The General Election Silly Season

Just as sure as baseball and cookouts, mid-summer in an election year starts the General Election Silly Season. VUI calls it the Silly Season, because it is the time of year that parties, groups and campaigns ramp up the rhetoric to try to raise money from you. It is especially silly this year as political donations are difficult to gather.

Vice President Biden recently got caught up in the Silly Season by allowing an email by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that compared Republicans to Nazis go out under this name. VUI wishes that Biden and the Democrats were the only one to blame. But, they are not. Republicans and conservative groups join the Democrats and the liberals in trying to scare the Hell out of people to give money.

But the most disgusting fundraising ploy by politicos is not the letter or email trying to scare people; it’s the phony survey letter. In the mail and on the internet, it works. People want to believe that a candidate or a group wants to hear their opinions on matters. In the classic survey fundraising letter or website, the questions are not geared to get opinions. They are written to promote the group or candidate and are intended to fire up the reader to give money. There is a series of questions meant to appeal to the beliefs the reader and almost always the last question is “how much can you contribute?” In the vast majority of cases, the answer to that last question is the only answer ever paid attention to. What is disgusting is there are people out there not as cynical as VUI and they thoughtfully answered the surveys, but chances are, right or left, their thoughtful answers were known to no one but themselves.

So, such is the Silly Season of Election year politics. Democrat or Republican, all sorts of people are going to try to get some money from you for the fall campaign. If you don’t allow any politician or group to scare or flatter you into writing a check to them, you will come through the Silly Season just fine.