This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Political Strategy: Tell Me What I Want to Hear

There are several tried and true talking points that politicians use to win our votes.

I am starting to get old and have heard quite a few speeches in my life by would-be presidents. The longer life goes on, the more perplexed I am by the superficiality of content in these speeches.

It seems highly likely that the primary agenda of speech writers for these ladies and gentlemen is to determine simply this: what is it people want to hear? If a candidate can find that choice makerel of promise, the smell is so compelling that we begin clapping our flippers like trained seals.

What kind of mackerels do we like?

Find out what's happening in Port Washington-Saukvillewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Lower taxes is the best thing you can tell us. Presidents have been elected on little more than a promise to toss us this golden fish. Why do we like lower taxes? Because it sounds like we are saving some money. Please don't worry about explaining how you will make up for the money you're not taking in taxes, which services will have to be cut, who will lose work, etc. Just flip us a fish.

Cut spending. We don't care where or how you will make up for what you have cut. Don't complicate things by saying more than three sentences about where you will cut it. Say things like "pork barrel spending," and move on. 

Find out what's happening in Port Washington-Saukvillewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Tell us you Support education. Don't get long winded now ... just tell us you like education and want all our kids to be smarter and test higher than they did last year. While we are gobbling that down, no need to explain whether or not you support educators ... the folks who have to inculcate that education. No need to say where you stand on funding public schools, including universities. Just say, "I like education."

Any jobs in the bucket? Tell us you intend to create a whole lot of jobs. Pick a number out of a hat and a date you will accomplish this by. We are clapping. Woot, woot! Throw us the fishy wishy. We don't care if you create specific catergories of jobs or if you're talking minimum wage jobs that don't pay living wages. Keep it simple! Just say jobs!

How about "stimulating" the economy. That's a really big word so don't try to explain it. We know you know how to do the job, whatever it means ... and we like our economies stimulated.

Protect our freedom! Everyone knows if we nod off on our gazillion-dollar state-of-the-art defense, the rest of the world will arrive in a second and occupy our country. We will all be speaking Arabic tomorrow because there is nothing more those terrorists would like than to run this huge country. No matter that we get most of our uranium from Russia already, and that the Chinese own huge amounts of our debt. Those "commies" have to be held off! No matter that the countries in the Middle East are not individually larger than many of our fifty states ... they are just waiting for us to fall asleep so they can move in and evict us. 

Work on health care (somehow). We don't understand it, but we think it's probably a bit too high. If you promise you have a plan to deal with health care, retaining our freedom to choose our own doctor, you are good to go. 

Half a dozen fish and our brain tummies are full. If you throw any more, we will nod off or go make a sandwich. Our favorite shows are coming on soon ... so keep it brief. We aren't the leaders, you are. You are supposed to take care of us ... so do it! MMMMMMMmmmmmmmmm. Smack, smack, smack. 

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Port Washington-Saukville