historiblogography

another kind of prisoner's dilemma

The Senate race in South Fucking Dakota was apparently the most expensive in the nation:

Daschle and Thune had spent $26.3 million, more than $50 apiece for each of the state's 502,000 registered voters, as of mid-October. That does not include the millions of dollars being spent by outside groups, most of them opposed to Daschle.

Once the final figures have come in, and the spending of outside groups is tallied, let's stop for a moment and try to imagine how much money has been spent in this stupid campaign: seventy-five dollars per voter? A hundred?

How amazingly wasteful and pointless. I've been hanging up on recorded telephone messages all week (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss wanted me to vote for or against something that her automated message never got a chance to tell me about), and vigorously ignoring ads on television, on radio, and in print. And I suspect that folks in South Dakota have been doing the same.

Only more so, obviously.

Politicans should just ritually burn great piles of cash, and save the rest of us the aggravation.

posted by Chris Bray @ 1:25 PM