The numbers just don’t add up.
- $130,000: The annual salary for the Louisiana governor;
- 48,014: The number of broadcast TV ads for the four major candidates for governor through Nov. 16, 2015;
- 24,007: The number of minutes of TV ads we were subjected to through Nov. 16 (at an average length of 30 seconds per ad);
- 400: The total number of hours of TV ads for governor through Nov. 16;
- 16.67: The number of days it would have taken you to watch every single ad through Nov. 16;
- $17,333,920: The total cost of the 48,014 TV ads for the four major gubernatorial candidates (No wonder that Baton Rouge TV station fired the reporter who dared ask Vitter about his prostitution scandal; the station stood to lose lucrative ad revenue from the Vitter camp);
- 13,654: The number ads purchased directly by David Vitter’s campaign (6,827 minutes, 113.8 hours, 4.7 full days of ads;
- $3,816,660: Total cost of TV ads purchased by Vitter’s campaign;
- 6,771: Number of ads purchased by Fund for Louisiana’s Future on behalf of Vitter (and make no mistake, while super PACs are prohibited from planning strategy or even consulting with a candidate, they can trash opponents freely and FLF trashed everyone but Vitter—3,385 minutes, 56 hours, 2.4 days);
- $3,185,640: The cost of TV ads purchased by FLF through Nov. 16;
- 9,259: Number of ads purchased by John Bel Edwards campaign (4,629 minutes, 77 hours, 3.2 days)
- $2,675,600: Cost of TV ads purchased by John Bel Edwards;
- 2,315: Number of TV ads purchased by Gumbo PAC on behalf of Edwards (1,157 minutes, 19.3 hours, .8 days)
- $1,204,010: Cost of TV ads purchased by Gumbo PAC, the bulk of which was purchased after the Oct. 24 open primary;
- 4,679: Number of TV ads purchased by Scott Angelle through Oct. 24 (2,340 minutes, 39 hours, 1.6 days)
- $1,528,340: Cost of TV ads purchased by Scott Angelle;
- 3,968: Number of TV ads purchased by Jay Dardenne through Oct. 24 (1,984 minutes, 33 hours, 1.4 days)
- $1,285,380: Total cost of TV ads purchased by Jay Dardenne;
- 7,368: Total number of TV ads purchased by smaller PACs (3,684 minutes, 61.4 hours, 2.6 days)
- 0: The number of ads, the minutes, hours and days and the cost of TV ads in which any of the four candidates actually discussed their plans for resolving the multitude of problems facing Louisiana in public education, higher education, health care, prison reform, employment, coastal restoration and preservation, the environment, the economy, the state budget, or infrastructure.
And therein lies the real shame of the 2015 gubernatorial election.
With so much at stake for the state and with more than 16 full days of TV ad time in which to address our problems, not a word was said by any candidate about what he intended to do to turn this state around after eight years of the amateurish experimental governance of one Bobby Jindal that has brought us to the brink of ruin.
I repeat. Not a single word.
Instead, we were treated to a never-ending barrage of:
- David Vitter is a snake for his tryst(s) with one or more hookers and is not only despised in the U.S. Senate but is largely an ineffective senator;
- David Vitter betrayed his family 15 years ago but has been forgiven by his wife and has fought valiantly in the U.S. Senate on behalf of Louisiana’s citizens;
- John Bel Edwards is joined at the hip with President Obama and desires to turn 5,500 hardened Angola convicts loose to prey on our citizenry;
- John Bell Edwards has an unblemished record of achievement as evidenced by his graduation from West Point and his subsequent leadership role in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne and has fought Bobby Jindal’s disastrous programs for eight years.
As the voters of this state who have to make a decision tomorrow (Saturday, Nov. 21), we are tired—tired of the negative campaigning, tired of the distortions of records and outright lies about opposing candidates, tired of the endless succession of robocalls that give us not a live person with whom we can debate issues, but a recording that pitches one candidate’s positives over another’s negatives. (It’s just not the same when we curse and scream our frustrations at a recording.) We deserved better from all the candidates. We got a campaign long on accusations, name-calling and finger-pointing and one woefully short on solutions.
