The presidential election season is heating up. Partisan emotions are reaching a boil, and many of us are filled with a passionate intensity. The comment cannot hear the commenter.
Yet the election is more than three months away. You need to do something with all that energy. You want to make a difference in this contest of 300 million voices, each shouting as loud as it can. That din is the beautiful tone of democracy, and you just want to be sure it’s tuned in the right key, since you have the vision, intelligence, and experience to know better. This is a noble impulse. You should follow it. How, though, can you be a difference-maker with so many people already shrieking?
The Stoneslide Corrective would like to offer some advice based on our vast experience reading political blogs and talking with our cousin who was once in politics. If you are an ardent supporter of one candidate, the best possible thing you can do is visibly, vocally, and aggressively support the opposing candidate. Yes, the other one.
The best research in voting behavior shows that people decide which candidate to vote for largely based on cultural affiliation. This makes perfect sense. Can you read the 1,000+-page health care bill and understand how it is likely to affect your monthly premium payment? Have you, with all your analytical acumen, done that? No. So, it makes sense for you to trust people you feel comfortable around, people who think like you. How can you upset this cultural affiliation in the other camp? Well, you already know there’s nothing they hate more than you. Get thyself into their community. That will make them doubt their existing convictions.
Imagine that a Texas oilman wearing $5,000 cowboy boots, gold belt buckle, etc., walks into a meeting of Literature Professors for Obama and loudly announces that he supports Obama. “Damn, he’s my kind of guy,” he says, slapping a tweed-jacketed back. “I trust him like I trust my daddy’s old coon hounds.”
Or a dreamy hippie girl, with flowing skirts and hair cascading down to her hips, wanders into a Chamber of Commerce Thursday Mixer and gushes about Mitt. When someone mentions the candidate’s support for free enterprise, she squeals. She spins a circle. “I think I’ll die if he doesn’t win; we need him,” she says while rapturously smelling a flower.
See?
Now, go fight for everything you loathe!
