Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

A couple links about Bush and Rove today.

Link 1 was that I happened to catch Fresh Air on the radio today, and Terri Gross was interviewing Wayne Slater, co-author of the book Bush’s Brain : How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. Slater was apparently based in the Austin bureau for the Dallas Morning News, and covered Bush from the beginning of his political career. There were some interesting anecdotes about Rove’s tactics, and how he planned Bush’s path to the presidency from day one, even before he’d convinced Bush to run for governor of Texas.

Which brings us to link 2. A friend of mine had heard about a tape of the debates between George W. Bush, master of malapropism, and Ann Richards, when they were running for the governorship. I’ve heard Ann Richards speak on the radio, and she comes across as a very bright person, intelligent and articulate. And apparently, Bush destroyed her in the debates, outarguing her, and generally demonstrating a level of intelligence that most nationwide voters would be surprised by. My friend tracked down this report on the web which indicates the same thing - James Fallows, author of Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, which I quite liked, wrote an article in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly reviewing a tape of that debate, and talking over the implications with my favorite professor, George Lakoff. It’s fun to speculate about the change in image that Bush is projecting now from then.

Also recommended to me recently was the book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. It traces the rise of the conservative movement over the last few decades. The friend of a friend that recommended it says that the authors claim that the conservative think tank movement is a reaction to the liberal university environment of the 60s and 70s. Since conservative thinkers had no place in the university, they created their own, one specifically geared towards politics. And, unsurprisingly, since they were oriented towards politics, they grew much more effective at turning thought into action than the liberal thinkers remaining at the universities. Lakoff is starting to fight this with his RockRidge Institute, but they’ve got a big lead.

Whee. Too many books to read. And that’s not even counting the 5 books I currently have checked out from the library, the three books I bought from a used bookstore recently, or the 10 books sitting in my shopping cart at Amazon, not to mention the 81 books on my Amazon wish list. Argh. But Bush’s Brain sounds really interesting, y’know, for studying up when I open my political consultancy. Yeah, right. I only wish.

A friend clipped this New Yorker article for me entitled “The Unpolitical Animal”, in which the columnist reviews the state of political science with regard to how voters making decisions. In particular, he discusses the article “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” by Philip Converse, which found that most people don’t have a coherent political belief system. They don’t have a sense of what issues mean, how they go together, and the consequences of certain decisions on other aspects of government.

When pollsters ask people for their opinion about an issue, people generally feel obliged to have one. Their answer is duly recorded, and it becomes a datum in a report on “public opinion.” But, after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the same questions, Converse concluded that “very substantial portions of the public” hold opinions that are essentially meaningless - off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles. These people might as well base their political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do.

There’s a lot of good but scary stuff in the article. Well worth reading.

It’s interesting because it demonstrates how ill-informed any of us are. And it makes me wonder about the viability of democracy. I’ve ranted about this before:

I guess the whole point of democracy is that the millions of people who are going to be affected make the decision. But does this really make sense for public policy decisions? If I were ill, I wouldn’t want a million people to decide what’s wrong with me, I’d want one qualified doctor. If my car’s broken, I could probably figure out what’s wrong with it by asking hundreds of people, but it’d be a lot faster to ask somebody who really knows cars. If society’s broken, should this method change?

This is more a criticism of direct democracy, admittedly. I know I don’t have the time to become familiar with the issues and tradeoffs associated with the decisions necessary to run a city, state or government. I can’t imagine that most people do. So why should the decision-making power lie in the hands of people who aren’t well-informed, and as the New Yorker article points out, probably don’t care?

The United States Constitution set up a representative democracy for a reason. Okay, that reason was probably elitism and thinking that most people can’t handle making decisions for themselves. But at the heart of it, I like the idea. I don’t have the time to do all the analysis; therefore, I’ll appoint somebody who will go do it for me. We do this in all aspects of our life, as the article points out:

An analogy (though one that Popkin is careful to dissociate himself from) would be to buying an expensive item like a house or a stereo system. A tiny fraction of consumers has the knowledge to discriminate among the entire range of available stereo components, and to make an informed choice based on assessments of cost and performance. Most of us rely on the advice of two or three friends who have recently made serious stereo-system purchases, possibly some online screen shopping, and the pitch of the salesman at J&R Music World.

