I’ve been blogging for 10 years. One of the things I struggled with was the idea of taking down my personal website a few months before the election.

I was told that this was a “must do” thing because my opponent would use photos of me wearing a Halloween costume or something in an attack ad. The photo of me wearing a coconut bra and a grass skirt from eight years ago I could almost be guaranteed to see in an ad, they said.

I didn’t want to believe it, but I acquiesced and took my weblog offline and even deleted the Google cache of it. I felt like I was removing a part of myself.

Then in the last weeks of the election, sure enough, silly and absurd photos of me appeared in attack pieces sent to my neighbors. I thought I’d see attacks based on my policy ideas perhaps, but no. The ads used silly photos of me on friends’ Flickr and Facebook accounts.

The first one I saw was me holding a glass of wine in a restaurant and calling me a far left liberal because, you know, if you drink wine you’re a liberal. I laughed it off as absurd. “No one will believe this.” I said.

And then came another attack ad with more silly pictures. And another.

I believe in political discourse, but I’ve seen that a good part of how we elect people is based on image. Does this mean our system is broken? I’m not sure.

At least I know why politicians always seem so bland — they’ve done a good job sanitizing their life. Or, at least, they don’t live in the online world.