I've voted. A few weeks ago, it looked like I might have to direct something on Election Day…and since my polling place is inconvenient enough during non-peak hours, I applied to vote by mail. My ballot is now marked and sent and I can report that Barack Obama will get at least one vote in the great state of California. It wouldn't surprise me if there were others.
I was reminded of how little my vote in that particular contest mattered when I was in Ohio last week. The state is "in play" so you couldn't turn on a TV or walk past one without seeing a McCain or Obama ad, usually a negative one. For the record, if I was even vaguely in the Undecided column, none of the attack ads would have budged my vote in the direction of the person doing the attacking. They all would have made me think less of the attacker.
So here's what we do next election to get our guy, whoever he is, elected. We form one of those 527 groups and we run attack ads…against the candidate we want to see win.
We make them outrageous and full of provable lies. We tell America that he's Osama bin Laden in a clever plastic disguise and that he molests small farm animals and embezzles money from orphanages and in his spare time, he's personally responsible for sending every piece of spam you ever got in your e-mailbox. We slam our guy so many ways that the opposition to him looks like a bunch of lying sleazeballs who deserve to be repudiated…and voters flock to him as a result.
I'll bet it would work. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the Obama people had the same idea this year.