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Free advertising -- well, except that we're paying for it...


A busy weekend, sufficiently so that I might have missed an item were it not for a piece on Mark Gibson's blog concerning a series of speeches Bush is going to be giving to allow him to get as much free campaigning and spin time as possible in the near future. (Go read the piece over at and linked from the above link.)

With the race in the court of public opinion (a race where we're left having to decide whose reporting to believe, which means that much reporting and rumor is often intended to affect the race in a feedback loop) each candidate is trying to decide where to spend money and when. If these speeches Bush is scheduled to give were for the edification of the public concerning the "way forward" in Iraq, wouldn't it make much more sense for him to alert the media and make an address from the White House? I agree with Mark, it's thinly disguised campaigning. Each time he speaks somewhere it'll get a great deal of local coverage, substantial print media coverage, and the usual sound bytes and capsulations on the cable/broadcast media, and none of it will drain his campaign coffers by a cent.

All this free time, I guess, means he's solved all those other, pesky problems. Hey, folks! Our worries must be nearly over!

(In another campaign fund-related story I'd neglected to mention this weekend, there was an announcement Friday that Kerry is considering delaying the acceptance of his party's nomination past the date of the convention. The significance is that once he (and the same will apply to Bush and the GOP nomination) accepts the nomination his campaign will be limited to $75 million in campaign money from then until the elections. With the GOP convention coming later (about 5 weeks after the late July DNC convention), and the Bush campaign having raised more money overall (over $200 million so far, vs Kerry's $117 million), there are concerns that from the end of July up until the GOP convention the Bush campaign could blast the public with all the remaining rounds in its publicly-raised coffers, once Kerry is safely on a budget.)

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