I received an email several weeks ago from a reader who described an idea for a do-it-yourself political ad campaign. Here’s how he described it.
I want things to change but I don’t want waste my money by making donations to someone’s political campaign. Why should I donate to others when I can do it myself and say exactly what I feel needs to be said?
I’m sick of treating politics like it’s a spectator sport.
I want to help make positive changes for the greater good or maybe help to discourage politicians from passing reckless laws that do more harm than good.
However – It’s scary… I’ve never picked a fight with an elected official before. Going one-on-one with a Senator, Congressman or Governor is intimidating.
AND – I want to stay out of legal trouble. I don’t want to inadvertently screw up my happy life in the process.
This is my plan…
My plan is to launch an online banner ad campaign targeting politicians or corporations that are heavily, politically invested with issues like internet censorship.
Banner ads are dirt cheap. You can get nearly 100,000 banner ad impressions delivered to a specific geographic area & a set of relevant keywords for about $100.
The banner ads show up on national websites but only to the people in the geographic area being targeted and only on relevant websites that match the keywords you’re targeting.
So anyway… I believe that I’m free to promote 100% truthful statements online about peoples voting records, direct quotes, public statements, etc…
I plan on creating banner ads and spending $100 per month on them… I don’t plan on creating websites; just banner ads. I plan on pointing the banner ads to other peoples websites like mainstream news sites, YouTube videos, Congressional voting records, niche news blogs, etc…
For example… If my banner ad features a direct quote… I’ll link the banner ad to an article on a mainstream news website that features the quote and focuses on the possible ramifications of what the statement could mean for American citizens.
So – What do I need to know so I can keep myself out of trouble?
I first thought about whether the state Campaign Spending Law would apply.
An individual could be considered a noncandidate committee if the person collects money from others to use for for campaign activities. In this case, though, the reader would use only his own funds, and so would not have to register and report as a committee.
“Noncandidate committee” means an organization, association, party, or individual that has the purpose of making or receiving contributions, making expenditures, or incurring financial obligations to influence the nomination for election, or the election, of any candidate to office, or for or against any question or issue on the ballot; provided that a noncandidate committee does not include:
(1) A candidate committee;
(2) Any individual making a contribution or making an expenditure of the individual’s own funds or anything of value that the individual originally acquired for the individual’s own use and not for the purpose of evading any provision of this part; or
(3) Any organization that raises or expends funds for the sole purpose of producing and disseminating informational or educational communications that are not made to influence the outcome of an election, question, or issue on a ballot. [emphasis added]
It clearly looks like the proposed activities would not qualify him as a non candidate committee.
Oh, one more thing. He wants to remain anonymous.
State law requires every campaign ad to contain the name and address of the ad’s sponsor.
But it doesn’t appear the proposed ads would be covered because they would be simple quotes or statements of fact, and would not expressly advocate voting for or against a candidate.
Here’s how the campaign spending law defines an “advertisement”:
“Advertisement” means any communication, excluding sundry items such as bumper stickers, that;
(1) Identifies a candidate directly or by implication, or identifies an issue or question that will appear on the ballot at the next applicable election; and
(2) Advocates or supports the nomination, opposition, or election of the candidate, or advocates the passage or defeat of the issue or question on the ballot.
And if they are not “advertisements” under the campaign spending law, they apparently wouldn’t have to disclose who is paying for them.
But the reader is still worried.
Here’s what he said:
Two things that cause a conflict in my brain are:
1) My desire to play fair…
2) My need to remain anonymous due to my fear of how some people prefer to “Kill the messenger” instead of deal with the facts.
In your opinion… Is unfair for someone like myself to publicly rub other people’s noses in the facts while remaining anonymous?
Or is it… Facts are facts. Deal with it. The messenger is irrelevant.
I responded by saying that it doesn’t take much digging to see that there is a long tradition of anonymous political speech in this country, and that courts have generally upheld the right to speak anonymously.
That aside, however, it’s still a source of controversy.
So, in the end, I think the reader’s do-it-yourself idea can be done without tripping over the state campaign spending law, so long as the messages avoid advocating election or defeat of specific candidates.
But federal law is so much more complex, I’m at a loss to offer any advice there. Hopefully someone else will have some useful ideas there.
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WOW, what a terrific idea!
I think anonymous should go for it!!
I like that idea, you get good bang for the buck.
Maybe that’s why I’m seeing so many “Ron Paul
wins Hawaii” ads on websites.
I think as long as you don’t advocate for the election of a specific individual you are free of any restrictions imposed by campaign spending or other government campaign authorities. Your right to express your ideas, and to do it anonymously if you choose, is constitutionally protected free speech. However, you will be pecked to death by ducks If they ever ID you.
Great idea. You also have a banner ad on your site asking whether I like Mitt Romney. My answer is NO!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don’t like it that he’s winning because he’s got lots of money for attack ads. I’m happy that Gingrich is winning on ideas and not on money. Go South Carolina!
I also don’t like it that Mitt Romney and Obama share Goldman Sachs as their highest contributors. Romney is Mr. Wall Street. He looks too well-greased and sleazy.
We need to get money out of politics. It’s out of control.
Will the real person behind the candidate/issue please stand up! I’m not sure I would pay any attention to banners without knowing the source…I ignore most of that stuff. Sorry but in thinking it through “Save us from Our Politcal Process” would not draw a big readership.
