aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Matt Bai: The Post Money Era
Matt Bai says DeVillis is the future of political ads; that PVRs and the Internet spell the end of political advertising as we know it. He expects online ads will get more expensive “as well-trafficked sites and Internet consultants dream up new ways to cash in on the migration of politics to the Web; where there’s money to be made, someone generally makes it.” But by the 2012 election cycle money will matter far less than ever before:
It’s arguable that, beyond a certain base line, how much you stockpile as a candidate - whether you have $75 million in the primaries, or even $100 million - will soon matter less than ever before. You can use that money to throw up ads on every late-night lineup in the Midwest, or spend it on plush offices or layers of consultants, but what does all that really get you, other than an inflated sense of your own success? Ask Howard Dean, who outraised all his 2004 primary opponents and ended up winning one state: his own.
“The need for money is probably going to reach some diminishing return, and it’s probably going to be a pretty low ceiling, compared to past campaigns,” predicts Peter Leyden, president of the left-leaning New Politics Institute. In other words, the emerging high-tech marketplace may yet bring us closer to what decades of federal campaign regulations have failed to achieve: a day when candidates can afford to spend less time obsessing over the constant need for cash and more time concerned with the currency of their ideas.
I look forward to his book, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. He was interviewed on On The Media yesterday.
