Starting a New Campaign

Have you noticed anything different in the last four days? There hasn’t been one television ad, radio ad or flyer delivered to your door in support of a political candidate or referendum. I don’t know about you but I think there is something about the week after elections that is akin to the week after New Year, but way better. Instead of post-holiday let-down, it’s more like post-election celebration. Oh sure, if our candidate lost we may not be as excited but there is still a certain amount of relief when it’s all over.

After my son, Paul, voted on Tuesday he said he felt like he’d just taken his ACT tests. He’s not far off. I think it’s more like a college exam. You go to class, get handed a sheet of paper with little circles on it that need to be filled in (at least in Minnesota), and you start filling in the answers. You studied, you know the answers, but wait, no one told you that there’d be bonus questions and suddenly you find yourself woefully unprepared and it’s too late to ask for help. Who should get my vote for judge in the 9^th district? Shoot! I should have studied better!

The truth is that I’m probably one of the most apolitical people you’ll ever meet. I’m not without an opinion, mind you, I’m just not politically inclined. I won’t argue politics with you and I won’t post on Facebook who I’m voting for, but make no mistake I will vote. Lots of people worked very hard to make sure women had the right to vote and I don’t intend to let them down.

All that said, there is ONE thing that I might consider fighting for in the political arena; some common decency. We’ve all seen the ads. It doesn’t matter which side of the line you’re on, the ads are nasty. They are filled with hateful remarks and half-truths about the opposing candidate. Is this really the kind of behavior we want to see from anyone, let alone the people representing us at the local, state and national level? Is this the kind of behavior we’d like our children to emulate? Isn’t there any way to stop this craziness?

Listen up politicians of the future. I promise you, if you can run a clean campaign in which you tell me what you’re going to do for my country, my state, or my local town and you refrain from telling me how evil your opponent is, I’ll most likely vote for you. There are a few major issues that could swing my vote the other direction, but in general, I think a person who can show some morals during a campaign might actually show up on the job with those same morals. (I do need to go on record here and say that I have a couple of friends in politics whom I know to be morally upright people and would not play dirty in their campaign but they don’t live in my area so I didn’t see their ads.)

Who’s with me? We could start our own campaign; PMUA - People for Morally Upright Advertisements or PADAC – People Against Dirty Ad Campaigns. If we start now, maybe by the time the next election campaigns start we’ll have made some progress. We’ve only got about 12 months. Yikes!