California’s gubernatorial candidates are spending millions on campaigns and publicity. Ironically, the attack advertisements aiming to sway our votes are exactly what I find most unpleasant about politics. Political attack ads should be entirely ignored. Regardless of whether or not the statements are true, they use emotional language and selective phrasing to influence your vote rather than informing your thought process through a logical argument.The typical attack ad will present viewers with a set of accusations about one of the candidates. The statements may be true, but could also be misleading. Either way, we’re only hearing one side of the story.The specifics of politics can be complicated to the common man, making it relatively easy to misconstrue someone as a bad guy. This is especially easy when you have an entire public relations team producing a thoroughly premeditated 30-second advertisement.Barbara O’Connor, communication studies professor at Sacramento State and Director of the Institute for Studies of Politics and Media, said that campaign teams try to quickly appeal to our emotions and gut feelings because it’s all they can do to make their commercial time count.”You can’t really advance an argument in 30 seconds,” O’Connor said.Although it may be effective, the smear ad is unavoidably crude and unethical, even manipulative, and I still protest it.George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at UC Berkley, said that nearly 18 percent of people have conflicting ideas in their own heads that can be manipulated by how they hear something.”Ads use language that activates a certain worldview,” Lakoff said. “It’s an attempt to get (voters) thinking a certain way.”A person will think and vote differently on the same issue, depending on how he or she has come to understand it. The language used to describe an issue affects how we think about it, and those preconceptions affect what we understand and how we vote.Voters typically say they dislike smear campaigning, but political teams continue with them because the fact is, it works. It works because, sadly, most of us wouldn’t recognize political rhetoric if it was staring us in the face.”You tell someone that they shouldn’t be persuaded by those arguments, and they say, “I’m not,'” O’Connor said. “Then you ask them where they get all their information and they say, “television.'”According to the Pew Research Center’s website, “Television as a whole remains the (national) public’s main source of campaign news.”But even if the majority start getting their information from the Internet, the same campaign teams are still using the same slippery methods to influence our vote. If we don’t actually try to understand the tricks being used to deceive us, then we’re not actually confronting the problem.In order to open our eyes, we should stop being gullible and empower ourselves to effectively analyze the rhetoric of others. The public needs to be educated enough to think for themselves.”To make more informed citizens,” O’Connor said, “school really is the silver bullet.”Knowledge and critical analysis are really the best weapons against the subtle thought control of advertisement campaigns. If you’re going to vote, make it your vote and not someone else’s. Ignore the ads, pay attention to what’s going on and find the facts yourself. PaulRoundtree can be reached at [email protected]