And lest readers think I am directing all of my disdain at the gubernatorial candidates, let me assure you I am not. I have equal contempt for the legislature, PACs and corporate power brokers.
Consider for a moment how approximately $31 million (that’s the total cost of this year’s governor’s race when all media advertising—radio, newspaper, robocalls and mail-outs, along with campaign staff and assorted expenses—are factored in) could have been put to better use. http://theadvocate.com/news/acadiana/13971699-123/louisiana-governor-race-spending-close
True, $31 million isn’t much when the state is looking at yet another $500 million budgetary shortfall, but every little bit helps. These donors, so concerned about the governor’s race, could, for example, feed a lot of homeless people or purchase quite a few text books for our schools. I’m just sayin’….
Most of that money, of course, is from PACs, the single worst plague ever visited upon a democratic society. PACs, with their unrestricted advertising expenditures, along with large corporate donors who also manage to circumvent the campaign contribution ceilings, remove the small contributors and the average citizen from the representation equation.
And why do they pour money into these campaigns? For benevolence, for the advancement of good, clean, honest government.
You can check that box no. It’s for the same reason they pay millions of dollars to lobbyists.
If you really want to know their motivation, just take a look at the list of state contracts http://wwwprd.doa.louisiana.gov/latrac/contracts/contractSearch.cfm or the impressive list of appointments to state boards and commissions.
Our thanks to the Center for Public Integrity for providing us with the television advertising cost breakdowns for the candidates and the various PACs. http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/10/01/18101/2015-state-ad-wars-tracker
“If you really want to know their motivation, just take a look at the list of state contracts http://wwwprd.doa.louisiana.gov/latrac/contracts/contractSearch.cfm or the impressive list of appointments to state boards and commissions.”
As ever, Tom, your summation above nailed it – the bottom line is…the bottom line. Money and power. Being a servant-leader, good steward of the people’s resources, standing for the common good – in other words being a public servant rather than a self-serving politician – appears to be a quaint, outdated notion.
We can dream of the day when politicians are limited to spending their own money on their campaigns. Then when we wake from dreamy dreamland and face the reality that unelected and largely unseen people control our governments at every level, we recognize the truth: as a nation we have been sold out to the highest bidder. Cynical, yes. But not naïve.
If our revolution is at the ballot box, then that’s where we have to go to “take back our country.” Next move: seek out those who will serve the public and not Mammon. Time for good people to step up and offer to serve in legislatures, councils, etc. Now, that’s a naïve quest…..sorry, just woke from a brief nap in dreamland.
As always, very well said earthmother. 🙂
Amen.
Those numbers just boggle the mind Tom. Plus, add in the fact that as you get this close to the election, how many people are even paying attention to these ads? For me, they’re just background noise.
Amen to everybody and, Fredster your comment evokes the reality that VERY few people who go to the polls know or care enough to be concerned and, unfortunately, there’s the rub. You, earthmother, Tom and du chicot are very much in the minority of our population. Most people I talk to are both skeptical and apathetic about how we are governed. I was at a party Monday night and I was taken aback by how uninformed and disinterested every single person I talked to was – and these were educated people taking the same OLLI LSU class as I was.
How we get people to care is a mystery to me. Tom, Bob Mann, and C. B. Forgotston are among a small group of people who try to inform the public. We can only hope the number of people who pay attention to them increases, but, again, how to we get them to care enough to do so? I, frankly, don’t know. The support Donald Trump has proves a substantial number of people are fed up with the way things are. The fact they support him proves how grossly uninformed they are. Sorry for the rant. Sheeeeeeeesh.
