Demilitarized Zone

While I’ve been pretty vocal about how negatively all this campaign shit’s been affecting me, it turns out that I didn’t really know how good I actually had it until I went to New Hampshire for a buddy’s party this weekend.

I didn’t take my camera with me to document it because a) I wasn’t expecting to see what I saw, and b) any evening that starts with Guinness and ends with liquid dynamite White Russians so powerful that The Dude would find an excuse to beg off isn’t something you want to have evidence of lying around. But as soon as I got off the highway into Nashua, I found that every single lawn had at least one campaign sign stuck into it. Most of them had two or three, including some so big that they could have acted as emergency stop barriers had I gone off the road from gaping slackjawed at such fervent politicking.

Lawn campaign signs are one of those thing that I’ve never understood. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never had my mind changed on an issue because of a sign planted in front of even a nice-looking house, any more than the stoners in high school decided to forego the Grateful Dead because of the enthusiastic Van Halen logo I’d Sharpied onto my Trapper Keeper. The best I can figure is that it’s a way to say, “Neighbors, I support (insert candidate here) so adamantly that I wish you know know this fact, so that in the event you are considering supporting (insert opposing candidate here), you will know whose car to key.”

But mostly I was surprised because where I live, I haven’t seen a single Presidential campaign sign stuck into a lawn. Not one. The only two I remember seeing this election season were on the same lawn in the college part of town, and they weren’t for a candidate, they were “Vote Yes on Question 1” and “Vote Yes on Question 2” banners – Question one being to abolish the Massachusetts income tax, and Question 2 being for the decriminalization of marijuana. Which is a bold position even for a college kid who just finished either reading Ayn Rand or playing Bioshock, because if the income tax gets abolished and weed becomes a mere ticketable offense, that ticket will be for $750,000.

And I realized that, for good or ill, it’s because New Hampshire is a swing state, and I live in Massachusetts. Here, it doesn’t matter what candidate for President you support, because the Democrat is going to win. Period. We were the only state to go for McGovern back in 1972 (Including McGovern’s own fucking home state), and that has never changed. Even if the Democratic candidate was named Barack “The Wad” Hitler al-Jihad and was running on a platform of turning Massachusetts into a protectorate colony of Alabama, he’d still pull about 58 percent of the vote here.

So neither of the campaigns are spending all that much money here because the herd has already decided, so there’s no point. Obama knows he’s a lock here, and McCain knows it would be throwing good money after bad, like renting a booth hawking Goth Vampire Porn at an Evangelical Christian Convention.

Therefore, Massachusetts is kind of a demilitarized zone when it comes to national political advertisements; if you’ve got a TiVo to commercial skip during national network shows, there’s really no need to come across them almost at all. Which was baffling to my buddy from New Hampshire, who said that he’s got Halloween circled in big red ink on his calendar so he knows on what day it’ll safe to answer the door again.

Apparently he’s constantly accosted by political canvassers, and has received so much literature calling one guy a commie terrorist symp and the other guy a feeble old fart with a deep itch in his thumb that can only be scratched by The Big Red Button that he’s thinking of using them to heat his house this winter to offset his electric bill losses from the fuckers constantly ringing his doorbell. I’d offer to make him a big Joe Walsh For President lawn sign to chase them off, but that would probably just bring country fans to his door with Steve Earle CDs, asking him to consider supporting a good country rock act.

Weirdly, the only political ads I hear on a regular basis are on the news radio channel I listen to all morning long, and those ads are for the run for one of New Hampshire’s Senate seats. And at least I can listen to those analytically, since I don’t have a horse in the race. Based on that advertising, it seems that the main difference between challenger Jeanne Shaheen and incumbent John Sununu is that Shaheen wants to raise taxes as part of an arcane ritual to stave off menopause, and Sununu can’t make it to his desk in the morning without his daily bracing dose of President Bush’s jizz.

So I can honsetly say that, even though I don’t get exposed to much of it, political advertising has helped me solidify my position and make a decision: I will never move to fucking New Hampshire.

[tags]political advertising, New Hampshire, swing states, Barack Obama, John McCain, political humor, dark humor, satire[/tags]