Hanger v. Sayre Highlights Why Politics Is Depressing
316 words.
Since seemingly half of the Virginia political blogosphere resides in the Shenandoah Valley, a lot of bloggers are talking (aka. bickering) about the upcoming Republican primary between incumbent Emmett Hanger and challenger Scott Sayre for the 24th District Virginia Senate seat. The CASTLE bloggers in particular are working hard to get Scott Sayre elected. Why Sayre? Beats me. Both men sound equally scary to me — they are both big time social conservatives.
The Sayre campaigning so far highlights one of the things I find depressing about politics at any level. Namely the disparity between a candidate’s allegedly intended message and the candidate’s actual message. Sayre-supporters, for example, talk constantly about getting out Sayre’s “positive message,” which sounds like a great and refreshing thing to do, except so far the only message I’ve seen coming through the blogs is, “The other guy raised taxes,” sometimes accompanied by funny pictures of Emmett Hanger holding bags of money, but almost never accompanied by any substantive reasoning. What’s positive about that? Pretty soon I’m sure we’ll start seeing Hanger’s retaliatory campaigning, which will undoubtedly further degenerate the level of discourse in the campaign.
Will any candidate ever have the courage to rise above character assassination in their campaign? Probably not, since anyone who tries doesn’t get elected. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle: Negative politics contributes to voter apathy, but voter apathy is probably the reason that negative politics works in the first place. It just takes too long to explain how one idea is superior to another, whereas it takes seconds to tear down someone’s character. I guess we’re stuck with it until the average American voter learns to spend more than the time span of a commercial spot or a nightly news sound bite or a blog headline to make their voting decision. It’s pretty sad to see the collective intellect of America dwindling into nothingness.
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