What I find troubling though, is “going one on one with senator congressman or govenor is intimidating”. Living on a small island can be limiting . I will watch my mouth because my friend and neighbor knows the senator, the developer or that union guy who lives down the street.
So what to do? Start a superpac?
Newt has quite the knack for twisting the facts. And too many voters buy his version of the truth because we’re lazy and issues are so complicated. I do like the fact check some of the news people do after the debates. We need more of that to specifically challenge the sound bites coming from neo-conservative think tanks…fodder for FOX….and Mitt.
Yes, there are online sources for campaign finances, quotes and positions but you often need a degree in math to find them useful. Keep digging, keep blogging, follow the money..if at all possible. Say your piece….
Maybe the problem might be advocacy itself, at least when it is at the expense of inquiry. If the concept is to target politicians who support “Internet censorship”, the right idea might be to instead engage in some inquiry into just what “Internet censorship” is comprised of. It seems that with the latest Wikipedia blackout over the issue of intellectual property rights on the Internet, too many members of the public are making snap judgments based on the hipness of the brand. Google and other Internet companies are hip and cool and virtuous, and the music and movie industries are evil. In reality, these are all major corporations who are pretty similar ideologically.
There is an article in Civil Beat entitled “Money, Power and Politics Shape Public Policy”, by a representative of KANU Hawaii. Most of what the author states sounds impeccable to me. But note the following:
The issue of a housing bubble is more complicated than that. A housing bubble is not rich people buying mansions and driving up prices, it is poor people imitating rich people.
There was a well-known article in the New York Times about an old retired electrician living alone in Orange County, California (home of the housing bubble) who went out and bought himself a $900,000 home. Everyday he would have a garage sale on his lawn selling off his things in order to make the mortgage payments (his neighbors were doing the same). If that same retired electrician had been living in a small town in Ohio, he would have been perfectly happy living in a small house like everyone else. There was no real estate bubble in most of the US because people aren’t exposed to luxury in the heartland the way they are on the coasts. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart does not yearn for.
That reminds me of a famous magazine cover on Time or Newsweek during the Internet bubble of the 1990s, that was entitled something like “Why aren’t you rich yet?” It very wittily captured the ethos of the times, one of preposterous expectations, of people dreaming of getting rich by selling cat food online (also, remember Iomega?). I mentioned this funny, insightful article to a neighbor of mine, a retired working man. He did not get the joke. He hunched over and looked at his shoes and gulped hard, with a look of guilt and dread on his face. Being just an ordinary person, he had this sense of profound inadequacy, like he was a total loser (even though the quality of his life was better than 80% of the world’s population).
There is no bubble in Kahala or Makiki Heights with rich people buying second or third or fourth homes. They can afford it and will never go into default. A housing bubble isn’t red-hot prices, a bubble is housing prices higher than 2.5 times annual family income. The problem is “poor” guys like me brainwashed by those rich guys living on the beach or up in the hills in gigantic houses. A bubble is comprised of a mix of unrealistic expectations, feelings of insecurity and self-fulfilling prophecies about prices. By the standards of the Case-Shiller home price index, one could argue that home prices on average in Hawaii are overvalued by 650% in relation to income. But it’s not rich people buying second homes in Kahala doing this, it’s people in Aiea laboring under misconceptions.
So I am a little disappointed with KANU Hawaii for that aspect of an otherwise right-on article. But at least KANU is not as bad as Faith Action for Community Equity, or FACE. I believe they released a “study” once on something like homelessness in Hawaii, with a range of proposals and solutions. They later revealed that they spend only $150 on the “study”. Basically, they spent the money on photocopying someone else’s generic “study”. It seemed to be advocacy at it’s most uninformed.
The travel writer Paul Theroux wrote an op-ed for the NYTimes about Hawaii, “Happily a state, forever an island”. In it he noted that public policy is generally not discussed or debated in Hawaii. Instead, he said, there is a plethora of do-gooder organizations in Hawaii modeled on religious advocacy and community service. So the missionary impulse is still going strong in Hawaii. The question is, is that a little too amateurish and small-townish in the 21st century?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/opinion/21theroux.html?pagewanted=all
A CNN anchor last week asked the loopy Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich at the very start of a televised debate if he would like to comment about one of his way too many marriages – while many in the nationwide TV audience were waiting anxiously, palpably, to see Newt and perhaps one other candidate quickly voted off the island – and Newt said, “No. But I will.” Soon out of seemingly nowhere Newt started producing snippets of, well, sense, on CNN. Ground gainers, yardage after solid yardage of a sort of reasonable sense not usually the custom in that Republican debate format, then further for a long sustained Gwen Ifil interview on the PBS Newshour; in all making sufficient on-the-spot sense that by primary voting night some 40 per cent South Carolina voters up and voted for Newt.
You don’t want a United States of Turkey, either. Or do you? Maybe that makes sense too – even without a formal ad campaign. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, as reported lately, is starting to make sense, visible all over the map in his neighborhood, which before World War I used to be the former Ottoman Empire (see “Dormant Power Revival” in The Economist, November 5 issue). Erdogan has lately been talking sense to Syria, to Israel, to the Bosniacs in Bosnia, and making sense about Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Think about it. Our United States could just defer to a more modern and perhaps improved United States of Turkey to deal with the likes of Syria, or even Greece.
So yes, jumping on the internet with an idea, or a whole sequence of them, just because they might make sense, but before there is any time whatsoever to do diligence, to think things through or to verify the theory, is not wise.
But raw sense is real.