Maybe this is one of the peculiar evils of allowing the ‘common folk’ (people like me and my neighbors) to participate in government, since, as a whole the throngs of ordinary people are too busy with the rest of life to be especially well-educated to the issues or deeply thoughtful in how we vote.

Besides (sarcasm here), if all the adds were simply educational about the platforms, we’d all tune out since that would lack violence and sex and therefore not be entertaining.

One exception to your statement “It just says that we won’t have politicians on the national scene who haven’t lived through the pork-gathering phase locally because we won’t elect them locally unless they bring us pork” is Tom Coburn. Here you have someone who is despised by the right and the left because he refuses to play political games and refuses pork for his home state. His book, “Breach of Trust”, is a must-read – he hammers into the phony politics of his own side pretty good. I wish _he_ would run for president!