Presidential candidates or products to market?

It is not news to anybody that elections are becoming more and more like Coke and Pepsi duking it out.  It is, therefore, no surprise that this presidential election will be the first billion dollar campaign ever.  And my university has money problems when we are searching for two million dollars!

This piece in Salon explains how the Obama campaign has incorporated all the marketing slicing and dicing tricks of the trade from the corporate world.  It ends thus:
It seems Joe McGinnis had it right 40 years ago, when "The Selling of the President" chronicled how techniques from Madison Avenue helped send Richard Nixon to Pennsylvania Avenue. If Obama wins the White House in part by looking at voters the way corporations look at consumers, by 2012 it may be even harder to tell where politics ends and marketing begins. (emphasis added)