Handling a lot of the media and communications for a local election has been taking up a lot of my time. The site I put together for my wife is by no means complicated or otherwise time-consuming; it's the non-web aspects of the campaign that are so devastating to my daily schedule.

The web is a very fitting place for electioneering. Folks can read at leisure about the candidates and the issues, get differing opinions (lots of those), investigate non-partisan fact-sheets and political reports, and share their views on the usenet. Corny as it may seem, this medium can be like an electronic village green, as Mr. Perot suggests, and this is as good and reasonable a use for it as any other. The obvious problem, however, is that so few constituents are web-savvy. This leaves me and other campaign workers with the near impossible task of reaching everyone with more "traditional" media.

Seeing those static, landscape-marring, name-blaring posters along the road irritates me, and yet I'm guilty of placing many in the past few weeks. I have similar feelings about silly radio ads extolling the virtues of candidates in 30-second spots, dramatic, silly, or newslike. Again, mea culpa, they're a necessary evil to which I am wholly a contributor. Without going into a lengthy diatribe here about the merits or failures of old-fashioned audio-visual advertising for political races, I'd like to muse a bit about some differences between those of us doing our political browsing online versus those who aren't.

Active (i.e. web browsing) participation in the political process tends to suggest a more responsible, intellectual result versus the passive influx (those damned signs). If I'm browsing through a newspaper, looking for political information, I'm only going to come up with that which the editors deemed "newsworthy", or the paid advertisements that are hardly dependable for impartial facts. I place that kind of information several notches below the web sites of non-partisan groups. When I want to inspect a potential legislator's performance history, I can usually find it on the web without a "Paid For the Committee to Elect..." notice at the bottom. When it comes unsolicited in the mail, I know that something in this guy's past has probably been omitted from the brochure.

In designing Michele's site, I tried to be as objective as possible, including her biography along with totally opinionless information about the office she's seeking. Sure, there's a little hype up front, but nothing untrue, I promise you. Writing it all was relatively easy for me; Michele has never been a politician before, is not now, and will probably never be. I didn't have to worry about hiding or playing down any record of bad legislation, or slush funds, or other political skullduggery. The intent was "hey, if you want to vote for this woman (and I think you should), then find out who she is and what the position is, and then make a decision. Period. No signs, no slogans, no baloney. No matter how large the billboard, or how catchy the slogan, "active" information will most likely yield a better cup of coffee.

What's been taking all my time is the other stuff: palm cards (those 8-inch long cards with pictures and factoids on both sides) to be given out to anyone who'll take them at supermarkets, community fairs, train stations, etc.; posters with her name as large as possible so it can be seen while you whiz by at 50 miles per hour; radio advertisements that have to either touch a nerve (and that's tough to do) or simply be catchy (with a name like Michele L. Bermel, that's a lot easier), and other forages into traditional media. I could have developed a hundred web sites in the time and with the energy I've spent on these other forms of communication.

So what gets people elected? Not web sites, that's for sure. Big billboards, catchy slogans, saturation, repetition, scandals (for the other guys), and a plethora of other misplaced, misattributed, overblown, invalid, incorrect, untimely, and otherwise baseless information. Let's face it, folks. We're a long way from taking advantage of the web as a primary resource for election decisions. Average men and women are going to make their decisions based on their absorption of the passive; they're going to remember that name, that face, that silly radio jingle, the mailing that pointed out the dirty work of the opponent, and all the rest of the non-information that inundates the political arena from August through election day. And I'm busy as hell churning it all out.

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