Op-ed Advertising

The Guardian is usually a pretty sane place to be, so long as you are there only for the news items. As for opinion pieces, well…

One Alex Slater has a column at The Guardian today titled “Obama: back on the campaign trail” in which he assures everyone who is on the side of the angels Barack Obama and the Democrats that all is well in the world of politics because Obama is no longer governing is back to campaigning. He is waxing rapturous about the “new-found feisty tone” that Obama is using, and assures Obama supporters that thirteen months of listening to the man in campaign mode will turn the polls around completely and Obama will win reelection in a cakewalk.

It does not matter what the President has actually done while in office, he assures us, and it will not matter what the state of the economy will be next fall, nor will it actually matter what the President is actually saying in his campaign. Obama is such a good campaigner that the mere fact that he is “out there” doing it will win the election handily.

Alex Slater, it turns out, is “managing director of [a] leading Democratic communications firm.” That may explain why, about one-third of the way through the column, I quit reading it to avoid an explosive vomiting episode onto my keyboard. I thought only the New York Times provided unpaid advertising in the form of op-ed columns.