messaging

Capitalizing on America’s displeasure with Democrat overreach, corporate welfare and dependency politics means the Right is soon going to need that rebrand they’ve been promising. To be successful, Rs messaging will complement the electorate’s consternation and offer a contrast without signaling any return to the Bush years:

Tapping the “WTF?” – Americans are whispering a collective WTF? at what Obama and Congress have been up to. The Rs should be standing alongside America with similar headshaking. What’s happening is beyond the pale to be sure, but righteous indignation won’t work as well as a tone of empathy-cum-bewilderment. In other words a tone of: “They seem to have gone off the deep end” is probably better than “This is an outrage!”

New Blood – Signal that the new GOP is smarter, younger and more diverse. You can’t out-Obama Obama, but you can flood the market with fresh faces and smart, succinct messages coming from those faces. The old power-players can work behind the scenes, but let the principled New Blood stand at the fore.

Innovation without Insanity – The best ideas for America don’t require raising taxes and spending other people’s money. We need to unleash entrepreneurship, not bureaucracy and profligacy. We need political entrepreneurship, too—that is, leadership with a view to freedom, pragmatism and common sense—all of which the left has abandoned.

Pullback from the Precipice – The Democrats are trying to reshape America in their image. Trouble is, they’re not God. We now see what can happen to things in six months if you try to play God. It’s time to pull America back from the precipice by turning away from centralized power and toward citizen-based cooperation, open markets and civil society.

Restoring Greatness – Remember when the Berlin Wall fell? America was once a beacon of freedom and prosperity. In an effort to mimic France, we may end up being like them in all the worst ways—decades of 10-plus percent unemployment, unfunded liabilities and the bureaucratization of everything.

Common Sense – “If we have to balance our budgets and cut household spending, so does the federal government.” This type of message is working. More like it can’t hurt and even if the economy starts to right itself a little, it may very well be due to more Bubblenomics. (Be prepared to deal with b.s. from the left if and when an upturn materializes.)

Principles Work. Policy Should Flow from Principles – Remind Americans that the Democrats gave us a bunch of spin and vagueness during the election. What became of all that? Destructive policies. America deserves something more straightforward. Find the best policy ideas, then remind them that we’re great because of our principles. To be great again, policy must flow from principles.

In an op-ed published in Time last month, Republican political consultant Mike Murphy wrote, "[it] was a huge shock to the GOP when Barack Obama won Republican Indiana last year. The bigger news was how he did it. Latino voters delivered the state. Exit polls showed that they provided Obama with a margin of more than 58,000 votes in a state he carried by a slim 26,000 votes. That's right, GOP, you've entered a brave new world ruled by Latino Hoosiers, and you're losing."

I was on the ground in Indiana during much of the 2008 election campaigns working as an Organizing Fellow on the Latino Steering Committee for then-Senator Barack Obama's Campaign for Change in East Chicago. When I began work there in July, many Latino voters were undecided, having supported Hillary Clinton during the long, dramatic Democratic Primary that had opened many wounds.

What persuaded many East Chicago Latinos whom I met to ultimately vote for Obama in '08 was that they felt vilified by the Republican Primary's chest-thumping over immigration reform -- led by then-Congressman Tom Tancredo.  East Chicago's Latinos also shared the increasingly widespread disillusionment with the GOP over the Bush administration's two terms in the Oval Office, terms that left a disproportionately high number of Latinos from places like East Chicago dead on battlefields in the Middle East. These were but two of the many, many grievances East Chicago Latinos had that Republican candidates failed to effectively address during the campaign, if they addressed them at all.  

So...why didn't Republican candidates immediately move to evaluate, engage and inspire Latino voters in the aftermath of then-Senator Clinton's withdrawal?  This was a question I asked my fellow "Hopemongers" throughout the campaign.  The most common response I got was that Republican campaigns were catering to ideologues' anti-immigration bravado.  I found this response to be implausible in that it called into question the competence of the Republican Party's strategists, who horsewhipped their Democratic counterparts through most of the last three decades of American politics.  Or to put it particularly, many foul political qualities are now synonymous with Karl Rove's name; incompetence is not one of them.  

