AS I have written in this column before, there is an art, an almost delicate and frustrating art to the designing of slogans for political candidates. Campaigning is a game where you work to be as visible as humanly possible in positive ways, and as practically invisible in negative ways. You want to try to make a concrete connection to voters. You want to establish a link that will last for weeks or months and compel them to fill in your oval on Election Day. You don’t want them to think of you when they think of things such as lying, immorality, laziness or corruption.

But it is tricky to make these sorts of connections.

You can spend millions of dollars on consultants and fancy signs, and you may get the same basic results as talking to your pare’ over the tangke and brainstorming campaign slogans using Journey lyrics. A universe of massaging and messaging does not guarantee effectiveness. It may increase the chances; just as having a ridiculous amount of resources at your disposal can end up creating intimacy through media carpet-bombing. You become a force of inevitability, as if it is destined for you to win because I see your face and your signs everywhere. This can also lead, however, to resentment and resistance. Over-saturating a market can have the same effect as placing ads above urinals. Your message may get through to every possible corner of the island, but people may end up feeling like your candidacy is an unwelcome, oppressive intrusion in their lives.

When you are making your message, what approach do you take? Politics tends to reward mediocrity or banality when it’s wrapped in nice-sounding things, and tends to punish those who truly embody an ideological difference from things as usual. There is always a lot of pressure to move toward the warm, fuzzy and meaningless. The alchemy of this usually ends up taking the political lead of the candidate and transforming them into a gold plated nugget that beams the following: strong ... trust ... friend.

You take these three most basic ways of describing yourself and find the most interesting, inspiring, least offensive way of combining them together. “Vote for me because I am strong, I am someone you can trust, I will be a friend to you.” A lot of the problems in politics emerge at this level. The messaging is more important than the message. Most people don’t care, don’t know what you actually stand for or what you might actually do, but so long as you have a message that they won’t mock or crack jokes at, you just might have a shot.

There is, however, always a feeling of preemptive dread as you go about crafting this slogan. It is similar for parents today who are trying to pick a Chamorro name for their child. Names such as Tasi or Ha’ani are common now, but if you pick something that is a little bit more radical or cerebral you may end up scarring your kid for life with a name that is unpronounceable to most on Guam or easily associated with something funny/negative. Naming your child “Matå’pang” today because you want to honor the great hero Matå’pang who killed Father San Vitores, but your son may end up living a local version of Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue.” To you, “matå’pang” may mean “purified” or “brave,” but the rest of the island doesn’t live with you. What sounds good amongst your friends, family and supporters may sound terrible after you’ve driven by a sign that proclaims it for several months or carried it with you through middle school.

It is no wonder that people can be so cautious.

A unique slogan can make or break you. It can be like a superhero’s cape. As you stand atop a building with the wind blowing, a crowd may shout out about how majestic and heroic it makes you look. On the other hand, the cape may make you look foolish as you walk around Micronesia Mall. People may snicker and ask you how the midnight screening for The Avengers was, or warn you to be careful since they now sell Kryptonite at the ABC Store.

I feel like more candidates should take silly risks when they are looking to define themselves in just a handful of words. Don’t hide yourself by rehashing the same words everyone is supposed to use in order to create the same image. Even if you can win elections that way, the discussion and the debate is poorer and less interesting because of it. You didn’t assert yourself in a real way as a candidate and so you probably won’t assert yourself much as an elected official.