{"id":1717,"date":"2004-05-06T12:47:29","date_gmt":"2004-05-06T17:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1717.html"},"modified":"2004-05-06T12:47:29","modified_gmt":"2004-05-06T17:47:29","slug":"follow-up-on-the-i-approve-this-message-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/follow-up-on-the-i-approve-this-message-question\/","title":{"rendered":"Follow-up on the ‘I approve this message’ question"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to everyone who wrote in yesterday with comments about the Bush web video<\/a> that doesn’t include<\/a> the “I approve this message” tag line. The consensus seems to be that Bush has, indeed, found a legitimate loophole around the “Stand By Your Ad” provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.<\/p>\n

I apparently missed it, but Slate’s Chris Suellentrop<\/a> talked to Federal Election Commission spokesman Bob Biersack and former FEC Chairman Trevor Potter for some advice on this last week. They, apparently, agree that candidates can run TV-like ads online and get around federal restrictions.<\/p>\n

President Bush has already taken advantage of the fact that McCain-Feingold doesn’t apply to the Internet. The Bush campaign’s very first advertisement this election was a Web-based video sent out via e-mail. Notably, it didn’t include the “I approved this message” tagline from the candidate that TV commercials are required to insert. <\/p>\n

Sure, corporations and unions can spend money in lots of places that aren’t covered by McCain-Feingold: billboards, phone calls, direct mail, newspaper and magazine ads. But only on the Internet can they broadcast something that looks like a TV ad. (They could deliver DVDs door-to-door, but that’s considerably more expensive.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fine. The Kerry campaign has been holding itself to a higher standard, using the required tagline on all broadcast ads, including those exclusively available online, but Bush wants to exploit the loophole.<\/p>\n

Should Kerry’s campaign do the same thing? Probably. In the second or two it takes for Kerry to tell the viewer that he “approves this message,” we could squeeze in another quick attack on Bush, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to everyone who wrote in yesterday with comments about the Bush web video that doesn’t include the “I approve this message” tag line. The consensus seems to be that Bush has, indeed, found a legitimate loophole around the “Stand By Your Ad” provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. I apparently missed it, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}