It makes sense in theory. Unfortunately, in practice, by having a single representative, it gives special interests one place upon which to focus their persuasion. And with billions of dollars at stake, those special interests have a large incentive to distort public policy (see my review of Mancur Olson’s Power and Prosperity). Unfortunately, direct democracy is subject to the same pressures. And since mass media techniques continue to evolve in efficacy, the uninformed and uninterested electorate at large may actually be more vulnerable to such pressures than an individual representative who has an electorate to whom they have to answer.

It’s a hard question. Obviously, I don’t have any answers. Most people want to have control of their lives, and that’s a strong incentive for direct democracy. But most people don’t want to have the responsibility of doing the research to make informed decisions with that control, and I think that’s a problem. There’s some merit to considering changing voting requirements from our current “any non-felon with a pulse over the age of 18″. A lot of people think there should be intelligence requirements, or civics knowledge quizzes, or something like that. My theory is similar to that of Heinlein’s in Starship Troopers (book, not movie), where he proposed that only people who served time in the government earned the right to vote. My less stringent version is that people should have to participate in local government to earn the right to vote. A few hours spent attending city council meetings each month would demonstrate the tradeoffs necessary for government to happen. You can’t have everything, even if you vote for it. And the thing about time is that we all have the same amount, 168 hours in every week. It’s non-discriminatory in that sense. And by demonstrating the responsibility to go to such meetings, it weeds out people that want to vote just for the sake of voting. I’m sure there are flaws with such a method. But it would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

The American Museum of the Moving Image has put together a repository of campaign commercials, dating back to 1952. The commercials of most interest to me, of course, were the current commercials being run by Bush and Kerry. Since I live in California, which both parties are ignoring, I yet to see a single campaign commercial on TV. So I was curious to see what the voters of Florida, Ohio and Michigan are seeing. And now I’m distressed.

Bush’s commercials are very well done. The campaign is basically the “stay the course” approach that’s common for incumbent presidents, with the motto “Steady leadership in times of change”. The attack ads against Kerry do a good job of targeting Kerry’s weaknesses, in particular his voting record and his attempt to be all things to all people. The ads make their point dramatically, with technically excellent direction; when discussing Democratic attack dogs like Michael Moore, they zoom in on their faces to make them look like they’re shouting crazily into the camera. When talking about hope for America, there’s a lingering shot of a young girl looking up at the sun.

In contrast, Kerry’s ads are absolutely terrible. Disastrously bad. What are Kerry’s weaknesses? He has an image problem of being stiff and distant. So why do all of his commercials feature him droning into the camera? By the end of the first commercial, he sounded like the Charlie Brown teacher to me. Having that kind of focus on Kerry just emphasizes his lack of charisma. You’ll note that Bush’s team wisely kept Bush completely out of most of his commercials except for brief voiceovers.

What’s another Kerry weakness? The perception that he waffles on the issues, chasing the votes. So statements like “My priorities are jobs and health care. And my commitment is defending this country” just sound ludicrous. It makes me want to smack whoever is writing his copy. Pick a focus. Certainly don’t change focus multiple times within a single thirty second spot! Again, Bush’s team does it right - each ad is targeted at a single issue (”Troops”, “Weapons”, “Doublespeak”, “Jobs”).

I just don’t get it. How are the Democrats so incompetent at managing the media? If the media is really liberal, as conservatives like to claim, and if Hollywood is so liberal, then how come there isn’t a single person on Kerry’s team who knows anything about image management? It’s boggling. I want to march into Kerry’s headquarters and offer my services. Because I can’t possibly be worse than what they already have.

Of course, having said that, I guess I should say what I’d recommend doing. The problem is that Bush has staked out his position nicely with his ads. He is appealing to people’s innate conservatism to stick with the existing choice. He has identified Kerry’s weaknesses and established them in the public consciousness. He even has guarded his own flank with an ad (”Attack ads”) accusing Kerry of going back on his word, showing a tape of Kerry saying that he will not go negative (taken from the primary campaign), juxtaposed with the multiple ads attacking Bush. Basically, there’s only two ways for Bush to fail at this point; one is for the economy to take a dive, and the other is for a major conflict in Iraq with significant American casualties. And I can’t say I really hope for either of those.

I guess the best advice I’d have for Kerry is what I recommended at the end of this previous post. Let others such as MoveOn.org focus on bashing Bush and getting out the liberal vote. Concentrate your effort on getting your positive message out there. Why should America change leaders? What is your vision? Don’t give me a health care plan. Don’t give me economic policy. Gore demonstrated what a turnoff that is for the voters. Give me a shining vision, something on par with Clinton’s “New Democracy” that inspires me. The same old Democratic rhetoric will not win this election. Somebody needs to tell Kerry that. Soon. Or it will be too late.

