Mike Dunford has a post up titled You Almost Have to Feel Sorry for Jim Tedisco, about the special election that's being held to fill Kirsten Gillibrand's House seat. The title alone is enough to tell you that Mike doesn't live in this area any more. Nobody who has to listen to the multi-media saturation bombing that's going on regarding this election could feel sorry for either of the participants.
Though, to be fair, the worst of the advertising is actually from the National Republican Congressional Committee, one of the groups that Tedisco is trying to distance himself from. They've got a radio spot with an ultra-smarmy voice laying into Scott Murphy for failing to "Support the Trooooooops" (the Republican's new version of "Save the Chiiiiiiiillllldren!!!") strongly enough. It's being played in basically every other ad break on the local ESPN radio affiliate, and is the only thing I've heard on the radio that's more irritating than Colin Cowherd.
One of the nice things about living in New York is that the state is so reliably Democratic that Presidential elections generate very little in the way of ad traffic. We only catch the fringes of the occasional national ad buy. This kind of saturation coverage is rare for a safe blue state. And if this is what living in a swing state is like, Ohio can keep it.
Fun fact: Jim Tedisco is a Union alum, and used to regularly play in the noontime pick-up game that I play in. He also held the college's scoring record for many years, so you can guess how that went. I've never met him or played against him, though, as far as I know.
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You should have been here in October and November. Most TV commercials, radio commercials? All politics. 3-4 messages a day on the answering machine,which had an attachment to try and screen out computer calls....
Now you understand why I have been so firm in not owning a TV set.
In 1990 one of my roommates had a TV. That fall our US Senate race was between Bob Smith and John Durkin, for the seat held by the retiring Warren Rudman. Smith's ads sneeringly attacked "liberal John Durkin", while Durkin's ads focused so heavily on Smith's allegedly pro-Japanese record (Smith was a Congresscritter at the time) as to identify him as "Bob Smith (R-Tokyo)". I concluded that I did not want either of these alleged gentlemen to be my Senator, so I cast a protest vote for the Libertarian candidate.
Since then, I have not kept a TV in my living room, and I often turn off the radio when it hits a commercial break (politicians aren't the only people who put out annoying ads). I feel so much saner at election time than I otherwise would.