"All Slander All the Time" (#251, Topic P)

This morning, the day after Election Day 2006, there was an interesting op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal, written by a former reporter, now a partner in a venture-capital firm; the piece's title is shown above. He first cited a Gallup Poll, where, among votes in states with closely contested Senate races, "The vast majority described [political advertising] as either 'somewhat negative,' 'very negative,' or 'extremely negative'." Extrapolating, he expressed the view that "2006 will be the first year that negative political advertising expenditures reached the $1 billion mark." He lamented that "in America, the major parties don't ever think in broad, national terms. They're all tactics and no strategy. They don't advertise themselves at all. Instead, they spend the hundreds of millions they raise microtargeting supposedly single-issue voters and bombarding them with negative messages about the opposite party's alleged disdain for those concerns." He concluded by saying that "The alternative [to a new political party], after all, is a new record every two years -- $2 billion of negative advertising, then $4 billion, then $8 billion. All slander all the time eventually collapses of its own foul weight." Is this -- democracy in USA in the 21st century as descried in this piece -- to be exported to other countries?