With the 2002 election upon us, we in California are barraged with campaign ads, especially Gray Davis' ads. But before we get to those, a little background for out-of-state readers.

The California GOP is a mess. Pete Wilson's administration seems to have undermined the state party apparatus, or else disheartened so many Republicans, that they seem doomed this year. The Legislature is in Democratic hands, and Republicans seem incapable of maintaining a solid resistance. Despite attempts to smear Gray Davis during the power-price-fixing crisis, the GOP doesn't appear to have gotten anywhere. This is not because Davis is a wiley pol or brutal realpolitiker. On the contrary, he's a whining, toadying, money-grubbing time-server, infamous for interrupting a California Teachers' Association representative in the middle of a spiel about a school building bill to say he wanted $1 million from them. Being unable to undermine Davis is like being unable to criticize the Taliban's human rights record. (Let's put it this way: I voted for Gray Davis, and this is what I think of him.)

The hapless California GOP somehow ended up nominating political novice Bill Simon for Governor. Simon's main claims to fame are that he served under Rudy Giuliani as a federal prosecutor, and that his family firm has been convicted of fraud.

If you haven't seen them, you can probably well imagine the ads from the Davis people. Immediately after the fraud conviction, the ads condescendingly and scoldingly asked how the people of California could trust Bill Simon when his family's corporate customers couldn't. But really, all the ads needed to do was present Bill Simon's face and a voiceover saying, "Oh, come on! Are you kidding?!" Since then, a higher court overturned the enormous fine levied by the lower court, and now the ads begin, "Bill Simon is back in court again..."

The Simon people, understandably and predictably, are complaining about the negative campaign tactics. But there hasn't been a strong response, since the Simon campaign has had such a difficult time raising funds (Simon himself, a multimillionaire, still hasn't decided to use any of his own money, and the state party, well....). They complain to the media about Davis' use of tv, and they complain that he's used his position as incumbent to roll lobbying groups for big contributions. Nothing printed in the papers has helped; no tv news soundbite has improved the poll numbers. Davis leads by 8-12 percent, and has all summer.

I bring this up not merely to complain or to garner sympathy, but because it raises a general issue regarding negative campaign ads.

It's rare when ads selling products attack other products in the same line. Chevy might occasionally direct a sneer at Ford, and the little animated Charmin quilters do giggle at the unquilted brands, but negative political ads are a different thing entirely. Imagine a Budweiser ad: "Miller Beer. Does it contain rat urine? Budweiser: 100% rat urine free. Drink Bud, not rat pee." Or Florida's Natural Orange Juice: "Florida's Natural is produced by a co-op of growers. Minute Maid is produced by a multinational corporation paying slave wages and driving paesant farmers in Brazil into hideous and depraved poverty, reducing them to animals, destroying them, chopping them up and using them as grist for its giant profit mill! So drink Florida's Natural."

I think it would be so incongruous, so dissonant to viewers to see product-attack ads that the brands that attempted them would be out of the market in weeks. Besides, there are Federal Trade Commission regulations prohibiting that kind of competition. But there are no Federal Election Commission regulations prohibiting attacks ads, for the interestingly opposed reason that it would be a limitation on free speech. (If so, why stop where politicians do? Why not produce an ad that graphically represents what LBJ accused an early Congressional opponent of doing with his sheep? Hey, if he isn't doing it, let him prove it!)

Every election cycle, everyone involved in politics claims to despise negative campaigning, suggests that it harms the integrity of the electoral process, and laments that it contributes to political apathy and cynicism. Yet it persists. One might even suspect politicians of hypocritically claiming to be against negative campaigning, since they all seem to resort to it.

But "resort" is a misnomer. Negative campaign ads are not used despite their negative consequences; apathy and cynicism are the goals! Exhibit A is the Gray Davis campaign. With the California GOP such a mess, the surest way to electoral victory for Davis this year was to undermine politics as such, to make it irrelevant. With no ideological stand to take, with no agenda, with nothing honorable in his record as Governor, with no obvious reason to present for anyone to vote for him, Davis' best strategy has been to wait for something unpleasant to be revealed about Bill Simon, and then put that on the air. If they're all bums, political discourse will dry up in the state like parched national forests. The ad campaign just lights the match.

Election ads perpetuate the notion that politicians, politics, and government are irrelevant to our lives, outside our control, hopelessly and irremediably corrupt. Anything anyone says in Washington, or Sacramento, or (Your Home State Capital) is necessarily a lie. The beneficiaries of this scheme are the (largely corporate) backers of candidates.

Lest this seem a wacko conspiracy theory, consider this: how easy is it to find a forum for informed, articulate, focused political debate that does not reduce issues to soundbites? What lengths do you have to go to in order to find out candidates' core beliefs, or their voting records, or their assocations with corporate sponsors? Compare that effort with the level of political discourse provided in the mainstream media, and notice: the news on tv and in your local paper uses the same taglines the ads do.

There's a well-researched psychological phenomenon called "learned helplessness." Through the constant refusal of a basic need, or through repeated punishment whenever an effort is made to fulfill a need, an animal can be trained to be so utterly passive that it will simply let itself die. Negative campaign ads achieve the same effect with regard to political discourse and the will of the people.