I saw a link to this article about Colin Powell over at GQ. I was skeptical initially because GQ didn’t really seem like a place to find an in-depth story, but I thought it provided a nice profile of Powell and his struggles within the Bush administration. Admittedly, I’m totally biased against Bush and his attack dogs, so it’s not surprising that I’m sympathetic to Powell, but this article seems to realistically portray the struggles within the Bush administration, at least from Powell’s perspective. Worth a read.

The subject of Donald Rumsfeld came up while IM’ing with a friend a couple days ago. We were talking about the various accusations flying around, and my friend asked: “i wonder what bush’s real agenda is in keeping rumsfeld around”. My response was “He’d have to find another scapegoat when more allegations arise. He keeps rummy around, Rove makes sure everything sticks to rummy, Bush jettisons him to demonstrate his leadership in october. That way he gets both credit for loyalty (to rummy) and then leadership and making the hard choices. It demonstrates his character to the midwest.”

No real point in posting this except that in the unlikely case that the world really is as cynical as I sometimes think, it’d be nice to be able to point to this.

It is interesting to talk about the importance of character, especially in a lot of the Midwest battleground states. I’ve been reading Moral Politics, a book by George Lakoff, on (to quote the subtitle) “How Liberals and Conservatives Think”. Lakoff is a cognitive linguist and the book is his attempt to understand political thinking in terms of different cognitive models of reality. In particular, he concentrates on moral systems and shows that conservative and liberal thinking tends to cluster around two alternative family models which he calls the Strict Father system and the Nurturant Parent system. The Strict Father system takes as its basic assumption that the world is a dangerous place, full of evil, and therefore it takes a strong leader (the Father of the family) to protect his children, teach them the self-discipline and self-reliance necessary to survive such a world, and command their obedience until they grow up. It’s a tough love, “spare the rod and spoil the child”, reward-and-punishment system. The Nurturant Parent system is one where all children are to be supported and encouraged to find their fulfillment, a system of less hierarchy (both parents share parenting duties) and more inclusion.

Lakoff spends the book going into detail on how these different worldviews affect politics, but I’ll get into that more when I finish the book and review it. The difference that I want to focus on here is that liberals tend to focus more on the issues, and conservatives tend to focus more on the man, when voting. In a world of strict hierarchy that is implied by the Strict Father model, it’s important that the man in charge is of strong character, one whose moral beacon is unquestioned, and whose authority is undeniable. The liberal viewpoint is more encompassing and consensus-driven, so the person is not as important as the issues where everybody wants their say. So how does this relate to the election?

Let’s go back to the example of Rumsfeld. Bush is essentially running his entire campaign on the character issue, as a strong leader who will stay the course, who will do what is necessary to protect his people from the evil around them. He is running as the Strict Father of Lakoff’s system. That means he must demonstrate his character in a variety of ways to show that he is worthy of the people’s trust. Rumsfeld provides a good opportunity to demonstrate two facets of character. By sticking with him now, Bush demonstrates his loyalty, his unwillingness to give up a comrade under fire. In October, Bush asks Rumsfeld to resign. He will have demonstrated his loyalty by that point, so Bush can use the firing as a chance to show his leadership and ability to make the “hard choices”. If Rove does his job, then any other allegations that appear over the next few months will be diverted to Rumsfeld, making Bush appear squeaky clean, and able to use the whole incident as an electoral advantage in demonstrating his character to dubious Midwestern voters.

Viewing things through the Lakoff lense, we can see the several mistakes that John Kerry is making in running his campaign. I covered several of these before, but I never get tired of this stuff, so I’ll go into more detail. One point is that Kerry has a reasonable grasp on the liberal population, given their fear of Bush on the issues, so he does not need to concentrate as much on them. But his failure to develop his personal narrative could be fatal in the Midwestern swing states. If Bush is running on character, Kerry needs to do so as well. And if Kerry focused on developing his own story and getting it to the voters, he should be in great shape. He’s a decorated war Veteran, with years of public service, running against a former alcoholic drug-abusing draft dodger who hasn’t earned a single thing in his life. Unfortunately, Kerry took the wrong approach. He concentrated on bashing Bush before developing his own story, which makes him look weak and negatively opportunistic.

