As a resident of the District of Columbia, at some point in the next few months I’m going to have to decide who I want to be the next Mayor. Current Mayor Adrian Fenty is in a heated primary battle with Council member Vincent Gray, and is losing ground as we speak.

I’m not a big TV watcher, I usually turn on the TV once per week to enjoy something mindless, so I may be a tad late weighing in on Fenty’s ads but what the hell.

The series ads issued by the Fenty campaign aim to debunk what the Mayor and his advisors believe to be “popular” misconceptions about the Mayor by mentioning them explicitly. In some cases this can be a good thing, for example, if the claim is something that can be proven e.g. a voting record, such a strategy can work. But when you aim to dispel myths of personality traits things just get silly.

One of the ads features a woman talking about how some people say Fenty is “arrogant.” She goes on to list out some positive things that he’s done for the community, as though one can’t be effective AND arrogant. In another ad, a woman says that people say that Fenty doesn’t “listen to the people,” and then goes on to list evidence of decisions Fenty has made presumably at public behest.

I found this ad to be ineffective for two reasons: 1. I’ve lived in the district for 2 years and in a suburb a mile outside of NW DC for 2 years before that. I’ve never heard that Fenty doesn’t listen to people. In fact, as far as I know, the Mayor is known to personally answer emails, now the seed of doubt has been planted in my mind. 2. Providing a few examples of when the mayor has listened doesn’t tell us much about his overall penchant for considering feedback.

Fenty has suffered some losses in the straw polls held so far. I think this is a good time for he and his team to reevaluate Fenty’s current ads and consider spending more time telling us what he’s done, rather than what strawmen think. It’s almost never a good idea to repeat back to people the negative words they or others have said about you. The words get stuck in the brain of the listener (having heard them multiple times) rather than the message you seek to convey.

For the record, I have NO idea which candidate will get my vote.