Kaus puts his law school training to work

Here is a really nice point by Mickey Kaus. These little pop-up ads for a book about Bill's indiscretions that pop up on Google whenever you search on Hilary are in effect campaign advertisements that are not covered by campaign finance laws. Technically, they are advertising a book, it just happens that a fair description of the contents of the book are about the same thing you might want to put in an attack ad. Do we mutilate the constitution even more in our quixotic quest for "pure" and "untainted" speech, or do we give free speech a chance? My guess is no. After all, what is the harm. It gives each side an irresistible incentive to skirt the "spirit" of campaign finance laws and a perfectly legitimate accusation to make against their opponents. Then we give ourselves another opportunity to reduce politics to a sterile and irrelevant judicial debate and avoid making any real decisions for another election cycle.

I predict one more thing. The Republicans that do this will get in a lot more trouble with the press than democrats who do or benefit from the same thing. There is no one out there that will say, "Hey, you are ignoring our problem," as they would if the press tried to ignore some actual harm done to someone's interests--say if they tried to look at chemical dumping or lax enforcement or unemployment on one sides watch or territory and not the other. The thing about real problems is that they have real victims that tend to make noise when you ignore them.

With this pseudo problem the only victims are rival groups of politicians. It does not take much imagination to guess which side the press will give the microphone to.

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