changing minds

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.

In the first installment of my Art of Persuasion series, I talked about emotional wedges. For the second installment, I’ll like to discuss metaphors and models.

Let’s disagree with George Lakoff that we ought (intentionally or not) to mislead through metaphors, as Steven Pinker points out in his critique of Lakoff’s metaphor-abuse. Or better, consider this doozy from Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought:

One can just imagine the howls of ridicule if a politician took Lakoff's Orwellian advice and renamed "taxes" as "membership fees." (Indeed, Orwell himself singled out revenue enhancement as an egregious euphemism for a tax increase in his famous 1949 essay "Politics and the English Language.") ... To take the most obvious example, taxes and membership fees are not two ways of framing the same thing: if you choose not to pay a membership fee, the organization will cease to provide you with its services, but if you choose not to pay taxes, men with guns will put you in jail.

Okay, so truth-in-metaphor is a better long-term strategy. But let’s agree with George Lakoff (and Mark Johnson) that we “live by” metaphors to some extent and that they are powerful cognitive tools—useful for framing issues and distilling a lot of information.

Recall that among the false metaphors the left uses is that society is like a machine. As I’ve written elsewhere, we need to fight this false metaphor. But first we must learn to identify them as Pinker did above:

Sadly, we're getting a whole lot of precisely the wrong kind of thinking in response to this [financial] crisis. Indeed, most of the bad thinking arises from viewing the economy through the lens of false metaphor -- economy as machine. We've heard pundits accuse the government or banks of being "asleep at the switch." But in a complex system there is no switch. We've heard people ask how to "fix it," "run it," or "regulate it," suggesting if just the right sort of genius controlled the rheostats, we'd get just the right sort of economy.  

When it comes to economics, the Left are, ironically, practitioners of Intelligent Design. (I’ll leave that detour for later.)

It’s not enough to critique false metaphors. We must introduce our own, more truth-conducive metaphors. And we must repeat them ad nauseum. In this case, we should argue that society is an ecosystem. Ecosystems - as any lefty can tell you - are dynamic systems, un-designed and evolved. You can’t plant an ecosystem like a garden, or operate it like a machine, or interfere with it too much—notwithstanding the best arguments of the Krugmans, Galbraiths and Keyneses of the world.

Let me not pass over models, which, as Max Black suggested, are a species of metaphor. Models are able to pick out specifically functional correspondences between the literal (source) domain and the figurative domain—which makes ‘economy as ecosystem’ as much a metaphor as a model.

In any case, this may be too abstract an example. I’d love to hear thoughts on other metaphors the Freedom Movement can embrace.  Because metaphors pack a cognitive punch. See?

In my last post (echoed by Rob Bluey here) we mentioned the so-called ‘structure of social change’ or the "political production cycle" a la Bluey. Here’s the process again: big idea, big idea passes to policy shop sausage grinder, which in turn get turned into popular messages. At the macro level, that’s the process, anyway. (I also argued that we’re stuck at the policy shop stage - think tank bubble - and have underinvested in messaging and implementation.)

But how does social change happen at the individual level? I’d argue, by in large, you have to invert the structure, i.e. reverse the process. In other words, you don’t start with big ideas for most people. You start with messages. Stark. Emotional. Once you resonate with someone emotionally, then you can begin to propose policies or offer big ideas. But the initial prick of emotion is the wedge-point upon which the rest gets built (even principles).

So, begin with emotional appeals. How do you get someone’s attention? Narratives, images, stories of real people with real feelings and vaguaries like ‘change’. Emotion. Consider the following two narratives:

- More than 140,000 people died in the bombing of Hiroshima during WW II.

- Elizabeth White is only three years old. Yesterday, her father held her wrist firmly against the kitchen table and hit her fingers one-by-one with a hammer.

Which one has more rational gravity? Okay. Which one has emotional gravity? Emotional gravity almost always wins.

The Left figured this out a long time ago. That’s why everything goes back to “the children.” Think of the global warming commercial with the kid on the train tracks—engine bearing down. Think of the piecemeal regulation and socialization of healthcare (they started with SCHIP, children’s Medicaid). How can you deny any child healthcare?

Of course, we prefer the rational argument. Yes, we feel. But we subordinate our emotions to wider considerations. (Lefties tend to emote first and rationalize ex post.) We should all hope to engage in rational discourse. But the left has abandoned this tack in exchange for ad misericordiam fallacy as tactic. It’s cheating, yes—well, if your standards of discourse come from a logic textbook. But in the marketplace of ideas, we have to sling all sorts of hash. Tit. For. Tat. So that means the Freedom Movement has to take up similar arms. Find the nerve. Strike it. Rational arguments and big ideas come later. (But if you’re going to do it, do it well.)

For example, libertarians try to explain the concept of “concentrated benefits and dispersed costs” when it comes to wasteful government expenditures and other lefty fetishes like light rail. Reasonable criticism to be sure. But most people don’t get it. Why not start with emotion? For example:

Rhonda Smith is struggling to make ends meet. But new regressive rail taxes mean she’ll pay $X more per year for a boondoggle she’ll probably never ride. New taxes rip off the poorest people in our community so wealthy commuters can ride overpriced trains (because they refuse to take buses). Shouldn't we be protecting people like Rhonda? So much for "progressive."

Okay, so maybe there are better examples. Criticize by creating.