Story:

In one of my congressional races, I was attending a gathering of small businesspeople (my state’s Restaurant and Lodging Association conference). My opponent had run a sleazy TV ad about me that my then 13-year-old son had seen. He called me hysterically crying and after running through a list of reason why (Got hurt? Fight at school? Something with mom?) I finally calmed him down enough for him to tell me he had seen the TV commercial. I told him that what the ad said was not true and one of the main reasons I was running was to change what my opponent was doing.

The next day when I spoke in front of the conference, I gave my speech on the issues, and then at the end, brought up the previous night’s call from my son. My goal was to help the audience see that the people they were sending to Washington simply because of the party they belonged to were, well, the kind of people they didn’t really like in real life. So, impulsively, I asked the crowd, “How many of you here hate Washington, D.C.?”.

I mean, it was a Republican crowd in a western state that famously hated the feds telling them how to live and what to do (in their view).

Serendipitously, I scored! Nearly every hand in the crowd went up. Phew! Which allowed me to reply with the words, “Then why do you keep sending the same people back there? The way they campaign is the way they are going to govern, because we’ve all let it work for them back here at home. It’s all they know.”

After my speech, I had more people come up to me and thank me for saying that than pretty much any other talk I gave over the course of that campaign.