Mea Culpa – Paying for Advertising I Don't Watch

Mea Culpa – Paying for Advertising I Don't Watch

With only thirteen days left to Election Day, you may be sure that most candidates aren't out there telling you how much they admire their opponents.

Far from it. This is the time of year when the media, the pundits, and especially the voters who haven't put their TV in a closet, complain that the airwaves are saturated with negative advertising.

So I'm sitting here feeling just a little guilty that I've contributed to that saturation. To come completely clean, I admit that over the past year I've made modest monthly donations to political campaigns and political organizations that put up ads on your TV set.

And yet I haven't seen a single political ad myself either for or against any political candidate.

The truth is that I don't watch TV, not out of moral indignation, or fear that it will rot my brain, or any other ideological reason. It's just that when a commercial comes on, and the volume goes up, it's like nails on a blackboard for me, and if somebody doesn't hit the mute button, watch out!

In fact, as I ask myself why I fund a form of communication that I consider as much a form of torture as listening to Celine Dion, I have to confess that I don't have a very good answer.

Who am I trying to convince, after all?

If it's the small sector of undecided voters who still remain undecided after a seemingly never ending presidential campaign, then I have to admit that I pretty much agree with Ezra Klein who wrote that “from a civic standpoint, few creatures are as contemptible” as The Undecided Voter, (“Undecided voters? Studies show that most actually have chosen a candidate,” The Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-klein12-2008oct12,0,6236237.story).

After all we've had two years of news articles, TV debates, blogs, internet sites with reams of data, for the undecided to digest, and few could argue that John McCain and Barack Obama present anything other than a definitive choice for two very different ideological approaches to politics.

So why am I spending my hard earned money trying to sway people whose state of indecision I find almost incredible, given the amount of information available about the candidates who are running for office?

And yet as Klein also points out, “Undecided voters are believed to be the decisive slice of the American electorate, so they get the debates and the ads and the focus groups (assuming, that is, that they live in a battleground state).”

I also agree with Klein's contention, based on recent research by political scientists that many of the Undecideds are not really as “undecided” as they claim but are already leaning in one direction or the other, and may in fact not want to state publicly the name of the person they will probably vote for. And sure there are probably a few who just enjoy reveling in all the media attention they get every four years.

The fact is that I consider this particular election to be so important that I will spend my money trying to push a few people over the line towards the candidate they may be leaning towards. I'll press the Republicans who feel embarrassed at John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin to ask them to question his overall judgment. I'll press the former Hillary voters who aren't comfortable with a black man as President to look again at Colin Powell's endorsement. And I'll keep those ads coming.

So apologies to those of you who've already made up your minds. Just keep your finger poised over the mute button. And to all of you, Decided and Undecided alike – Get Out, and VOTE!