If I were in charge of the Kerry campaign staff, I would punt on all of the issues and the getting out the liberal vote and Bush-bashing. There are plenty of grassroots organization who can and will do a better job of it (Moveon.Org is the best example, but there are many others, such as Howard Stern and Michael Moore). Kerry needs to be focusing his efforts on publicizing his personal narrative and putting it in terms of character and the “Great Man” theory of politics. His campaign can afford to stay positive, because there are plenty of other organizations that will do the Bush-bashing for him. And he needs to stay positive, to give people a real alternative to vote for, somebody whose character they feel they can trust. It’s especially important in this election because if people feel that they are choosing the lesser of two evils, they will just stay home and not vote. And given the threat to their way of life, you can be sure that Bush’s supporters will be out in force. So Kerry needs to get people excited to vote for him, to get that Clintonian buzz going. I remember being astonished in 1992 by how many people I knew were genuinely excited by Bill Clinton the man. Kerry will never be the natural politician that Clinton was, but he could stand to take lessons from him on ignoring the issues and selling himself as the product.

Anyway. I’ve wandered far afield again. Someday I’ll get bored with ranting about politics. Maybe.

So, after yesterday’s post which talked separately about Arianna Huffington and Howard Stern, I was amused to hear Arianna as a guest on Howard’s show this morning. Politics really really makes the strangest bedfellows. They commiserated about the idiocy of Bush especially after the robotic press conference last night, before Stern got distracted by inquiring about Arianna’s ex-husband, who came out as gay after the divorce. Then Stern started asking her what the sex was like and whether she had any clue, and she’s asking whether they should talk about something more interesting, like defeating Bush. Stern would have none of it, saying that he was more interested in the sex at the moment. Arianna got frustrated and found something to get Stern back on track. She mentioned that she’d had dinner with Uma Thurman the previous night, and Uma had asked Arianna to ask Howard if she could come on the show and do a joint voter registration drive to help defeat Bush. Howard said “Okay, now you’ve got my attention!” And then he told Arianna to tell Uma, “Baby. I am doing everything I can to defeat Bush. I am begging my listeners to vote against him. I would love to help register voters with you.” Absolutely hilarious stuff. And yet serious. Stern may be a wackjob pervert, but he can get people to listen to him. And just the idea of Arianna Huffington and Uma Thurman and Howard Stern teaming up because they all hate Bush makes me think that there’s some hope that Bush could be defeated this fall. If these different people from these very different backgrounds are all anti-Bush, that has to mean something.

I can only hope.

First of all, George Lakoff’s ideas are exemplified once again by this Arianna Huffington column, where she is talking to the 11-year-old son of a friend of hers:

“Arianna,” he said with the enchanting optimism of a Greek-American boy, “I’m going to convince you that you should support Bush in November. Here are two questions you have to answer. The first question is: Are you for more or less taxes? The second question is: Do you want to fight the war on terrorism?”

Absolutely brilliant. George Bush and the conservatives have made their frame so widespread and so simple that an 11-year-old boy can articulate it clearly. If the Democrats had anything like that level of media savvy and attention to marketing, it wouldn’t even be a close contest this fall. Arianna actually makes a good stab at starting to set appropriate liberal frames in the column, but they’re too complex still. I’m thinking about buying her book though, to see what other thoughts she might have. She and Lakoff at least recognize the problem; it’s going to take years for the cognitive machinery to be put in place to combat the conservative think-tank movement that Lakoff describes.

Another Alternet post does a great job of describing how the Democrats are being “Betamaxed”, in the sense of having a superior product being destroyed by poor marketing. She cites poll numbers showing that when people are asked in isolation, they tend to support liberal positions like the environment, universal health care and gun control. But when they get to the booths, they vote Rebublican. She describes the brilliant branding the Republicans have done, such that they’re still the party of smaller government and fiscal conservatives when it’s been more than 30 years since a Republican president has passed a balanced budget or reduced government spending. Read the article. Good stuff. Falls in line with Lakoff’s stuff beautifully.

Which brings me to my last topic, one that I’ve been meaning to write about for a few weeks now. A key influence in the upcoming election may be one that absolutely nobody would have predicted. And I’m talking about Howard Stern. Yes, the radio shock jock. For those of you who haven’t been following the story, Howard Stern decided earlier this year that Bush was an idiot and that he was going to vote for Kerry. Two days later, his show got pulled off of Clear Channel, the radio station conglomerate, whose owners are huge Bush supporters. The show allegedly got pulled in response to the FCC cracking down in the wake of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident, but Stern hadn’t changed his show in years. The only thing that changed was that he started bad-mouthing Bush on the air.

