Enough negative attacks. These candidates really don’t have horns |  Gary Yordon

I ran into Kristin Dozier the other day and she didn’t have horns.

I mean if you just listen to the campaign being designed to discredit her, I would have bet the farm that she had at least a couple of nubs. But no, she was the same Kristin I had known for years. Go figure.

And I saw a picture of John Dailey at a high school football game. He looked pretty normal to me as well. No pitchforks or pointy ears. Amazing.

The truth is that despite the extreme rhetoric — which attempts to narrowly pigeon-hole candidates into looking like scoundrels because of a vote they made or comment they liked on social media — is unfortunate on many levels.

And if you think this noise isn’t keeping talented people from running for office, you need to get your head out of the sand. I’m amazed that anyone with any talent is willing to take the inevitable public beating just for the opportunity to serve our community. The herd of potential future candidates has officially been thinned. I know that, because those people have told me that’s why they won’t run. We have met the enemy, and they are us.

I think about David Bellamy — a good man I’ve known for 30 years. Loves our community, a caring surgeon and a guy whose family is his world. His crime was voting for a couple Republicans who happened to support a couple medical issues he believed in — so ipso facto, he must have become the people he voted for. And it was game-on to bury him under a blanket of suspicion. He deserved better.

I think about Jeremy Matlow — a good man who has built a solid business and offered himself up for public service. Great father and husband. His crime was asking uncomfortable questions and upsetting the applecart by challenging city management and the traditional business community. So now he’s a hypocritical slave labor scoundrel. He deserved better.

Having a healthy community discussion about their different visions for our future got rained on under a cloud of noise from people in the grandstands, armed with assumptions, fear-mongering and keyboards. People who read a nugget on social media and become fortunetellers with the ability to see into a candidate’s soul.

And here’s the bottom line on the Matlow/Bellamy race: After both of them were smacked around for eight months, a poll showed a close race with more than 20% of voters still undecided just a few weeks from Election Day. Those are voters who heard the noise and were unmoved, waiting for someone to shove a little inspiration their way. And in the end, Matlow made the pivot with his smart ads about his family, and a boatload of those undecided voters went his way.

Over the last 40 years, I’ve helped design the messaging for hundreds of local, state and federal campaigns. And among the many truths I’ve learned, there is one that has proven to be true time after time: When you make a negative campaign too big, it becomes small. When the negative is so absurdly absurd, thinking voters file it in the stupid folder. And Leon County is loaded with thinking voters.

Negative advertising in today’s political universe is clumsy at best. Big booming voices talking over sinister photos and throwing fugazis around like Vito Corleone. They might as well save some money and just throw a pie at the screen.

Most political consultants will tell you that the over-the-top negative moves the needle. And they would be correct. The goofy negative you see does influence some voters. But it’s also the easy way out. It’s easy to throw a stone, but it’s harder to convince someone why the right thing to do is to never pick up the stone in the first place.

Belching out negative ads is child’s play. But inspiring people to believe in you is hard work. Which is why some candidates take the quick and easy path to needle-moving. But if you take the time to inspire a voter, it will stick and it’s a more solid needle-mover, maybe not as fast, but stickier.

That doesn’t mean a political ad that’s critical of a legitimate issue or vote has no place. It does. This column is about trying to convince a voter that if a candidate has a long neck, then his or her parents must have been giraffes.

Let’s stop the name-calling and planting false flags. This mayor’s race is about two public officials who see two different paths for our future. That strikes me as a pretty good opportunity for someone to paint a picture on that palette.

Gary Yordon is a host of the political WCTV program "The Usual Suspects" and president of The Zachary Group. You can find his podcast, "Banana Peel Boulevard" at thepeelpodcast.com or on the Apple, Amazon Music and Spotify platforms. Yordon is not a paid consultant for either the John Dailey or Kristin Dozier campaigns.

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