P. S. With regard to the Jindal plan for closing the current year budget gap courageously approved by the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget today, Reo, Schroder accurately described this as the sham it is. It was a win-win for Jindal who will be gone before the excrement hits the fan and can allege he left the state in good shape as he solicits financial support for his think tank. It is also, of course, a winner for the members of the committee who voted for it because the public has learned to be skeptical about everything anyhow so a plan that appears non-controversial on the surface will escape the scrutiny one that actually did something would not. So, who are the losers? Go to the nearest mirror to find out.
Okay, I’m putting myself in time out before I have a stroke.
Mr. Winham, we have our work cut out for us. I was shocked and saddened to learn how someone I know well voted. This person is highly educated and extremely intelligent, deeply faithful, displays the highest personal integrity….thought it through, considered each candidate’s attractive and not-so-attractive characteristics and prayed about the choice. This person has worked in state service for three decades and seen firsthand the carnage left by jindal. And voted for vitter.
This Catholic person had not seen the blogs outing Wendy Vitter as top attorney for the NO Archdiocese/Catholic Charities – the group that does excellent work taking care of the least of His children – and which resettled that dozen or so Syrian refugees in our state earlier this year. Talk about shocked and speechless – but once cast our vote cannot be changed, unlike our hearts. So we just shook our heads and decided to ignore that huge “elephant” in the room.
A major re-branding project is in order. That’s if any of our young people have learned to read and think. If we have the misfortune of having another R in the governor’s mansion, that alone will surely change some hearts and minds, as we will get fiscally bombed back to the stone age. Another 30 hours and we will know our fate.
I have long said the same thing about how much good the millions and millions of dollars spent on attack ads could do and I have yet to get even a mild response from the folks that I rant to. It is as if we have given up and will just roll over and play dead. No information of value is given anymore. I feel the same way about the debates. For the most part they were almost silly, name calling, insulting and no real facts about how to solve our problems. AND, of course, if a hint of a real solution is put forth, it is attacked as the worst, most unAmerican idea ever thought. Both political parties do this and we are the losers. Thanks for giving voice to all of this.
@Tom, Stephen and earthmother: I’m pretty good “blog friends” with a man who writes on our blog, TW. He lives in Kentucky and was naturally devastated when Blevin was elected there.
He sent me an article from kentucky.com concerning a young woman with a child who was able to get on expanded medicaid in that state. The writer interviewed her and she talked about how great the medicaid expansion was, how it helped with her child and some condition the child had. After the election they went back to her and she said that yes she had voted for Blevin the republican instead of Conway the Democrat. She said to the effect “I guess I’m just a die-hard Republican.” She said she wouldn’t mind paying $5.00 for an office visit or maybe 15 or 20 dollars a month toward a premium because Blevin said the recipients had to have “skin in the game” but that $50 or $60 a month for a premium was “too high”. I read that and sat here and shook my head.
Blevin has already said he was going to take down Kyconnect, the website the state developed for the marketplace. That will cost millions to shut down. And Blevin has stated that there were not going to be the same number of enrollees on medicaid after he takes office.
Further, my blog friend said that the counties that had the largest increase in expanded medicaid were the ones that largely went for Bevin the republican.
Why, oh why do people vote against their own self interest? (sigh) Sometimes you can’t fix stupid.
Fredster, sometimes I despair because the stupid people who get what they deserve when they vote for their own destruction, also inflict the result of their poor choices on the rest of us.
The highly effective rightwing propaganda machine is a wonder of the modern, info-savvy world. Bad people have managed to convince their followers, like lemmings, to choose to go over the cliff so that those in power can have more while everyone else suffers.
Even intelligent people buy into the lies. A couple very close to us who are well educated, retired business people, lost their comfortable retirement and teeter at the brink of poverty due to such lies as a 401K is soooo much better than a silly ole traditional pension that their huge corporation ditched. Also, free market capitalism (that wrecked those 401K investments) is waaaay better than Obama’s socialist government, but they don’t get the FACT that SOCIAL Security and Medicare, which are keeping them alive, are the most socialist of programs. and are in fact, run by, um, the government. Which they detest and mistrust. (If it were me, I’d ask for a refund of the thousands of dollars in tuition for that MBA-Finance from the big name school, ’cause they sure didn’t learn much.) At least they no longer tease about my “pathetic lil government retirement check,” because it’s a damn sight more than that million or so in the 401K account seems to be throwing off.
