When it comes to political advertising, the focus is usually on the advertisers, not the sellers. Yet the meltdown of the Republican debate process has become a story of sellers supposedly behaving badly: a greedy CNBC, and CNN before that, keeping candidates standing on stage for hours just to sell that many more ad slots for up to $250,000 a pop. Of course it was Donald Trump who put debate ad rates on the radar in the first place, even as he is now trashing host networks for wanting debates to run long. Two months ago, he was happy to take credit for the high rates CNN was charging for ad time during its September 16 debate (and deftly called for the network to donate that sum to the veterans' groups Trump may have offended with his criticisms of Sen. John McCain). But that was before Trump and fellow candidates had to stand on CNN's debate stage for three hours. Ever since, ad sales have been a sidebar to the debate story. At the tail end of the CNBC debacle,
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