David McElroy

Leaving political brochures on my doorknob is about as useless as trying to sell Avon products to the local Mary Kay sales rep. I’m certainly not buying, but I like to flip through the brochures and make fun of the attempt to sell to me.

When U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus started having ethics problems last year, other Alabama Republicans smelled blood in the water. With the primary election only nine days away, State Sen. Scott Beason has emerged as the leading shark.

I haven’t looked at any polling and I don’t know how much money Beason has to spend, so I don’t have an informed opinion about whether he has a chance. My gut says he’ll probably lose, but that’s simply because an entrenched incumbent such as Bachus is hard to beat, even if he is a lightweight with no real credentials.

This is the first campaign cycle in more than 20 years when I haven’t done any work for a campaign, so it allows me to experience an election from the outside for the first time in a long time. It’s an interesting point of view. I’ve done hundreds of brochures and cards similar to the Beason literature that was hung on my door Saturday. So I’m going to invite you to take a look at a typical campaign piece — through the eyes of someone who used to write and design them.

The Beason brochure isn’t terrible and it isn’t great. It’s pretty garden variety as campaign literature goes. I guess that’s what makes this so interesting to me. You could change the name and photos on this brochure and use it for pretty much any conservative Republican district. (Change the wording and the issues and you could come up with a similar template for a typical Democratic district.)

Keep Reading

I was checking out at a store Friday when I handed the cashier a box containing individual items that she needed to count in order to charge me for. I told her there were six of them and she rang it up without checking.

“Well, if you’re going to take my word for it without looking, there were really only two,” I jokingly said to her.

“Oh, you wouldn’t lie to me,” she said quite seriously and confidently. “I can tell. Most people would, but you wouldn’t.”

My first reaction was to be grateful that someone could see my sterling character all the way through the fat and ugly exterior. It’s kind of nice to be trusted, isn’t it? And to be honest, this is something I’ve heard strangers say to me all my life. I seem to have a trustworthy-looking face.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that her reaction wasn’t really that great. In fact, it’s the sort of poor judgment people use all the time when they turn their lives over to politicians who they’ve decided they can trust.

Have you ever heard someone say — of a politician or actor or someone else they’ve never met — “I really like him”? We all seem to make instant, intuitive judgments about people, and we’re oddly sure that our judgments are correct, even if it’s absurd for other people to make such silly snap judgments.

Keep Reading

It was almost 1 a.m. by the time I came out of Walmart Wednesday night. I didn’t have many items, but I rolled my purchases out to the car on a shopping cart because I had a huge bag of dog food that I didn’t want to carry. It had been raining hard while I was in the store, but there was a break in the rain while I walked out and loaded the car. Then the rain started again.

The parking lot was virtually deserted and there were shopping carts left abandoned in various places, presumably by people who didn’t want to take the time in the rain to put the carts in the places where they belonged. But I found myself walking the empty cart over to the cart corral — or whatever they call it these days — as the rain came pounding down on me.

As I ran back to the car, I laughed at myself for going to the trouble of putting the cart in the right place in the downpour. I briefly wondered why I bothered. After all, there were plenty of other carts all over the parking lot. Mine would have been just one more. There was nobody out there to see me, so nobody would have even known I hadn’t put it where it was supposed to go. Despite those things, I immediately knew why I’d done it.

I’d returned the cart to the proper place simply because I had decided — at some distant time in the past that I don’t even recall — that I was the kind of person who always put the cart up. I’d seen — and disapproved of — many people over the years who left carts in random places in parking lots. So I’d unconsciously programmed myself. I had decided that I wasn’t like that — and that programming gently led me to walk with a cart in the rain when others wouldn’t.

Keep Reading