Clear Channel pulling his show off of their stations sent Stern ballistic. And he’s dedicated what little time he has left on the air (there’s allegedly a bill in Congress which would make radio personalities personally responsible for the six figure fines the FCC has started handing out for indecency) to railing about Bush. And while I may dislike Stern’s preferred lowbrow humor, I do respect his media savvy. A lot. The man has built an empire of radio, film and books selling himself as the product. He knows how to get people talking about the things that he wants to talk about. And now he’s talking about Bush being a liar, about Bush’s destruction of the environment, about Bush being in bed with corporate lobbyists like Clear Channel. And he’s a smart guy. He has regularly been taking calls from listeners who are Bush supporters and destroying their arguments on the air. He invited a conservative pundit and Al Franken to debate on his show, and he and Al ganged up on the conservative and made him look like a fool.

And this could be incredibly significant. Like it or not, Stern has a huge following nationwide. And it’s a predominantly white straight male demographic that is anything but solidly Democratic. If he convinces his listeners to vote against Bush, that’s a significant swing right there. But he’s gone further than that. He’s taking Bush’s arguments and rebutting them on air. His listeners can now take those rebuttals and repeat them whenever somebody confronts them with a conservative argument. It’s kind of weird, but Stern could be influencing the political discourse of this country at a grass roots level in a way that hasn’t been seen outside of the conservative movement (Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage perform that function nicely over there). And don’t bet against Stern. He’s got more media savvy than the entire Democratic party put together. And he’s a compelling speaker - I’ve started tuning into his show occasionally in the morning to listen to his anti-Bush rants.

It’s a fascinating story to me. It’s the power of the media. It’s controlling the framing of issues. It’s understanding the importance of marketing a position. All issues of interest to me, all rolled into one story. I’m rooting for Howard Stern. And that’s something I’m not sure I ever thought I’d say…

A friend sent me a link to this article over at Yahoo, describing how Bush has scored points by defining John Kerry with a series of negative ads since the end of the primaries. We then saw this article where Ralph Nader, of all people, tells Kerry to loosen up and be himself. As usual, I’m fascinated by the media wars, and by how image is defined in these political battles, as well as the strategies involved. So here’s some thoughts on Kerry’s campaign.

Kerry needs to figure out what he stands for and use that to define himself. Up to this point in the campaign, Kerry has been defined by what he is not. In the primaries, Kerry won because he was not Dean. So far in the general election, Kerry has been trying to run by being not Bush. But that’s not enough. George Lakoff does a good job of explaining how “voters vote their identities, not their self-interest.” (Lakoff’s Second Law). George Bush has created a strong brand that defines who he is. He’s a regular guy that’s for national security, smaller government, and strong Christian values. The fact that each of these claims is patently false has nothing to do with the situation. Democrats can try all day to point at Bush’s record and show that he’s a Washington insider blue-blood, who’s put Americans in more danger than ever and increased the size of government to a size not seen since Reagan. But people don’t listen to facts. They have bought into the Bush image, the Bush brand, and that’s what they vote for. That’s why, as the first of those Yahoo article points out, Bush is trusted by 50 percentage points more than Kerry on national security, despite Kerry’s vast experience in the Senate.

Kerry doesn’t understand Lakoff’s Second Law. He’s trying to get voters to vote for him based on reason and logic. He needs to instead be spending his time creating a compelling story and publicizing it. For one thing, he needs to accept the term liberal and then start the battle to define it. By ducking the question and denying that he’s a liberal, Kerry makes liberal look like a bad word. This is especially ludicrous when Kerry has one of the most sterling liberal voting records in the Senate. Kerry should shout that he _is_ a liberal. Follow Bush’s strategy of solidifying your own flank before going after the middle. Bush is nailing down his religious right flank with the gay marriage amendment. Kerry needs to nail down his liberal left flank by agreeing to actually be a liberal. Then go after the middle by explaining how being a liberal means standing up for the environment, it means treating people with dignity, it means not giving your corporate buddies tax writeoffs worth hundreds of millions of dollars while they lay off 10% of their workforce.

