attacking Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. So far this year, Perry has donated $9.2 million to “independent” groups supporting Republican congressional candidates. (Democrat George Soros, who was the last presidential campaign’s biggest individual donor at $27 million, has contributed $4.1 million in this election.)

As Bloomberg.com reported this week, one of the groups Perry finances is the Sacramento-based Economic Freedom Fund, which gets almost its entire budget from Perry. Nearly $1 million of that has gone to buy ads attacking Jim Marshall and John Barrow, two Democratic congressmen in Georgia.

One of those ads goes like this: “In Washington, liberal Marshall votes repeatedly against limiting lawsuits that drive up health-care costs.”

You get the picture. In fact, something like it surely has been on your television screen dozens of times over the past few months.

This Sacramento-based group has spent nearly another million just this month to buy broadcast ads attacking Democratic senatorial candidates in Montana, New Jersey and Tennessee -- what a surprise -- and candidates for the House in Indiana, Illinois and Minnesota. Another Perry-funded group -- the Washington, D.C.-based Free Enterprise Fund -- has paid for ads assailing Democrat Ned Lamont, who is running against the now independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut.

According to the Federal Election Commission, so-called independent groups, like those funded by Perry and Soros, have spent $9.4 million on mainly negative campaign advertising over the past month, two-thirds of it on behalf of GOP candidates.

If you think people who don’t want to leave any fingerprints are playing hide the ball with your democracy, it’s not without some reason.

There’s nothing new about negative advertising. In these days of bitter partisan division in a country more or less split down the political middle, political strategists rely on negative ads to do three important things -- to depress turnout among the sort of pragmatic centrists who are disgusted by dirty campaigns, to energize the rabidly partisan faithful and to influence the casual voter who turns up to hit the touch screen on the basis of an impulse or impression. (They’re actually the people Krause had in mind when he described the demagogue’s audience.)

This also is where the interplay between negative advertising and the changing news media becomes a factor.

The bulk of that $2 billion-plus will be spent on television advertising and 95% of that will go to purchase air time on local stations. That isn’t just because, in a midterm election, politics are even more local than usual. Political strategists know that the vast majority of Americans who still follow the news -- and their number is dropping -- do so on local television. Most of these stations operate with minimal staffs under increasing budget pressures with few, if any, full-time political journalists.

So they in turn get their take on political news from newspapers, cable news and, increasingly, online sources. That’s significant because, as in so many other areas, these three lines of information increasingly diverge -- not just in tone, but increasingly over what relevant political news is.

For example, if you’ve been following this past week’s election news in your daily newspaper, you got a fairly standard recap of last-minute campaigning and late polling -- to the extent that ever-diminishing news budgets permit such things. If you were relying on the Web, your notion of the pressing issue would vary depending on whether your predilection runs to left- or right-wing sites. On the latter, there was no other issue except Kerry’s botched attempt at stupid humor that ended up insulting men and women in the military serving in Iraq. On the left, it was all obscure congressional Republican corruption all the time --except for all the gloating over Ann Coulter’s allegedly impending prosecution for violating Florida election laws.

MEANWHILE, over on cable news, the ascendance of Krause’s classic demagogues continues apace, as the three networks’ overall audience declines. Thus, cable news watchers got either the right-wing rants of Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, the left-wing rants of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann or the neo-populist ravings of CNN’s Lou Dobbs.

Every credible measure of public opinion says that the issue that will matter most to people next Tuesday is the war in Iraq. What conclusions can thoughtfully concerned voters draw about it or anything else from a news media lost in discord for utterly self-interested reasons and two parties that seem to hope Americans vote with their spleens rather than their heads or hearts?

And if you think this is bad, wait until 2008, when the real money goes on the table and all bets are off.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com