For the past few months American kids have been pummeled with lefty entreaties to vote: Punkvoter.com, the 21st Century Democrats’ Young Voter Project, and Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising Tour are just a few of the projects trying to harness the country’s youthful energy. But only one Web site is taking advantage of all these riled-up youngsters–many of whom are below voting age–by siccing them on their parents. ConvinceYourMom.com, launched by J.C. Dwyer, a 26-year-old Wilmette native, offers young people a “Four-Fold Path to Convincing,” his strategy for putting together a stat-fortified argument against Bush.
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Step one: “Survey the Field.” “The Cognitive Dissonance approach consists of finding out what your target cares about, then demonstrating conclusively how Bush has screwed it up,” says the site. “Faced with an onslaught of carefully prepared facts, your target will have no recourse: in order to preserve a self-image as a reasonable, consistent person, he or she will be forced to vote against Bush. Or risk feeling, well, hypocritical.” A sample icebreaker conversation follows. In step two (“Attack!”) you can access seven topical categories’ worth of administration-damning facts Dwyer’s culled from sources such as Harper’s Magazine, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (a nonpartisan data research and distribution organization affiliated with Syracuse University), Earthjustice.org, and several government Web sites. Steps three and four are “Parry” (the site offers scripts for dealing with rebuttals from your folks) and “Seal the Deal” (use “I” statements).
Dwyer lives in Brooklyn now; he’s studying social research at Hunter College in Manhattan. His parents still live in Wilmette. Dwyer has never managed to get a straight answer out of either of them about their voting records. “They’re very cagey about it,” he says. His mom, a homemaker, is especially wary of appearing partisan and tends to be nonconfrontational. “This is really the first year I started working on her,” he says. “I’ve tried to find out what she believes in, but if I start arguing a point, she’ll just let the conversation go.” He tells me he’s pretty certain she’s voted “straight Republican” lately, then adds, after a pause, “But she’d probably kill me if she heard me saying that.” (His parents chose not to comment for this story.)
I decided to try out the ConvinceYourMom approach on my folks, who, like Dwyer’s parents, are upper-middle-class independents who’ve leaned to the right over the years. By the time I called them up, mom didn’t need my prodding anymore–she’d decided to vote for Kerry. Dad, however, is a trickier case; if his reaction is any indication, all the noncombative, fact-based persuasion strategies a Web site can offer might not do the trick. After we amicably discussed some of the site’s facts on Bush’s environmental record and the Patriot Act (as well as PBS’s Frontline special on the candidates, which we’d both just watched), he said, “I find myself agreeing with Kerry right down the line, even with his waffling, and I’m repulsed by Bush’s apparent motivations and religious fervor. If I put down the pros and cons on paper it clearly doesn’t come out for Bush. It seems like I should be putting up Kerry signs in the front yard. But there’s some gut thing in me that’s totally separate from all that I know intellectually. I can’t explain it.” He and Dwyer’s mom remain, at press time, undecided.
