"I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all."
- Ogden Nash, parodying Joyce Kilmer
By Steve Young
In the next few weeks, local and state campaigns will be ramping up for the election. It's not a big election year in Pennsylvania, but you won't be able to tell that from the proliferation of lawn signs, those mini-billboards that litter the shoulders of our highways and byways.
One day you're on Roosevelt Boulevard, and the next you're tooling down the Schmidt-Butkovitz-Williams-Untermeyer Freeway. The off-year names that clutter the roadside - not exactly Obama or McCain - will be unrecognizable to most voters.
The lawn sign has become a mode for advertising everything from massages to hoagies, as well as the marketing monster of the political midway. By the end of the campaign, this election will seem to be less about issues than a battle for numerical lawn-sign supremacy.
Lawn signs aren't so much about democracy as they are about insulting the intelligence of every registered American voter with more than one tooth. Who makes a decision based on a lawn sign? I doubt any voter looks at one and thinks, "That name is the kind of name I want running my government. That name seems to know how to spend my tax dollars. Boy, if I had that name, maybe one day I could become president."
With political ads on television and radio, at least there's an attempt to make a point. But most political lawn signs are too small to fit a candidate's full name and political party, let alone his platform.
Worse, they're unavoidable. One can turn off TV and radio commercials, but you can't bypass the signs lining the bypass.
If your neighbors want to publicize their support for a candidate, the signs are there every time you walk out of your house. And if they happen to have an abiding interest in the contests for school board, supervisor, judge, and tax collector, as well as a few local and state referendums, there's no seeing their lawn until at earliest Nov. 4.
Lawn signs are cheap, and they make the candidate, along with the volunteers who put them up, feel as if they're actually doing something. Elliott Curson, an advertising guru who has worked for Ronald Reagan and Arlen Specter, told me that they are more vanity plates than vote-getters. "They make local candidates feel good about themselves - make them feel like they can win," Curson said. "If they were honest, candidates really only want to put up two: one next to their home, and one next to their opponent's home."
So how do we stop this blight on the Delaware Valley landscape? Here's my suggestion: In next year's May primary, we've got about 30 or 40 candidates who will be vying for the Democratic and Republican nominations for Pennsylvania governor. I say we vote only for those who pledge not to use lawn signs. How often do we get the opportunity to see if a politician can keep a promise before we vote for him?