A more plausible variant of the "anti-immigration bravado" responses that were occasionally offered was that anti-immigrant ideologues were indispensable in the existing Republican campaign finance structures; but there is little evidence to support this claim.  

Whatever the reason the GOP chose to ignore (and in many cases, offend) the Latino vote, without it, the party's future would appear to be a series of increasingly humiliating election losses.  According to research done by the Pew Hispanic Center, "Hispanics now make up 22% of all children under the age of 18 in the United States -- up from 9% in 1980."  And the majority of these children [read: future voters] are the U.S. born offspring of immigrants.  One can thus surmise that the current and future states of the American electorate is one in which immigration will not be a vague historical statement of "uniqueness", but a flesh and blood reality of a vast, rapidly growing demographic of potential voters.  To continue to vilify the "illegal aliens" as "criminals" is just the sort of messaging that could create at least one generation of Latino voters with a deep-seated tendency to vote for the Democratic Party's candidates similar to the unanimity Ronald Reagan inspired among Evangelical Christians for the Republican Party.  The difference here is that Evangelicals were a noisy fringe of the overall demographic, whereas Latinos are poised to someday replace Caucasians as the majority demographic in the United States.

Murphy suggests that "[a] smart GOP would be deeply in the microloan and free-English-lessons business in immigrant communities," and that it would also avoid seeking the "cheap applause" of the anti-immigration right.  To Murphy, "cheap" is a quantified word.  He "made a career out of counting votes" and thus recognizes that a serious strategic approach to the GOP's future must accept that the electoral value of noisy anti-immigration posturing is plummeting at a rate roughly commensurate with its ability to win national elections. 

Republican Party strategists should take to heart the extreme sensitivity in the media during this week's Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor to any remark that can be spun into an overall ethnic-, "race-" and gender-related diatribe by Republican lawmakers (and therefore, the Republican Party) against all Latinas (and therefore, all Latinos).  This should come as no surprise to today's GOP strategists, as it was their predecessors who perfected the tactics that are now used against them. 

But Obama's in the White House now, and earlier this year the New York Times reported that "comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in [President Obama's] first year in office."  While I have my doubts about just how much of a first year priority comprehensive immigration reform will prove to be, it will be a priority during President Obama's first term; and when comprehensive immigration reform happens, the party that calls it amnesty will fare far worse on election day than the one that supports it as necessary, justice, emancipation, etc.  However it's fed to the media, behind closed doors, what Mike Murphy's vote-counting counterparts in the Democratic Party see in comprehensive immigration reform is 12 million potential votes.

Unless the Republicans prefer losing successive elections by increasingly wide margins, they should encourage Republican lawmakers to stand with President Obama on comprehensive immigration reform.  I know.  I know.  But they broke the law!  They steal 'merican jobs!  They don't even speak English! etc.  The fact remains that a most of them are already us, as in We the People, as in citizens with votes to cast.  And many more of them will be of voting age or naturalized into the electoral processes very soon.  Republicans can't prevent this, and Democrat lawmakers are happy to let a Republican colleague look like a "racist" hillbilly asshole for interrupting a Supreme Court nominee during her confirmation hearing.

Therefore, Republicans should go out of their way to make comprehensive immigration reform as painless as possible.  Obama has mentioned having illegal immigrants pay a fine, as criminals.  Republicans on Capitol Hill could oppose this aspect of the reform bill as a show of good faith to the demographic at the heart of their landslide losses last fall.  Furthermore, Republican Party messaging has always revolved around the rhetoric of the "bootstraps" party of self-determination, manifest destiny, and the importance of family.  Well, these are the very principles that brought successive generations of Latino immigrants to the United States. 

