First Bit of Media—Steve Hansen is Vague... Or Something...

As I was looking at all the political advertisements I own, as possibilities for this entry, this one particularly intrigued me:

This ad talks about three different groups—Democratic leaders, education leaders, and women's rights activists—which Steve Hansen apparently wants to connect himself to. To achieve this, various members of each group are mentioned as supporting the candidate, with the exception of women's rights activists, of which only one is mentioned. So according to the big blue rectangle at the bottom of this ad, "Democrats, women, & Sacramento leaders support Steve Hansen." That seems a touch misleading.

First of all, let's look at the ambiguity—to the point of equivocation—caused by the word "Democrats." This word could be used to describe elected officials who Democrats or all people who are Democrats. In the "Democratic Leaders" paragraph at the top of the page, he says he is "honored to have earned the endorsements of" multiple elected officials who are Democrats. Yet the big blue rectangle says that Democrats support Steve Hansen, not mentioning the elected officials any longer. By not repeating the phrase "Democratic leaders" here, the ad promotes the idea that all Democrats support Steve Hansen, that the two he named and the "other progressive leaders throughout our city" are somehow representative of the party as a whole. By saying that Democrats support Hansen, even if it could be seen to mean that some Democrats support him, this advertisement attempts to make readers think that, as a rule, Democrats support the candidate. So this use of the word is an excellent example of ambiguity bordering on equivocation.

Now let's talk about the category entitled "Equal Rights," the vagueness surrounding equal rights, whatever those are, and the category's dubious connection to women. Having equal rights literally means having the same freedoms as everyone else. But people have many freedoms, and are denied many freedoms, and many freedoms are unequally distributed. Steve Hansen seems to have an idea of a certain set of freedoms which he has worked to make everyone have equally. He has "fought my entire career for equal rights, same sex marriage and a woman's right to choose." The latter two state obvious cases of equal rights being fought for. Yet the former is simply a broad, general term which could mean anything the reader projects onto it.

Projection is also encouraged by the mention of the support of Dolores Huerta, who is described as having "fought...to deliver civil rights and to give a voice to marginalized communities." Which civil rights? What kind of voice? Which communities? The second part of the big blue rectangle states that women support Steve Hansen, so maybe Huerta, a woman herself, has worked to bring women a more active role in the workplace (giving them a voice) where they had previously been paid less. Or maybe she worked to give them a voice in the broader community when it came to contraceptive rights and abortion. Or maybe it wasn't women at all, but Latinos, since her name sounds like Spanish. She might have worked to get them into schools, or again, workplace equality. She could have helped a whole range of "marginalized communities," in an infinite number of ways, but nothing is said of the communities she helped or how she did it—why give in to specifics when the people reading the ad could be from any marginalized community and feel that Huerta helped them or their peers or relations gain equality and a voice?

And now we must return to women, and the vagueness surrounding them. WHICH WOMEN? Hansen says in his accurséd rectangle that women support him. But since we don't even know if Huerta helped women, and so if these women would follow Huerta's endorsement, we are left to ponder which women do support Hansen, aside from Huerta and the Dianna Rodriguez mentioned in the paragraph before. If the point of the rectangle is to summarize the above, which it very much appears to be, we must ask where he explains which women do support him and for which of his policies.

The third part of the big blue rectangle is also worthy of note. "Sacramento leaders support Steve Hansen." Yes. And I'm sure Sacramento leaders also support almost every other candidate. Different leaders, of course, and different numbers of them for each candidate. But just as with the use of the word "Democrats," "Sacramento leaders" is used to cause ambiguity. On the one hand we can see from the leaders mentioned that some do support the candidate. But on the other hand the use of the unqualified phase indicates, if only subconsciously, that all Sacramento leaders support Steve Hansen, which would lend him some handy ethos but is definitely not true. By allowing this ambiguity in phrasing in the big blue rectangle, the ad makes Steve Hansen seem like a more credible candidate, even as it uses misleading language.

The misleading power of that single rectangle, and the advertisement it purports to summarize, continues to astonish me. Every part of the sentence within the rectangle is vague or ambiguous in a way that, even after looking for further explanation within the text, appears to be designed to mislead. It may not have been. I could very easily be making a big deal out of nothing. But I found it so easy to misinterpret the ad to Hansen's advantage that I can't help but hope that other readers were protected from falsehoods by this same paranoia.