In politics, you’re either on message or you are losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… CONTEMPT AND DIGNITY.
Politics is a contact sport and things can get a little rough on the campaign trail – particularly in a tight race.
We don’t see so many of those in Utah but we have seen them in presidential races and we’ve seen them in recent cycles in the fourth congressional district.
Voters always say they don’t like negative campaign attacks but there’s a reason they are so prevalent: they work.
It’s easier to cast doubt about your opponent than it is to explain the intricacies of your position on the various policies that are important to you – and should be important to voters. So, what we get is attack ads with ominous music and cherry-picked votes and quotes that highlight the reasons the “other guy” can’t be trusted with your vote.
This month, a national movement to encourage voters and politicos to reject contempt and reward dignity launched a pilot project in Utah. It’s called The Dignity Index and it takes selected communication pieces, rates them on a scale from one to eight and is intended to give voters an idea of who is demonizing their opponent and who is choosing to be respectful, even when they disagree.
It makes sense. Politicians are already rated on how they vote on every issue by one special interest group or another. Maybe focusing some attention on how they speak during a campaign will clean things up a bit.
Of course, it isn’t always the campaigns that bring the heat. More often than not it’s the outside money, the political action committees, that go low, leaving campaigns to chug along the high road. Whether or not those groups are influenced by a dignity rating is a question that remains to be answered.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.
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