communication

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http://www.archive.org/details/communications_primer

Relevant!

One thing I find relevant about this to the communications here in the Next Right land, is that very often there actually is a bunch of extra 'noise' subsequently acting on the transmitter signal(a message) to vary it from the 'original', in the form of opinions, and statements, and digressions, spin-offs, etc, which interferes with the message, and the original point/challenge gets buried.

Michigan Matt's S/N ratio is pretty low

Submitted by NoMoreBlatherDotCom on Thu, 04/16/2009 - 22:38.

There's only one sentence in his space-filling comment that wasn't simply an ad hom.[...]

Just as true...maybe some, if not many of the messages here start out with noise before they even get out the starting gate. "When anything acts on the signal so as to bury it in an unpredictable and undesirable way in a communication system, it is noise." Interesting, yes.

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: Future campaigns can no longer afford to just find the right phrases. We have to find the right arguments and the right way to communicate them.

Lately, a lot of the discussion has rightfully centered on policy. Earlier, Jon Henke asked us to consider what policies we should advocate and support. I've spent some time outlining a theme for a new set of items we can go forward with: the Agenda of Equal Opportunity. Although I would much rather talk about substance than rhetoric, I wanted to take a break from the policy discussion and discuss campaign messaging.

Max Borders has a quite comprehensive four part series on the "Art of Persuasion," analyzing the importance of merging rational policy discussion with critical ideas in communication: emotional wedges, metaphors & models, typology and imagery. What also caught my attention was a December 15 Roll Call op-ed from pollster David Winston, responding to fellow pollster Stuart Rothenberg, rejecting attack-based campaigns:

The truth is, voters don’t want to hear why the other guy is bad. They want to know why you are a better choice. People want hear how candidates will govern, how they will solve problems and what they really stand for.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) put it this way: “Wal-Mart doesn’t get ahead by attacking Sears but by offering better value.” In the past two elections, Republicans failed to win over voters because they failed to tell them how they would address their concerns.

The GOP has spent the past 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to drive up Democrats’ negatives. Sometimes they succeeded, but rather than solidifying the GOP’s majority coalition, over time, this self-defeating strategy made it permanently vulnerable. Republicans found themselves with razor-thin victories, no mandate to govern and growing unfavorable ratings.

Don't get me wrong. There is still value in opposition research and compare-contrast messaging. But Winston is right in that a campaign's opposition, or attacks on an opposition, can't be the foundation of a campaign's message. In fact, an attack-based campaign is really a campaign that's playing defense instead of offense. This seems counter-intuitive, but the reality is that campaigns founded on attacking their opponents means that they either have nearly nothing substantive to say about their guy, or their opponent's message is better at resonating with voters. Or both.

The extension of Winston's point is this: campaigns (and candidates) can tend to get too intellectual or quite anti-intellectual, and the GOP's problem in the past few cycles has been the latter. Campaigns need to formulate and execute a messaging strategy that's not ten steps below the voter nor ten steps ahead of the voter. Rather, campaigns need to outline a substantive agenda, and find a way to communicate that agenda that's only one step above the voter.

In an earlier post, I briefly went over some "Rules of Debate," describing my time as volunteer debate coach at a local high school in Alaska. (I debated in high school and college as well. Yes, I'm a nerd.) I taught my students that in any debate of any format, great substance always has to come before great style. Great style should never make bad substance good, but it can greatly enhance good substance. Let's go over some pointers that I've previously given to my debate students and see how they can apply to campaign messaging. (Continue reading below the fold.)

Disclaimer: I don't intend on this post being some sort of cookie-cutter strategy. I know that messaging depends on the audience and that all politics is truly local. This is why voter indentification, voter persuasion and GOTV efforts need to be integrated now more than ever.

Images can be powerful. Pictures can certainly communicate more than words and words can evoke mental images, even without pictures. In the freedom movement, we should not be reluctant to use imagery—as well as symbols and icons. Not only can images evoke feelings, they can be used as mnemonic cues, branding devices and visual motifs. We overlook them at our peril. Whether or not you agree with the war in Iraq, is this not powerful? What about this? Now, how do you find images that capture your message? Sometimes they’re not Google-able. Sometimes you have to write your own images. LIke so:

Tooth decay begins, typically, when debris becomes trapped between the teeth and along the ridges and in the grooves of the molars. The food rots. It becomes colonized with bacteria. The bacteria feeds off sugars in the mouth and forms an acid that begins to eat away at the enamel of the teeth. Slowly, the bacteria works its way through to the dentin, the inner structure, and from there the cavity begins to blossom three-dimensionally, spreading inward and sideways. When the decay reaches the pulp tissue, the blood vessels, and the nerves that serve the tooth, the pain starts—an insistent throbbing. The tooth turns brown. It begins to lose its hard structure, to the point where a dentist can reach into a cavity with a hand instrument and scoop out the decay. At the base of the tooth, the bacteria mineralizes into tartar, which begins to irritate the gums. They become puffy and bright red and start to recede, leaving more and more of the tooth's root exposed. When the infection works its way down to the bone, the structure holding the tooth in begins to collapse altogether....People without health insurance have bad teeth because, if you're paying for everything out of your own pocket, going to the dentist for a checkup seems like a luxury. It isn't, of course. The loss of teeth makes eating fresh fruits and vegetables difficult, and a diet heavy in soft, processed foods exacerbates more serious health problems, like diabetes. The pain of tooth decay leads many people to use alcohol as a salve. And those struggling to get ahead in the job market quickly find that the unsightliness of bad teeth, and the self-consciousness that results, can become a major barrier.

(Phew. Yes it’s laid on thick.) And with it, Malcolm Gladwell writes perhaps one of the goofiest paeans to socialized medicine (at least, low copays) ever---at least from where rational argument, rigorous policy analysis and data are concerned. (More can be said about the piece as critique of “moral hazard,” a concept he clearly doesn’t get… Gladwell's slipping point, perhaps? I digress).What he did well, however, was capture the reader’s attention with imagery—and a little of the ‘eeeeeeww’ factor. Both go a long way. Symbols can be powerful too. Consider the Nike swoosh, the hopeful “O” and the swastika. For whatever reason, these symbols have the ability to evoke, to inspire or to enrage. The memetics of the Freedom Movement must include images to complement our titles and tropes. Finally, what about icons? Who are the people who function as the symbols of freedom? Jefferson? MLK? Reagan? An Iraqi woman with purple-stained fingers? A Peruvian woman with legal title to her property? Better: who is the next freedom icon?