Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico. Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

Who was more transparently over-the-top on Tuesday, as political junkies waiting for the vote to come in filled the long hours with clouds of verbal helium in TV studios? Was it former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who argued on CNN that Ebola and the Islamic State were “issues that the administration didn’t take seriously”? Or was it Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who as late as Tuesday morning was still suggesting to Jake Tapper that the election wasn’t really about Barack Obama, even though every Democrat running that day seemed to think it was (as did the president himself)? “Jake, the president really is our best asset,” Wasserman-Schultz insisted, without laughing.

Folks, let’s say it plainly (no spin). Spin, as an art, has totally jumped the shark. It’s so overdone, it’s dead. It’s self-parody. Low comedy. Kitsch. For years, as the country and political parties have grown more polarized, we’ve been moving the goal posts of spin-surdity. The farther Republicans and Democrats drifted apart, the more the spin-meisters followed and stretched their rhetoric beyond any recognizable reality. The more wacked-out the rhetoric got, the fewer people listened. Now we’ve gotten the point where even some spin-doctors think that there’s not much point any more. “I think everyone’s kind of caught on to it,” says James Carville, who, once upon a time, was to political spin what Picasso was to rearranged anatomy. “Everybody, the journalists, everybody sees through it.”


Spin, in other words, is little but entertainment now. Entertainment that doesn’t entertain. And the numbers agree. Take CNN, which has sought to avoid the identification of Fox with the right or MSNBC with the left, even as it still hosts many a spinmeister on Election Day. But its ratings are falling. CNN has already dumped shows like “Crossfire” and is now relying on original series from the likes of Anthony Bourdain and Mike Rowe. Even the venerable Sunday talk shows are now a target for critics for doing little more than to provide a stage for talking-point talkers.While political campaigns have long tried to turn events to their advantage, not so long ago “spin” was a novel concept. In the documentary “War Room” about the Clinton ’92 campaign, early practitioners like Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos wowed viewers with their command of a new ferocity of political firepower. As Begala explains today, “Spin is the attempt to describe a situation in the most favorable light possible, e.g.: ‘No, I think Gov. Dukakis looks great in that helmet.’” The Clinton War Room art of spin was fast, pointed, and deeply cynical in a way that surprised opponents, revolutionized politics, and indoctrinated a new generation of press secretaries, strategists, and consultants.

And, soon, it was everywhere—from post-debate “spin rooms” to endless cable news talkfests.

Traditional spin, says Evan Tracey, founder of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, proliferated so much that all the spin largely cancelled itself out. Today, the polarization of issues and parties has left little room for reasoned nuance that might give a smart spinmeister credibility. “Nobody has the secret sauce anymore,” he says.

Why did spin go over the top? The combination of hyper-polarization and social-media frenzy has created a situation where it seems every spin-meister’s message and TV ad is exaggerated to such absurd lengths that they’ve effectively become meaningless—especially because they’re addressing audiences that are either (a) already fully committed on one side or the other, a choir that doesn’t need preaching to or (b) such sophisticated users of social media that they just don’t buy the crap any more.

In addition, Tracey suggests, spin is so omnipresent that it’s become like white noise—always there and so never noticed. “You have this proliferation of the permanent campaign, which means we’ve stayed in campaign mode and never gone into governing mode,” he says. I think “We’re reporting on the politics of policy versus the policy itself.”

Spin abuse has been, by and large, equally distributed across parties. This cycle it was the Democrats like Wasserman-Schultz who were desperate to persuade TV viewers that what everyone knew somehow wasn’t true: that a very unpopular Obama was about to cost Senate and House Democratic candidates a lot of support. In fact, after Mark Udall lost in Colorado Tuesday night, former Obama spinmeister Jay Carney promptly delivered up an almost Orwellian degree of over-spin, suggesting that Cory Gardner beat the incumbent because Udall “did not want Obama [in Colorado]. ... I think that speaks to some decisions Democrats made around the country.” Other Dems, like Ed Rendell, sought to spin out Tuesday's Republican victory as a disadvantage for the GOP over the next two years: "I think the Republicans, be careful what you wish for, because if they win the Senate, they better do something, they better send the president some responsible pieces of legislation or they’ll get crushed in 2016," the former Democratic governor said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

In the last cycle, on the other hand, it was the spectacle of Karl Rove on Fox News on Election Night, near-panic-stricken, frenziedly trying to prevent Fox from calling the election for Obama and other Democrats. “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?" host Megyn Kelly finally asked him.The slow death of effective spin tracks the increase in political polarization in the country. As the Pew Research Center found in a study released last month, “When it comes to getting news about politics and government, liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds. There is little overlap in the news sources they turn to and trust. And whether discussing politics online or with friends, they are more likely than others to interact with like-minded individuals.”

It’s not surprising, of course, that the radicalization of spin has also occurred in parallel with the trend in TV ads, which are also seen as so absurdly over-the-top these days that they appear to persuade fewer and fewer people—even as more and more wash over us each election with ever-increasing amounts of money.

It’s not just newbies like Joni Ernst suggesting, with a big grin, that she’s going to castrate the big spenders in Washington the way she once did pigs in Iowa (a line that apparently helped her to victory over Democrat Bruce Braley). Even Neel Kashkari, who was once assistant secretary of the Treasury and helped avert a Depression in 2008 as head of the TARP program—a serious guy, in other words—allowed himself to be filmed in a silly ad in the California governor’s race in which he pulls a supposedly drowning child out of a pool. The ad isn’t about swimming; it’s about … education. Ugh.

Yet even as the spin and the rhetoric has soared into the stratosphere, the population of potential voters who could be persuaded by spin it has grown very small. Same goes for political ads: The number of people all those billions of dollars are targeting is smaller and smaller.

Carville says he believes standard TV spin “reached its zenith sometime end of the last century beginning of this century,” and then began its long decline into meaninglessness. “I think it’s like a wobbling top, if you will. Because it’s wobbling, it’s hard to turn off, it’s old habits. All the talking points are dying a little bit by the wayside.”

Will the spin ever spin itself out? In the media, not any time soon, at least not while partisanship brings in ratings and readers. Ironically, the shift of information seekers to the Internet in order to avoid spin hasn’t improved the quality of their information very much, given all the nonsense disseminated there and the eroding away of formerly trusted conduits of information, like newspapers and TV broadcast networks. Especially for young readers, there is no direction home any longer. What's the home truth on immigration? The national debt? The tax code? How to produce economic growth? Which website will tell you the truth? Almost all are ideologically skewed. The deployment of "fact-checker" columns at newspapers has been a good trend, but they just can't keep up with all the bad information—and the spin.

And some unapologetic spinmeisters, like Kevin Madden, say all that’s happened is that there’s just that much more pressure to get better at spinning. “Not all spin is equal. I think voters can tell very quickly whether or not someone who is actually offering a critical analysis of a race or whether or not they’re offering rogue talking points,” he says.

But today those who perfected the art are tired and ready to move on. Their spin: Spin’s over. “I am no longer a spin doctor. I do not work for any politicians,” says Paul Begala. “I am free to speak my mind—and I do. Thus I no longer have to pretend that a gaffe is actually a brilliant line—and thank God for that.”