Massachusetts: Follow the money before you swallow the spin

If advertising didn’t matter, major companies would arrange their budgets very differently and we wouldn’t need truth in advertising laws, or to prohibit movie theaters from inserting subliminal imagery to drive the crowd out to the concession stand.

If advertising mattered less, media outlets wouldn’t waste time they could be charging for commercials on making sure to promote their own shows – their product – to keep us tuned in, to prop up their ratings.

Advertising matters. Information, in one form or another, is what moves goods out of the warehouse and off the retailer’s shelves. Capitalism is envisioned as a system where consumers with good, accurate information make informed decisions selecting the “right” goods and services, driving a sort of evolution where the best flourish and the inferior producers tend to go out of business.

The key word there is accurate.

If slogans and messages didn’t matter, Budweiser wouldn’t be the King of (U.S.) Beers, cigarette companies wouldn’t have plastered their names, images, and messages on every surface and/or object they could find, millions of dollars wouldn’t be spent during the Super Bowl each year, and the Fox network wouldn’t bother calling their reporting “fair and balanced.”

Characters welcome…

So, ask yourself, who benefits from advertising that the election of Scott Brown as a U.S. Senator is the end of Health Care reform in the Congress? Who benefits from describing it as a referendum on the Obama administration? Whose interests are served by citing one election as indicative of a trend?

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley & now Senator-elect Scott Brown

To be frank, Ms. Coakley ran a hapless campaign that hindsight can label overconfident. Her message, deliberate or not, was that baseball doesn’t matter, shaking hands with voters doesn’t matter, and that she had it all wrapped up months ago – that details didn’t matter if she just went through the motions.

Had Coakley sought, and been willing to heed, the sort of advisors that helped recent campaign “winners” there’s a chance she’d have won – but voters in Massachusetts were more inspired by an up-and-coming guy with a winning smile who went to work hard telling them what kind of person he was.

The key word there is voters.

Ms. Coakley left too many of the people who had given Obama his huge margin in that state in 2008 uninspired on election day — unwilling to take the time to go and vote.

You can suggest that there was infighting in her Massachusetts party, that others are hoping to win that seat in 2012 when the term of the special election ends. You can ask if the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee gave her the proper support. You can question the spin in the media, or what would have happened if the President had showed more enthusiastic support, sooner. You can be sure the exit polls will be discussed exhaustively, both on and off camera.

Those notions are being examined, of course, by everybody from the punditocracy to the elite strategists of the major political parties, and every candidate for any office that will be elected later this year. Meanwhile, because winning matters, the facts are being sliced, diced, and repackaged for your consumption by everybody with something to gain.

Bottom line:

Sadly, the skills needed to campaign effectively don’t test what kind of legislator a candidate will be, and the contest in Massachusetts was more about how two people resonated with the electorate rather than their platforms, initiatives, and policy goals — the only issue that was raised was Brown’s intent to be an obstructionist on Health Care reform (which surely accounts for no small fraction of the financial support he lined up.)

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In a contest with a relative unknown, in a state that reliably votes for Democrats, the outcome of the election to fill out Ted Kennedy’s term in the wake of his death was determined by the campaigns and leadership of two very different individuals – one who wanted it badly, and one who assumed she wasn’t in a contest.

Congratulations are due to the Senator-elect, the Cosmo “Centerfold Winner” clearly prevailed by inspiring more Massachusetts voters to go to the polls – though I doubt they were mostly “conservative” GOP voters, given his photo spread – so just what does it really mean for other elections? “Characters welcome.”

Remember, advertising matters: follow the money before you swallow the spin.