David McElroy

Republicans are the party of small government. They’re happy to tell you that each time there’s an election. They hate Big Government. If you’ll just vote them into power, they’ll shrink government and lower your taxes.

If you believe that, you’re a sucker.

Most people who dislike the GOP and who oppose it do so because they oppose its rhetoric. They’re either Democrats who have partisan reasons for cheering “their team” or they’re progressive left ideologues who favor a bigger, more activist role for government — for one reason or another.

But even though I’m a former Republican — and spent years trying to elect Republican candidates professionally — I find the GOP terribly hypocritical and unworthy of support. Even if I still believed in the concept of majoritarian rule — and I don’t — Republicans have proven over and over again that they’re not going to deliver on their promises to cut the size of government.

When Republicans took over the state Legislature in Alabama a few years back, they came roaring to power promising to cut government, roll back taxes and generally live up to all those glib promises we wrote for GOP candidates for years.

Guess what? They didn’t really mean all that stuff they said. They just wanted to get elected.

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I just saw a politician engaging in ridiculous race-baiting and my first reaction was to angrily denounce her.

My anger was hot and my self-righteousness ran strong. I wanted to condemn her in strong language and make it clear that she’s the sort of person who continues to make race a serious issue in the country. (I’m not going to mention which extreme she was representing, because it doesn’t matter.)

But in the space of 60 seconds, I went from anger at her to frustration with myself. I’ve now stifled my instinct to angrily point out how wrong she is and how she’s using race in a divisive way — not because that would be inaccurate, but because paying so much attention to such divisive people is what gives them so much power.

Race is one of the ugliest problems we have in this country today, and I understand the frustrations and grievances of certain people on both sides of the black/white divide. (Adding Hispanics and the interests of smaller ethnic groups complicates the question even further.)

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When I was about 24, I got a contract to produce a marketing campaign for a large church in Tuscaloosa, Ala. I wasn’t really qualified for the work — especially the television and radio portions — but one of the deacons involved in the selection process was the father of a friend of mine. He asked if I was interested and then set up a meeting with the pastor. I somehow talked my way into the contract.

At the time, I was convinced that churches needed to be using clever and impressive modern advertising to grab the attention of people who didn’t normally attend church. That’s what every modern organization did, so it seemed to make sense to me. I wanted churches to dump their staid old images and be creative in their graphics and copywriting. That approach sold Coke, Tide, Rolaids, Pepto Bismol, Dial soap and Chevrolets. Surely we ought to be doing the same thing.

My advertising campaign was a failure. The TV commercials were generic and boring. (I still have them on old U-matic tapes somewhere.) The radio spots were adequate but forgettable. The flyers for posting on college campuses were actually pretty decent, but I’m not sure anything was ever done with them. And the half page ad in the newspaper was a disaster because the local newspaper flipped my sunrise picture — what a cliche — and the picture and the copy didn’t match.

At the time, I blamed the relative lack of success of the campaign on my inexperience and poor execution. But as I’ve observed church marketing over the years — and thought a lot about why churches do the things they do and what they’re supposed to become — I’ve completely changed what I believe. I’ve decided that all of my beliefs about church “marketing” were wrong.

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