Speech

Was pondering just how cool it is that ‘lil old me with $70 / year and a little free time can have a blog and a website name where I can write about whatever, and whoever wants can read it, or toss it, as they see fit. No crumpled up paper, no litter, no problem. We can agree, or disagree, and there will be no fiery antics where one will insist on convincing the other.

So yeah, speech is cool. I’m not gonna spend my words and $70 / year to try to convince you, dear readers, of anything. But there is plenty of other money out there being thrown around to in fact convince you of something or another, mostly political in nature. And that is a depressingly effective tactic. It turns out that a shocking number of people base their opinions, votes or other actions based in fact on very little information, but instead base it on the sheer volume of the messages they are bombarded with. ‘Name recognition’ wins a phenomenal number of elections, as many people simply vote for names they recognize.

(Full disclosure: I have been a participant in the depressing act of putting my name ‘out there’ in hopes that people would recognize it and vote for me for a local office. I bought newspaper ads, and yard signs, (all with my own money) and placed them where I could or thought they would have visibility. Yes, I was elected and served the full term. I am not proud of the tactic, but was advised by veterans of its, well, advisability. I prefer to think that voters tuned into the debates and read the position articles in the newspaper. (Aside: I have found that if you turn the leftover campaign signs inside out, write ‘Free’ on them with spray paint, and put them outside your house next to stuff you are done with, said stuff will reliably disappear.))

So, name recognition works. Not with me, but it works with a lot of people. I prefer to study issues, candidates, pros and cons, and research things for myself before reaching a decision, but a lot of folks are OK with supporting things that overwhelm them with messages. And that’s not speech, whatever side it is from. It’s noise. And that’s why large campaign donors, a few people, can sway elections that should be decided by us, a lot of people, because in so many cases, the person/party/platform that successfully makes the most noise, wins.

So the problem, as I see it, is not with corporate donations or large individual donors or benefactors. The problem is with us – somewhere along the way, people quit being passionate about things, and just accepted whatever was thrown at them. For decades and hundreds of years, we were in control, we said how things should be, but we have given it away in favor of whatever sign or commercial we saw last. That this is so can be evidenced by voting place rules prohibiting campaign signs within a certain (small) number of feet from the polls, or rules prohibiting election workers from wearing clothes to the polls that promote a particular candidate.

Are we so shallow that our vote can be swayed just by seeing a particular candidate’s name a minute before we actually vote? It would seem that some people act that way; hell, why would campaigns spend all that money on signs, buttons and such tripe if they weren’t actually effective in swaying peoples’ choices?

Now, this is not a particularly recent phenomenon. People have been influenced by fluff slogans and the like for years. ‘I like Ike’ was the classic; lots of people so declared their preference for Eisenhower, but many were not actually able to articulate why they were fond of the candidate. Great slogan though.

I get it. Informed voting is hard. It takes work to look beyond campaign literature, slogans and bumper stickers. It takes time to research candidates’ history in prior professional or elected posts they may have held, and to understand their positions on things beyond the 15-second sound bite. Who has that kind of time or energy?

Well, the folks that founded this country did. They were passionate about how things should be, to the point of laying their lives on the line to establish so many things about this country. Those folks turned their beliefs into our country, including our right to vote. And we shouldn’t squander that to a sound bite, catchy slogan or colorful sign. If we don’t owe it to ourselves, we at least owe it to them.