Persuasion at its Worst

Not coming soon to a television channel near you

I’m going to the polls today holding my nose. After enduring months of attack ads on television and dozens of daily calls to my home phone (thank God for caller ID), it’s impossible to muster any enthusiasm or respect for either candidate for governor, or for anyone else.

Is this the best that today’s persuasive communication can do? Billions of dollars and presumably some of the brightest minds in the business fail to produce a spark of intelligence or positivity. Our political process has devolved: through a process of survival of the nastiest, we’ve gone from the Federalist Papers and the Lincoln Douglas debates to name-calling on TV.

The scary thing is that they tell us they do this because it works. That’s scary because of what it says about us, the voters, more than what it says about them. Are we so shallow that we are susceptible to such superficial arguments? Are we so selfish that we will sell our vote for one narrow interest? Are we so distracted that we can only pay attention for thirty seconds at a time? Have we lost the skills to listen to carefully considered arguments, weigh the evidence, and form reasonable conclusions?

We complain about politicians all the time, but maybe we’re getting exactly what we deserve.