"You Can't SAY That!"

Negative advertising a sad fact of our fucked-up political system. It is much easier to say something nasty, whether true or not, about your opponent than it is to say something good about yourself.

Oh, before I continue, please allow me to add a brief note to Senators McCain and Obama…

QUIT WHINING ABOUT NEGATIVE ADVERTISING! SAME FOR THE “NEWS” MEDIA – SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT.

There.

Now that I’ve gotten THAT out of my system, please allow me to continue.

One of the things that I really admired about Senator Obama in the beginning of the primary season is that he seemed dedicated to running a positive campaign, despite Senator Clinton’s determination to go ugly early and often. Sadly, he has turned to negative advertising as well.

I have some sympathy for Senator Obama, however. His advisors and the democratic party accused him of being “too soft” on the notoriously negative republicans, fronted by John McCain.

Personally? I’d like to see the secretary of state pass a law against negative advertising. When I was a kid, it was against FCC rules for one product to mention the name of another product in it’s ads. Hence, for those of you old enough to remember, the once-much parodied “brand X” commercials. I’d like to see something similar passed for politicians. Of course, that wouldn’t stop anonymous bullshit like Hilary Clinton’s “3 AM” commercial. (And, for the record, Senator Clinton – if the White House phone rings at three AM, I would prefer EITHER Senator McCain or Senator Obama on this end of the phone. How did you react to the news of your husband’s blow job? If I remember correctly, you said that you cried, you screamed, you were short of breath, you about passed out… not the reaction that I want when the missiles are flying at three o’clock in the morning, okay?)

So what can we do about negative advertising? Vote. Vote against candidates that run negative ads – vote FOR candidates that do not. Kind of limits our options to about zero right now. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again – it took us a long time to fuck our democracy up – it’ll take a long time and a lot of patience to straighten it out.

What else can we do? Write to Senators McCain and Obama. I’m going to do that. Not to McCain – I’m afraid that my support for him vanished when he started pretending to be hard-right in order to get votes from Bush supporters.

What else can we do? Ignore the negative ads. When my kids were little, my ex-wife and I took parenting classes to be better parents. My son was an A # 1 fit-thrower, and one of the coping tools that we learned for that that worked really well was to ignore the fits. It worked. It took a while, but it DID work. So I’m suggesting the same thing here. Ignore the negative ads – focus instead on what they say about themselves and what their record is. Fortunately, since Obama and McCain are both senators, we actually have a voting record to look at. When a governor (like Bush or Romney) runs, it’s harder to judge.

Another thing to do is to prepare questionnaires to send to the candidates. No guarantee that they’ll respond, but at least you will have tried. I’m going to prepare questionnaires for our local offices that are up for election this year (Senator, Governor) as well as Senators McCain, Obama and Barr for the presidential run. I’ll post them here after I write them, as well as any responses that I receive, unedited but with commentary.

We can stop the negative crap, people… but in this country of Jerry Springer and “Moment of Truth”, where Americans seem to prefer sensationalism above all, it’ll take some time.

And patience.

Peace.

Randal