I have to admit that I’m enjoying campaign emails from the Elorza for Mayor of Providence campaign.  I do wish, however, that our population were sufficiently educated in the finer points of reading to pick up on the thing that makes them so interesting.

Jorge Elorza is a progressive, which means that he’ll support a system of government that fosters corruption, while taking away other people’s rights, to boot.  I’ve put that contentiously, but you don’t have to agree with me to accept that some people believe it and will vote accordingly because they think Vincent Cianci is the lesser of two evils.  We’ll have to check back in the future to find out whether I’m right about Elorza or whether the outcome of an Elorza City Hall is better than Cianci’s brand of corruption.

What’s interesting, here, though, is the rhetoric.  Here’s a line from the latest campaign email:

One in five Providence voters remains undecided, and we need to reach every single one of them with Jorge’s positive message about uniting our city as One Providence.

Contrast that with this talking point from the candidate in a recent RI Public Radio debate:

“It’s about jobs, it’s about schools,” Elorza said, “and I’m running for mayor to change the culture at City Hall. I’ll be frank and I’ll be honest: I think it’s an embarrassment that Mr. Cianci is running for mayor of Providence once again. We can’t go back to the dark days of the past, and there’s a clear contrast and there’s a clear choice in this election.”

According to the other results from the poll that the email cites, the largest group of likely Providence voters, 38%, actually would like to “go back to the dark days of the past.”  That shows how absurd it is to overlap claims about a “positive message about uniting our city as One Providence” with a campaign characterized and motivated by the drive to keep a particular person out of city government.

Maybe it’s my literary sensibilities, but I find something amusing about a campaign with a theme that can be summarized as: “I’m bringing the positive message that we must keep that scumbag out of office.”

Viewed a little more deeply, though, the message is disturbing because the “One Providence” that’s united against Cianci must inherently exclude those voters who make a different calculation and support his third chance.  Winning electoral victory isn’t just defeating another candidate; it’s defeating the other candidate’s supporters, and it’s implicitly divisive to claim a general unity in opposition to a plurality of voters.

A little more deeply, still, the message is just creepy. It’s like a guy knocking on the door late at night to say that we value everybody in our community, and you don’t want to be one of those people whose values are different from everybody’s, do you?

Maybe Elorza would be a better mayor than Cianci.  Maybe he’d be less corrupt and not as apt as I think to implement restrictive big-government policies that foster insider deals, strangle the economy, and whittle away the liberty of residents of the city.  But this notion of claiming that the people of a community to be united against their neighbors (which seems to be gaining popularity among Elorza’s ilk) is downright dangerous, however effective it may be as a campaign strategy.