Ruth Marcus offers this Washington Post commentary, which begins:

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith died this year, but he left behind the conventional wisdom. Galbraith coined the phrase in 1958 to denote those comfortable ideas “which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability.”
Coincidentally, in the weeks after Galbraith’s death, I came across assaults on two pillars of the conventional political wisdom: that negative attack ads are bad and that disclosure of campaign finance information is good. Neither argument is ultimately convincing, but both serve as provocative warnings against the complacent repetition of accepted verities.

The two assaults are John Geer’s recent book, “In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns” and a paper Bob Bauer recently presented to the MPSA as part of UCLA’s Campaign Finance Disclosure Project.
Bob Bauer responds.