My new favorite quote (from Aaron Sorkin and the writers of The West Wing): “The only thing harder than speaking truth to power is speaking truth to stupid.”
big, deep sigh…..
“The only thing harder than speaking truth to power is speaking truth to stupid.”
I don’t recall that from the show, but I love it. I will keep that one handy.
After reading a few comments that prove that even educated people are acting against theirs and others best common interest, I have to ask, if a great portion of our populace brainwashed by the media propaganda that has been constant for many years, now? Don’t we know how dangerous mind-control is? I guess in this instance, my being stubborn has served me well. But, if more and more minds are being controlled by this ideology of hate the government, won’t it end in tyranny and destruction of our democracy? This fear is always in the back of my mind when I encounter this unreasonable loyalty to that which is hurting all of us. We need answers to combat this. End of my rant!
“AND, of course, if a hint of a real solution is put forth, it is attacked as the worst, most unAmerican idea ever thought. Both political parties do this and we are the losers.”
The problem here is that both major parties have been captured by the corporatocracy (mainly the FIRE sector). However, there are real naturally opposing factions within corporatocracy, due to divergent interests, capable of being exploited. For instance, many CEO’s of companies in certain sectors of the economy complain bitterly of being forced by hedge funds to buy back their own stock, thereby driving up the price, instead of putting revenue to work in research and development thus exposing them to the adverse consequences of capital market manipulation and the hollowing out of their companies. See Wolf Richter’s Wolfstreet dot com. Michael Hudson has written of the natural conflict between industry and finance early on.
“After reading a few comments that prove that even educated people are acting against theirs and others best common interest,…”
Multiple reasons for this, but the primary one is that so many do not have enough grounding in historical fact.
That being said, how many of these books have you read? –
Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power x Meacham
James Madison x Brookhiser
Alexander Hamilton x Chernow
Madison and Jefferson x Burstein & Isenberg
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt x Morris
Theodore Rex x Morris
Wilson x Berg
FDR, a Biography x Morgan
Eisenhower in War and Peace x Smith
The First Tycoon, the Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt x Stiles
Titan, the Life of John D. Rockefeller x Chernow
The House of Morgan, an American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance x Chernow
Louis D. Brandeis x Urofsky
The Wealth of Nations x Smith
Das Kapital x Marx
All the President’s Bankers x Prins
This is a short list. How many of these do you think are required reading in the usual university courses in government? Now, relate this to the percentage of Americans that have completed requirements for four year degrees, the majority of which have little focus on the subject of government. Do you begin to see the reason for progressive’s constant push for free education to the four year level?
How many would go to the effort to read and understand this? –
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/modern-monetary-theory-primer.html
It’s not stupidity, it’s bloody ignorance. Consider the number of offshore oilfield workers, numbering in the thousands in La., doing 2 week on/off shifts that would have the time to read extensively but would rather spend their time off riding scooters, getting drunk and beating each others brains out in the local pubs. Can we wonder that these oafs, with no more background in government than a degree from CNN university; are surprised that they’re suddenly out of a job due to oil dropping to $40/barrel. Stupidity is believing that with no more background than that they could actually have anything to say concerning politics which would have any relevance to anyone whatsoever. Least of which would be how their loss of income is going to impact La. tax revenues.
But there are ways to get someone’s attention. Ask a mom and pop retailer, often the target of conservative Republican propaganda through the Chamber of Commerce, what’s going to happen to his/her business when a large number of his/her customers are paupers.
Great article and oh so true.
$30+ million for BS that adds no value.
How many hungry stomachs would that have been filled on Thanksgiving with a fraction of those dollars?
How many Louisiana citizens could have been helped?
When will we learn that throwing away big bucks and televised cage matches is no way to run a democracy? Trying to fight big money by throwing money at it is a great way to go broke.