Lakoff’s right. The political process is all about giving yourself an image that aligns the voter’s self story with yours. Interestingly, both sides of the campaign have so far failed to run ads in that vein. Bush’s attack ads on Kerry are surprising in that by bothering to attack Kerry rather than stand on his record, Bush makes his own record look weak and makes Kerry look like more of a threat. But at the same time, Kerry’s response ads have looked just as pathetic; they basically convey the message “Bush is attacking me! Waaaahhhhh!!!” Neither one of them is stating what they stand for. Bush doesn’t have to. His brand is already established in the nationwide market. He can afford to go negative this early. Kerry still needs to define his image. He’s a moderate with liberal social tendencies, with a strong background of supporting the military. That’s an entirely electable position. If he markets it right.

And the first thing he needed to do on that front is take his weak points and pre-emptively strike to remove them from the debate. Unfortunately, he’s too late to do that. His weak points, in my eyes, are his wealthy heritage (and heiress wife), his liberal record (which I think he should exploit rather than hide from), and his “flip-flops” in the Senate (which are mostly a result of actually doing politics rather than talking about it - Bismarck’s quote about “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made” seems appropriate here). Unfortunately, Bush has beaten him to the punch on both the flip-flopping and the liberal record. For a large portion of the country, Kerry is now defined as “one of them“. And it’s going to take a focused effort to overcome that. I just hope he figures it out in time.

Once Kerry establishes his image, and fortifies his weak points, that’s when he can go back after Bush. That’s when he discusses the tragic loss of life in Iraq. That’s when he details the disgusting corporate kickbacks. That’s when he points out the inconsistencies in Bush’s 3 years in office (such as being for free trade, except when it affects the steel industry or other politically important constituencies). But by starting out with those points, Kerry is running the risk of defining himself purely as being not Bush. And defining one’s image negatively is a guaranteed route to failure in American politics. We’ll see what happens…

I mentioned George Lakoff in my list of links a month ago, but somebody recently forwarded me a link to this interview with him, where I got a better sense of his thinking. That page also links to this other interview, which has some really great bits.

Lakoff was the guy who said frames trump facts, the “law” that intrigued me so much I linked to it before. These interviews apply that concept to politics. In particular, he points out how the conservative movement has spent thirty years developing a coherent conceptual structure that allows them to use a coordinated set of phrases that frames the debate in their terms. Tax relief is his common example, because relief implies an affliction that must be relieved, therefore taxes should be relieved. The liberal or progressive movement has not built up this infrastructure of framing, instead relying on the ideas to sell themselves:

Also, within traditional liberalism you have a history of rational thought that was born out of the Enlightenment: all meanings should be literal, and everything should follow logically. So if you just tell people the facts, that should be enough - the truth shall set you free. All people are fully rational, so if you tell them the truth, they should reach the right conclusions. That, of course, has been a disaster.

The problem is that as soon as you let the other side set the frame, you’re arguing on their terms. The question “Are you for or against tax relief?” is similar to the linguistic trap in “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” The question is inherently unfair, because how could anybody be opposed to relief? Questions like this are used in polls all the time to influence how people respond. But it’s hard to fight your way out of such a frame, because very few people think about the implications of how things are phrased, so when you argue against the language, they say that you’re just nit-picking and tell you to shut up and answer the question (any resemblance to Fox News is purely coincidental, of course). Another example phrase is “intellectual property”; Lawrence Lessig fights against this phrase because as soon as you call ideas property, then you bring a whole set of other connotations about property - property is owned, it can belong to only one person at a time, etc. It biases the whole debate.

Lakoff also points out that conservative politicians have all of these think tanks and institutes who coach them on this stuff (he says that Frank Luntz is the man who leads that effort - check out this Mother Jones article detailing one of Luntz’s reports). The liberal movement has no such equivalent at this time, so they’re essentially going into this battle completely unarmed. In response, Lakoff is one of the co-founders of the Rockridge Institute, a group of scholars coming together to “develop a vision, a strategy, and a moral language that can move U.S. society in a progressive direction.” There’s some really good thought-provoking essays on their website.

To bring this all back into the realm of things I’ve previously ranted about, the Democratic candidates are all terrible at the image game, something which has bothered me since the beginning. Lakoff agrees:

Do any of the Democratic Presidential candidates grasp the importance of framing?

None. They don’t get it at all. But they’re in a funny position. The framing changes that have to be made are long-term changes. The conservatives understood this in 1973. By 1980 they had a candidate, Ronald Reagan, who could take all this stuff and run with it. The progressives don’t have a candidate now who understands these things and can talk about them.

