Tired of campaign ads
I wish the political discourse accessible to the majority of the population came in chunks longer than 30 seconds. You can’t make or refute an argument in that short a span of time, and the result is that no one wins. We’ve stopped expecting political dialogue to involve arguments and answers in the first place – it’s all about the quick sell. I could point you to a dozen videos of campaign ads as proof of this, but if you know how to search on YouTube or really even turn on a television, I trust you can find plenty of examples for yourself.
There are lots of times when politicians should naturally want to explain themselves. Many of the sound bites and other tidbits easily turned into attack ads started out as decently reasonable things but were taken out of context. Not all started out as genuinely good things, but they’re usually not as bad as they’re made out to sound. You can tell because the voiceovers in the ads sound like they’re in a trailer for some dystopian sci-fi movie. In a world where nothing is quite like it seems… If they really had a thoroughly compelling case to make, they wouldn’t need to explain it in an ominous voice with scary sound effects. Surely there’s another side to the story… why aren’t politicians eager to refute these weak attacks?
The biggest example of this lately is all the hubbub about who said what about whom before the US Presidential nominations were secured. The Clintons and Joe Biden said Obama didn’t have enough experience, particularly in foreign policy. Romney criticized McCain on a million different things. McCain’s using clips of Hillary Clinton and Biden in ads now. How could McCain even consider Romney, commentators are saying, since he said such nasty things about McCain during the campaign?
This baffles me, especially after having watched both the Clintons’ and Biden’s speeches at the Democratic National Convention, in which they gave full support to Obama and his ability to lead the country. There’s such an easy response! Why isn’t it being made explicitly? It would work equally well for Romney, should the need arise. It goes like this: “Last year I thought [fill in name] had [fill in shortcoming]. but over the past months, as I’ve watched him campaign and heard his opinions on [cite a few key issues or events], I’ve come to realize the depth of his [strength in area of supposed shortcoming] and I’m now entirely sure that he is a well-qualified candidate.” There, was that so hard? We can admit that we changed our minds because we had actual reason to do so.
I could imagine acceptable explanations of lots of other seeming grounds for attack. Voted before some legislation before you voted against it? Explain how bills are usually hundreds and hundreds of pages long, and get amended at different times in complicated ways, so it’s possible to have the “same” bill with very different policy outcomes at two different times. Told a bunch of evangelical Christians that deciding when life begins is “above your pay grade”? Point out that the nature of life is a complex philosophical, theological, and scientific question, and that while any group of people might think it has the answer, it’s not the place of the president to decree that there’s one right perspective when there’s so much debate still going on. Unable to remember how many houses you own? Explain that they’re in your wife’s name, and she buys and sells them without really involving you at all. And maybe confess to the fact that almost all nationally well-known politicians are very wealthy, and seriously, we all knew that, it’s not a crime.
The thing about McCain’s houses really interests me. I just searched on JohnMcCain.com for anything about that mini-scandal, and couldn’t find anything except for a bunch of old articles about the subprime mortgage crisis. I can understand not making a big shiny featured link on your front page to your refutation of Obama’s attacks, but I can’t understand not taking the time to clear them up at all.
On the other hand, Barack Obama has a section of his web site called Fight the Smears. That’s a good start, but it doesn’t cover the more nuanced stuff, and even for what it does cover a lot of people aren’t looking there or don’t even realize the site exists.
I’d like to see the mainstream media stop reporting on what misconceptions the public might hold about incendiary campaign ads, and start reporting on the truth behind the accusations. I’d like to see politicians unafraid to admit they’ve changed their mind and happy to explain the reasons why. When they just let oversimplified, out-of-context attacks go unresponded to, they’re tacitly admitting that the attacks have merit. We should be trying to raise public discourse to a higher level by expecting that politicians explain their actions, and demanding that they criticize each other only when they have more evidence than a sound bite.
Comments
One Response to “Tired of campaign ads”
Leave a Reply
Well put. Let’s hope most voters will, for a change, ignore those ads and listen to what the candidates have to say in the debates.