PUBLISHED: 09-08-08

Que sera, sera

I drink your campaign milkshake

I remember my first election in 2004. I was fresh out of high school and attending a women’s college. Even though it’s in the Bible Belt state of Missouri, Cottey College is a fairly liberal college, and everyone is encouraged to be tolerant. There was even a “Political Interest Group” that didn’t support any one political party; the group just wanted people to care about politics.

Many of us pay attention to the election coverage and see the TV ads meant to sway opinion. We observe the politicking and wag our fingers at the gossip.

The year President George W. Bush was re-elected, I was amazed at the passion I saw from his collegiate supporters leading up to Election Night. In particular, a couple of Texan girls absolutely loved him and planned, as I did, to send in their absentee ballots to vote.

Their door was plastered in Bush paraphernalia, almost resembling a shrine to their former state governor. They despised Sen. John Kerry. I made note of this and laughed with one of my democrat suitemates about it. But it didn’t end there.

A couple weeks later, we created a small, letter-size poster with pictures of the candidates on it and the altered words from a popular song at the time: “My campaign brings all the boys to the yard / Damn right / It’s better than yours.” Eighteen-year-olds with a political agenda. By replacing the word “milkshake” with “campaign,” we thought we were hilarious.

We posted it in the dead of night and woke up the next morning to a storm of angry Republicans. We got the reaction we wanted, but we didn’t want consequences—so we kept it a secret. We were the only ones who knew about it.

I realize now—as I’m telling the world what we did—that I was worse than the muckrakers and the people whose job it is to make candidates look bad. Only I was 18 and unbelievably immature about it.
The attack only served to upset the people on the receiving end, not to enlighten anyone about a particular candidate. It wasn’t constructive. Maybe I was taking the election coverage to heart.

A study by The Pew Research Center published on Aug. 6 found that most people feel they are hearing too much about Sen. Barack Obama and not enough about Sen. John McCain, but “Republicans and Democrats think Obama’s commercials have been mostly positive.” As far as who has the more negative ads, both Republicans and Democrats say it’s McCain.

The most recent ad I can think of is McCain’s infamous “Obama is a celebrity” ad featuring cameos (with or without permission) of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

Many laughed at the ad, thinking either it was entertaining or ridiculous. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know it added to my opinion about the candidates. I think I listened harder because it was so entertaining.

Four years ago, I made the mistake of forcing my opinion on some unassuming girls who really just wanted to see their homeboy get elected. To borrow from another popular set of words, “If you don’t have something constructive to say, don’t say it at all.”

I think I’ll just let the candidates take care of the smear campaigns, and I’ll stick to watching it go down on TV.

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