As many of you are aware, Election Day is fast approaching. In fact, as you are reading this, I am probably frantically knocking on doors and making phone calls to ensure crazy people don’t represent us in government.

However, not everyone can have the pleasure of speaking to a similarly involved partisan to learn about the candidates. Thus, most are dependant on the campaigns’ messaging. Usually, this tends to come in the form of things like commercials or those annoying ads on Facebook.

Unfortunately, this is a genuinely terrible way of learning things about politics. These messages are intentionally vague and overtly misleading.

Opacity is a facet of modern politics that most professionals are pretty comfortable with. While stopping just short of lying, this vagueness is a way of convincing people of things without boring them to death in the meantime. It’s the “overtly misleading” portion that deserves a little more scrutiny.

Not quite the same thing as lying, this kind of misleading message is easily explained away when questioned, but leaves potential voters with a mistaken impression of the facts.

To be clear, this is a bipartisan phenomenon. But, to be even clearer, Republicans do it a lot more often. In fact, it seems to be a main part of their strategy.

Let’s start with some illustrative examples. First, local congressional candidate Ann Marie Buerkle has recently started airing a TV ad about her stance on women’s health issues.

The ad is very well made, but at no point does she address the issue at hand. Instead, she spends the ad pushing a political narrative. It goes something like this: She has daughters, is a woman, registered as a nurse and worked as a health care attorney.

Voters are left to draw their own conclusion, but the ad is set up in such a way as to leave us with just one — that Buerkle cares about and will advocate for issues of women’s health.

This conclusion just isn’t true.

Her first speech on the floor of the House of Representatives was in support of a bill that would change the legal definition of rape to “forcible rape,” a definition that, according the legal doctrine, conspicuously excludes date rape and marital rape.

Beyond that, her voting record shows that she is one of the most anti-women’s health representatives in Congress today.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently alluded that the car brand Jeep was considering moving its production from swing-state Ohio overseas to China. Romney went so far as to repeat this line at multiple rallies and to include a similar statement in a last-minute ad.

Again, voters are expected to conclude that the auto bailout — one of President Obama’s signature achievements — has failed, and that Obama is doing more to help China than middle-class Ohioans.

Sadly for Romney, everyone of merit on the subject, including Jeep’s parent company Chrysler, has proven this false. Not only is there no talk of shipping jobs overseas, the company actually announced an additional 1,100 jobs at that same Ohio plant just last week.

The truly insidious part of these claims is that they are so effective. By imbedding just a passing thought into the brains of passive voters, they have the capacity to change minds and determine elections.

These claims are not outright lies. Buerkle is in fact a registered nurse and Jeep does plan to add manufacturing jobs in China.

What these messages lack is the full story; they leave out chunks of fact that are necessary for drawing accurate conclusions.

Colin Crowley is a senior political science and philosophy major. His column appears online weekly. He can be reached at cocrowle@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @colincrowley.

Published on November 4, 2012 at 2:11 pm