A friend of mine sent me a great example of this yesterday. From the New York Times:

“This is not a time for photo opportunities, it is a time to create real opportunities in America,” he [Kerry] told a town hall meeting at Northcentral Technical College in Wausau, Wisconsin, after touring a laboratory and
posing for photographs with a 40-pound aluminum slab into which a computer-control machine tool etched the words “Wisconsin Backs Kerry in 2004.”

He decries photo ops in the middle of a photo op. Unbelievable. Reuters undoubtedly helped by phrasing the story so that both concepts are in the same sentence. But these are the sorts of mistakes that will doom Kerry in the general election. He just doesn’t understand how to play the image game at a master level. He’s at least figured out its existence - the move to bring all of his Vietnam veteran friends on to his campaign was a smart move to help change his image - but he’s got a long way to go before he can match up with Bush and Rove.

It doesn’t help that it’s pretty much impossible to figure out what Kerry (or any of the other Democratic candidates) stands for. They’re pretty much against Bush. That’s about it. The incoherence of the Democratic platform drives me nuts. Lakoff again:

Right now the Democratic Party is into marketing. They pick a number of issues like prescription drugs and Social Security and ask which ones sell best across the spectrum, and they run on those issues. They have no moral perspective, no general values, no identity.

Edwards has actually come closest with the Two Americas campaign, a nice succinct summary of what he stands for. Unfortunately, I think he’s standing in the wrong place. As I noted before, too many people are convinced that they’re going to vault into the upper tax brackets soon to think that the rich and privileged should be penalized (check out this survey by Luntz’s group which shows that people oppose the death tax even though it only affects inheritances of more than $625,000, a figure which few of us are ever likely to see). [Update: An alert reader pointed out that my use of the phrase "death tax" was using the conservatives' framing. Oops. You can see how insidious such language is.]

Lakoff makes a lot of sense to me. The day before I read those interviews, I wrote this in an email to a friend:

I think that your point about the larger liberal discussion is a good one. Part of what the Democratic party and the liberal movement has suffered from is an inability to agree upon and communicate a core message. Oddly enough, the Republicans should suffer from the same fate since their party now covers a crazy patchwork quilt of alliances between the old-school fiscal conservatives to the neo-con hawks to the fundamentalist Christians, etc. But now that I think about it, I suspect that the commonality is that all of those folks agree upon the importance of order and hierarchy, so they fall into line when they have a strong leader (and are more likely to produce people able to be seen as those leaders) (and no, I’m not counting Bush as a strong leader, but he’s got people on his team that are). Meanwhile, the liberals, by focusing on being all-inclusive and consensus-driven, often come across as ineffectual and ethereal.

The Rockridge Institute is designed to construct and communicate a core liberal message. This will be crucial to setting the debate in the years moving forward. I’m actually tempted to write Lakoff and ask if the Institute needs a part-time intern to help proofread and edit or something, because getting involved in these discussions is something that would interest me greatly. We’ll see. For now, though, I should shut this down and go to the job that pays me.

So I wanted to get one more entry in on politics before the Democratic primary race totally collapses this Tuesday when it looks like Kerry will take 5 of the 7 contested states.

One of the things that I previously observed about this race is that it’s all about perception. In particular, I said a month ago about Dean:

Yes, he’s got moderate policies, as Tom Tomorrow points out in his cartoon. But he’s not known for that. He’s known for angrily spewing on television against the war. That’s the extent of most voters’ knowledge of Dean. If elections were decided by a careful analysis of the issues, I would agree that Dean has a very good chance. But they’re not. Elections are decided by personalities, by gut instincts, and by first reactions.

The perceptions are very popular. All people saw on television of Dean was him screaming about Bush (or yelling after the Iowa letdown). And that plays powerfully into what people think. This Online Beat column over at The Nation has an interesting observation that the one area of New Hampshire that got its news from a relatively independent newspaper was the one area that Dean won.

What do I think will happen? It looks like Kerry is heading towards victory right now. He’s got the Big Mo’ (mentum) going right now. Which is a pity, because I don’t think he can beat Bush. For one thing, he’s a New England liberal, which was part of the reason I was originally worried about Dean. Unlike Dean, he is a war veteran, which will help a little bit. But there’s no way he can run believably against the Washington culture when he’s been a senator for twenty years. He’s had to make too many compromises, too many votes of expediency. And, yes, that’s the way things actually get done in Washington. But it’s too easy to pick at those compromises, and you can bet Karl Rove has teams of researchers on that task right now.

