A growing trend around the United States is politicians dodg­ing all questions, and only entering interviews with preset conditions so we get very limited information on candidates.

This trend has become incredibly popular this election cycle in par­ticular, and these are what I would consider some very good reasons behind it.

1. Their ideas are just the same old thing. The less people know about your stances on the issue, the less they will know about your flawed ideology. Therefore, it is more likely they are going to vote for you.
2. Their ideas are crazy. They want to force their religious beliefs on you, and stop all pre-marital copulation. They think the presi­dent is a secret Indonesian Muslim welfare thug born in Kenya, they want to repeal all environmental regulations.
3. They’re just plain dumb, and they know the more they speak, the more they’re going to be putting their foot in their mouth.

Sure, there could be other reasons for dodging any kind of interaction. However, these seem like three logical assumptions to make based on the records of politicians all over the country. As someone who pays a lot of attention to politics, I’ve seen some strange stuff, but not quite as strange as some of the candidates coming out of the wood-works all over the country this year.

One of the lighter, but more lo­cal examples, is Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate for governor of California. She has a nasty habit of running away from people asking questions, and just lets her commer­cials do all her work for her. She has stated that the first thing she wants to do as governor is repeal AB32, a bill that regulates for the sake of the environment.

Watching candidates around the country destroy themselves every time they open their mouth, I can understand her idea of keeping quiet and letting scripts do the talking. But do we as citizens of “the greatest country on earth” deserve this kind of treatment? We deserve to know where our potential representatives stand on the issues, instead we get repetitions of sound bytes that can be misleading or downright false.

As debate season approaches we can only hope this era of silence will end and we can really get some decent information out of those who wish to serve us. We need to know if these people will serve us, or if they will serve an agenda we cannot stand to tolerate.