WHAT WORDS GET YOUR VOTE?

If you are eighteen or older and a United States citizen, you will or should be headed to the polls this coming Tuesday to cast your vote for our next President, Vice-President, and a whole roster of other elected officials – unless, of course, you are like me and took advantage of early or absentee voting.

In large part, you have or will place your vote based on words. Words spoken or written by the candidates themselves, political action committees, or friends and in or on newspapers, billboards, lawn signs, television commercials, candidate appearances, on expensive glossy snail mailed cards, or one or more of the thirteen thousand twenty-six telephone calls you’ve received over the past several weeks.

It doesn’t matter who you like better – or, more accurately, who you dislike less – or with which party your beliefs generally align, you can probably agree that political candidates, as a whole, tend to do unspeakable things with words. They twist them. They make them up. The fling them like flaming sacks of you-know-what. Sometimes they’re true. Sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re recorded secretly. And sometimes they are spliced together in a masterpiece of video manipulation.

So how do you know what to believe? I don’t know the answer. But here are two things I do with all those political words:

1.            Consider the source of the words. I’m more inclined to believe those “I’m so-and-so and I approve this message” words than those where that affirmation is missing. For some candidates, it seems that they don’t even produce their own commercials – they just rely on or are victims of these other groups’ apparently astronomical marketing budgets.

2.            Listen to every single word. What are they really saying? But more important, what are they not saying? Those marketing message copywriters are very crafty – they choose each word carefully so if it seems they’ve left something out, chances are it was on purpose and not just an oversight. Ask yourself, "Why?"

Whether you are a Donkey or an Elephant and whether you are empowered by or view that label as an insult or associate yourself with a whole other “animal” altogether, happy voting.

-From the Wordsy Woman