What disappoints me about the race is that Edwards and Clark have managed to split the “Southern Democrat outsider” vote in half, basically dooming both of them to irrelevancy. If you combined their tallies, they would be a force to rival Kerry, and one that has a much better chance of beating Bush for the reasons I outlined in that original post. But with neither seeming willing to back down and accept the vice-presidency, it looks like they’ll hand the nomination to Kerry, and the general election to Bush. And that just sucks.

Why do I like Clark? I think he’s electable. That’s it. I understand that most of my friends disdain him because he’s a total cypher. He has no positions of his own. He has taken no stands. He’s a blank slate politically. But that’s why he’s electable. As soon as you take stands, you get judged by those stands. Kerry will get nailed for this now that he’s the front runner, or he may hold it off until the general election. And I don’t think being a cypher necessarily means nothing will get done. If Clark chooses the right advisors, he can get quite a bit done. I think Bush is primarily a figurehead, but he’s got a crack staff, and they have accomplished far more than our worst nightmares when he became President four years ago.

With a little bit of massaging of his message, Clark could go right after the traditional wing of the Republican party. What should he be aiming for? A strong national security as evidenced by his generalship. Fiscal discipline. Balanced budgets. All of these are historically Republican issues. And issues that Bush is vulnerable on; his own party is rebelling against his egregious budget deficits. With the right strategy, I think Clark could hold the line on those issues and mix in enough socially liberal issues to attract Democrats. Yes, it brings the Democrats back to the center, which disappoints my more liberal friends. But the center is way better than wherever Bush is trying to take us.

Totally random observation. I was IM’ing a friend of mine, and he commented that “homeland security is such a sham”. My response: “um, yeah. if they’d just admit that homeland security is a giant jobs-creation program, a la the New Deal TVA, I’d respect them more”. It’s totally a socialist economic stimulation package. If a Democratic president were in office, the Republicans would be screaming bloody murder about it. As it is, they’re barely being held in check. If the Democrats put up a credible centrist candidate, there’s a decent chance they can steal some protest votes from the Republicans which may be all they need; in the New Hampshire Republican primary, according to this Nation column, “One in seven Republican primary voters cast ballots for candidates other than Bush, holding the president to just 85 percent of the 62,927 ballots cast.” But Dean is not that candidate, certainly not with the way he’s been portrayed in the media. And I don’t think Kerry will be able to escape his ties to the special interest groups that helped him continue to get re-elected to the Senate.

Edwards is a great liberal candidate. From what I’ve read, he’s got the best stump speech going. But I don’t feel that his “Two Americas” speech will play well with many Americans. Yes, there’s outrage about the rich getting richer and getting benefits that others don’t. But most Americans don’t believe that redistributing income is a good thing. I think it’s because America has the rags-to-riches story as one of its central myths, so many Americans believe that if they work hard enough, they could be the ones on top. And they don’t want to risk their theoretical gains. Judging one’s own competence is difficult, and we experience the Lake Wobegon Effect where “all the children are above average”. So even though Edwards Southern outsider characteristics lend themselves to the general election, I think he will be too liberal for most (heck, his ads make me a bit nervous). His lack of leadership experience and non-veteran status are also big weaknesses against Bush.

Which brings me back to Clark. I wouldn’t mind seeing a Clark/Kerry ticket. Or a Clark/Edwards ticket for that matter. Both have their advantages - Kerry would bring the knowledge of how things really work in Washington, while Edwards might be enough of a bone to keep the liberal wing of the Democratic Party from defecting to Nader or candidates further to the left. Unfortunately, until Clark gets better advisors and refines his message, this is all just dreaming. Unless something unexpected happens Tuesday (and there’s still time - things shifted radically in the last 48 hours before Iowa and New Hampshire), Kerry will soon be on the express train to the nomination, especially because both Edwards and Dean have drop-dead points (Edwards said he’ll drop out if he doesn’t win South Carolina on Tuesday, and Dean’s campaign would experience a severe blow if he loses in Michigan three days later since he’s concentrating all his efforts there). After that, unless both Edwards and Dean shift their support to Clark, Kerry will be in charge. And Bush and Rove will be on their way to a Dukakis-like romp.