The air war heats up

My Way News - Romney to Air Presidential Campaign Ad:
"It is the first ad by a top-tier contender in a campaign experts believe will cost more than $1 billion by the time it ends in November 2008."

According to this AP story, US Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) opened the air war in December in a small way in the Carolinas and South Dakota. With expensive TV advertising starting already, that billion dollar price tag for the 2008 presidential campaigns may be a conservative estimate.

In case anyone thinks choosing a president for four years is not an appropriate way to spend a billion dollars, I would reply that it's only about six dollars for every adult in America - sounds like a bargain to me.

I don't intend to prognosticate on who will win either nomination. Better men than me have come to grief over such predictions.

In 1967, David Broder, long the top political analyst at The Washington Post, published a wonderful and insightful book about the upcoming 1968 presidential race. In that book, he described how George Romney (Republican governor of Michigan and father of Mitt Romney) would use the issue of the Vietnam War to defeat the re-election of President Lyndon Johnson. There were only three minor defects to Broder's book: (1) Romney did not get the GOP nod; (2) LBJ did not run for re-election; and (3) Vietnam was not the central issue of the campaign.

For the benefit of those too young to remember, 1968 was the year Republican nominee Richard Milhaus Nixon (former vice president) defeated Democrat nominee Hubert Horatio Humphrey (the incumbent vice president) and American Independent Party nominee George Corley Wallace (Democrat governor of Alabama). The key issue was crime.