Finally, when their man from Oklahoma, Senator Tom Coburn, interrupts a Supreme Court nominee by attempting to get on television with an innocuous "You'll have lots of 'splainin' to do," call him on it.  Blog, tweet, phone, email, etc. to let him know that interrupting a Supreme Court nominee with a wisecrack--any wisecrack--is not what he's paid to do during a Supreme Court nomination hearing, especially a wisecrack Time can easily interpret as "invoking a phrase familiar to fans of the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy, on which Lucy's long-suffering husband Ricky Ricardo (Cuban-American Desi Arnaz in real life) would often utter the refrain in exasperation at his zany wife's antics."  But before any of this can happen, Republicans must first recognize that the rise of the Latino voter is as inevitable as a naturalization process for the suspected twelve million undocumented immigrants in the United States.  Failing to do so is to insist upon the Republican Party's indefinite political irrelevance.

We start with a small story right here at Next Right about how Obama didn't let reporters in to cover a basketball game, but instead sent out a slick media package.  Not long into it, we get the phrase "Ministry of Propaganda." 

Sigh.

And we wonder why conservatives are failing to break through with a broader audience.  It has far less to do with principles, pork, transparency or any of that and a whole lot more to do with how the mainstream conservative media treats everything Obama does as heralding the rise of some sort of Communist/Fascist state. 

We saw Americans speaking up for sanity at tea parties.  Everyone else saw signs with Obama wearing a Hitler mustache or photoshopped in with hammers and sickles.  If that isn't an invitation for an undecided voter to tune out the voices behind the signs, I don't know what is.  You and I know that the people with the nutty signs were a few bad apple Freepers, Ron Paulists and throwback Birchers, but way too much of this paranoid style has seeped into places like National Review and even this site to a lesser extent.

The chicken-littleification of the GOP is a huge roadblock to winning elections.  People see Obama, whatever the policy differences, as an even-tempered guy, not some aspiring tinpot dictator or deluded campus radical.  That impression will not be successfully countered by being louder and making more extreme claims.  There is a big difference between saying that a policy will have serious bad outcomes and that it will lead to the destruction of everything we hold dear.  First of all, people will listen to you if you claim the former.

Let's try some guidelines.

Helpful:

- Obama will reduce available healthcare choices;

- Obama's budget plans have very serious long term consequences for the American economy and our ability to pay for entitlements to which citizens have grown accustomed;

- Obama's open-borders immigration policy depresses wages, increases the possibility of terrorist infiltration and makes a mockery of the notion that we are a nation of laws;

- Obama's national security policies make us less safe and give more free reign to governments hostile to America while decreasing the ability of our intelligence agencies to do their vital work.

Not Helpful:

- The One's lapdog sycophants in the Obamedia are unwilling to investigate his deep connections to Weather Underground terrorist radicals.

- Show us the birth certificate!

- Closing Guantanamo means freeing terrorists in our neighborhood. (as if they were going to get an apartment next door).

- "These events have heralded a new era of partnership between the White House and private companies, one that calls to mind the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II." (from David Brooks of all places).

- It is time to send him and his lazy supporters who steal from the people who work and give to the people who don't work, back to their home state or maybe send them to Iran to lived...make sure Al Gore is with them. (Also from Next Right)

Conservatives are smarter than this!

Consider this graph of Iraqi civilian casualties since the start of the war to the present:

What does it mean? Data are powerful, but must be framed. Now is the time to frame this before the party in power does. (If you don't believe this will get re-framed, just wait till the comment lurkers get a hold of this post.) 

Here's another one:

If you don't frame this, they will. 

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?

They say “know your audience.” But that can be tough without a guide. Understanding the lenses through which your audience is likely to see the world can help. (Call this meta-messaging. In other words, it's critical to ask yourself relevant questions about your audience in relation your goals and tactics prior to messaging.)

