You’ve got to love when the campaign season rolls around in politics.
As our current Governor Jennifer Granholm is preparing to leave office on Nov. 2, democratic nominee Virg Bernero and republican nominee Rick Snyder are gearing up to battle it out to claim the soon-to-be vacant Governor’s position.
And how can you tell they are getting ready to duke it out? Oh, it’s the attack ads, of course.
Although the candidates have mostly stayed quiet since claiming their respective party’s nominations, the air war finally kicked off in the past few weeks as the state democratic party ran its first attack ad on Snyder, accusing him of shipping jobs overseas when he was an executive of Gateway Computer.
So as the game usually goes, the republican party and Mr. Snyder volleyed back with an ad accusing Bernero of spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on his office aquarium’s cleaning costs, personalized pencils and his dining services.
We all know politicians spend taxpayer dollars on things we’d rather not have them spend our money on, but when politicians have to dig and dig to find any sort of information in order to throw an opponent under the bus, the whole political landscape has turned into a high school lunch room with the candidates spreading gossip like a group of 16-year-old girls.
While I understand the whole nature of politics and the ridiculous mudslinging that it produces, these ads do nothing more than try and provoke fear in the mind of the voter.
Voters are ambushed with ads that do nothing but dig up skeletons from the past, but the problem does not lie within the advertising, but with the voters.
So many people are willing to spout off facts from attack ads all too frequently, when they can just as easily put in a little effort and actually look up how a candidate has voted and what their values are.
And that is a sad fact in our society today, that many people are willing to form opinions in key political issues without the slightest bit of research.
With this in mind, we all have to do our due diligence when it comes to voting and political issues. Just think about it, whoever gets elected in the end of this race will be the governor of Michigan for four years until the next election.
So don’t you believe that you should at least take some time to research the people you will be voting for? n