Allow me to steal shamelessly from Aaron Wildavsky, who identified primary value types or ‘biases’. These political predispositions can help you tailor your messages to some degree. They are: hierarchicalist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist.

John McCain looks like he's closing the gap, or even taking the lead, in some national polls. RealClearPolitics now gives him a 274 to 264 edge in the electoral college without toss-up states. There are plenty of explanations for this, and they all might be valid: McCain starting to hit Obama hard, Obama's failure to come up with a coherent strategy in the midst of great tactics (something Soren points out), etc.

One of the new theories is Obama's failure to sell his economic message to voters. David Leonhardt of the New York Times Magazine released his Sunday story today on Obama's academic battle on economic policy:

"With Obama, there is vast disagreement about just how liberal he is, especially on the economy. My favorite example came in mid-June, shortly after Obama named Jason Furman, a protégé of Robert Rubin, the centrist former Treasury secretary, as his lead economic adviser. Labor leaders recoiled, and John Sweeney, the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., worried aloud about “corporate influence on the Democratic Party.” Then, the following week, Kimberley Strassel, a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, wrote a column titled, 'Farewell, New Democrats,' concluding that Obama’s economic policies amounted to the end of Clintonian centrism and a reversion to old liberal ways."

"Some of the confusion stems from Obama’s own strategy of presenting himself as a postpartisan figure. A few weeks ago, I joined him on a flight from Orlando to Chicago and began our conversation by asking about his economic approach. He started to answer, but then interrupted himself. 'My core economic theory is pragmatism,' he said, 'figuring out what works.'"

Pragmatism? Figuring out what works? Really? Fantastic! Not only is there a fight between the netroots and grassroots of the Left, there's a fundamental fight within the academic wing of the Left on the principles of free markets vs. the principles of European social democracies. They're obviously trying to merge the two in some sort of coherent fashion, but have failed miserably. So how can McCain take advantage of this and continue his surge in the polls?

Over the last 15 years Americans have physically sorted ourselves into cultural enclaves that share strikingly similar tastes in everything from cars and clothes to churches and politics.  Bill Bishop isn’t the first observer to point this out, but his new book The Big Sort is the deepest analysis of the phenomenon’s origins and political effects so far. 

One of the first big discussions we had on this blog was a debate over the roles of targeted micro messages and unifying macro themes and this book breaks down the demographics behind that debate. Americans have retreated into enclaves of “image tribes” as divided by geography as they are by ideas and tastes and according to Bishop, there’s very little common dialog left.

On the National Review website, Republican media guru (and in full disclosure, my boss) Alex Castellanos has an article examining the Republican soul and recommending a new outlook and message for the coming elections.  And with "and-the-planets-align" kind of timing, he cites the internet as a model for conservative government.

Conservatives do not hate government. We never have. We love life when it is well-governed. We respect the flag, our country, and traditional authority. We like a world where rules are observed and regulations are respected....What we believe in is people-driven, choice-filled, dynamic, flexible, equal-opportunity self-government. We should call it organic government. Want to know what your government is going to look like 20 years from now? Ask your children. They will say it will look a lot less like General Motors and a lot more like MySpace. The Internet is an education for us all, a place where people self-organize and govern themselves with maximum freedom. In its reflection, we can see more than the future of technology and communications; we can see the promise of democracy.

The roots of our Republican beliefs can be found in the small models of government.  In local, self-aggregating groups:  PTA meetings, church collection plates, and community watch programs.  It is where individual freedom leads to action. It is where responsibility for oneself and one’s family leads to responsibility for all. This is this government we should be discussing – the government that forms over fences, coffee and a sense of personal empowerment.

So let’s hope that the launch of The Next Right is a moment of recognition and action. In the same way we’d talk to our neighbor about a community issue, let’s hope we talk to each other about where we are going as a movement and what we want in the elections. Just as we’d support a school fundraiser let’s hope we organize to support our institutions and candidates.