Branding

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.

The political discourse in this country is dominated by two contrasting groups; we have the Democrats, represented by Obama, Clinton, Pelosi, and Reid, and the Republicans, represented by Bush, Palin, Huckabee, and Jindal. The reason I picked these individuals is because they, for the most part, agree with all the planks of their parties.

Another trait that they have in common is that most of these political figures, with the exceptions of Obama and Huckabee, are generally disliked. Not hated, not despised, disliked. Few of them have positive approval ratings, even though virtually every person polled had never met these people. While professions can be disliked, asking people what they thought of Bob, a used car salesman, would give you wildly different results than asking people what they thought of Bob, their local car salesman who goes to church with them and has a son who is on the school football team. The reason that these answers are different is that one is asking people what they think of a idea and the other is asking people what they think of a person. One of the main reasons that I believe that the politicians in the first paragraph are so disliked is that people know them as ideas and concepts, not as people. Nancy Pelosi may be a great person to talk to, but I know her as the representative of San Francisco liberalism in the same sense that I know Sarah Palin as the representative of uneducated social conservatism.

The second part of my point is that a district or state will generally elect people closer to the middle of their political balance. In other words, Vermont will elect a flaming liberal, while Mississippi will elect a rabid conservative, because they are near the middle of that state's political balance. Personality plays a big part as well, and many politicians get elected while being much more liberal or conservative than their average constituent, based on their charisma. Examples of this are Sebelius in Kansas or (I hate to use this ubiquitous example) Reagan in California. However, generally speaking, a right-of-center district will elect a right-of-center candidate, and vice-versa. Nate Silver shows a typical way that a region votes, based on how primaries end up, and how liberal/conservative the region is, here

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/02/land-of-thousand-liebermans.html

What this article says, for those who are loath of reading, is that each person is a number on the liberal-conservative scale, and they vote for the candidate that is closest to them; "If there's a liberal Democrat at space 10 and a conservative one at space 50, we assume that the voter at space 20 will pick the candidate at 10, who is slightly closer to her ideological preferences". This happens once in the primaries, and once in the general election, and in a 60-40 district, the dominant party wins 75% of the time, which seems logical.

The main development of the past 3 years, as my title implies, is that Democrats have been playing this system more deliberately. Ideally, according to the model, a district that is evenly divided should elect a Democrat at 25 on the scale, and a Republican at 75, and the two would split the vote evenly. However, if the Democrats push to nominate a more conservative member, say at 40 on the scale, that Democrat would win 55-45. I know that there are dozens of intangibles in this situation, such as liberal Democrats staying home or voting Green. However, I think that a lot of progress that the Democrats have made electorally is because they are biting the bullet and choosing more conservative Democrats, while Republicans are talking about doing the opposite.

The other major development, besides picking "conservadems", is the Democrats' adoption of, for lack of a better word, Rovian tactics in terms of branding. Our guy is your neighbor, the guy you buy nails and lumber from (is a small business owner), the guy who keeps you safe at night (is an attorney general), or the guy who is an elder at your church (loves family values). Their guy is the idea, the concept. Kerry is the concept of Vietnam protests and Massachusetts liberalism, while Bush is the local police chief who has had to make the tough decisions necessary to keep your family safe.

To see how both these trends played out today, one needs to look no further than the NY-20 special election. Despite being the worse candidate and starting at a large disadvantage, Murphy won because he was a conservative democrat (as opposed to a typical republican), and because he was successful in branding himself as a small-business entrepreneur, as opposed to Tedisco, who he tied with the Republican establishment.

The applications of this are twofold. One is to ease the pressure on Republicans in liberal and moderate states. The Democrats have let their Blue Dogs vote against the party on some important proposals, and that is a key reason why many of them are still in office. Secondly, allow Republican candidates to distance themselves from prominent members of their party.

Personal disclaimer: I am a moderate conservative who voted for both Bush and Obama, obviously for different reasons. I know the latter would get me banned from other sites (*cough* RedState *cough*), but I appreciate reading debate from liberals and conservatives...as long as it's good ^_^.

There’s a weird symmetry between the Right and the Left. It’s difficult to articulate, but it’s becoming clearer to me now. They’re both Keynesians, only in different domains. The Left are Keynesians about economics, the Right are Keynesians about political strategy. The trouble with either is that Keynesianism doesn’t work very well anywhere it's applied.

Lest I lose my reader straight out of the gate, allow me to explain in simpler terms the defining characteristics of what I’ll call the “Keynesian Model.” This model:

1. Deals almost exclusively in macro-level aggregates.

2. Holds that these aggregates are mostly informative.

3. Information can be successfully used for macro purposes.

For example, in economics, Keynesians want to tweak or “stimulate” the economy by raining largess on particular sectors to stimulate aggregate labor demand, say.

But the trouble with this way of looking at the world is:

I. The micro-level is where most of the action is.

II. The devil of the economy is in the details of billions of individual means-ends actions, coordinations and transactions, which makes knowledge mostly local.

III. These details are far to complex to be reduced to aggregates and manipulated to positive effect.

Now, I believe the Left has figured out I-III in the political domain, though sadly not in the economic (indeed, I seriously doubt they care about the micro mechanisms of economic growth at all, as I argue here.  Keynesian policies of the Obama Administration are merely a pretext for the end of consolidating power, economics be damned. But I digress.). The point is, the right seems to be under a similar spell, except in their approach to political strategy.

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. 

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.

The political blogosphere is buzzing about Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s interview. Soren Dayton argues the lessons of the Obama campaign were “budgeting, technology, field, and media,” while Patrick Ruffini finds that the important lesson is that “Obama ran a better kind of offline campaign.” Although it is quite true that these are some critical lessons, as a business nerd and student at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, I think there’s a massive lesson that pundits are missing: Obama for President wasn’t run like a traditional campaign, but instead like a huge corporation. I don’t believe that any campaign on this level was ever able to accomplish this with nearly the same success as Plouffe and company.

Plouffe makes this unmistakenably clear throughout his interview:

There are business analogies. One is, we’re a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. … We had over 5,000 employees… And we were an organization about accountability. Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.

What specific trends that the most successful modern corporations employ were echoed by the Obama campaign?

1. “Know your customer.” I’ve probably heard this from my entrepreneurship advisor a thousand times now, but only because it is perhaps the single most important phrase in business. Obama’s campaign really knew its customers – just look at the way it outreached to young voters.
2. A consistent message and high-impact branding. These two go hand in hand. Take Apple, a highly successful company even despite the recession, for example: they have a simple but highly memorable logo, effective messaging (i.e. “Get a Mac” ads), and a well-designed and innovative website. Barack Obama’s branding and messaging was as good as any corporation.
3. Job performance measurement and personal accountability. Think quarterly or annual reviews at your place of work. As quoted earlier, Plouffe confirms the importance of this in the Obama campaign: “Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.”
4. Fiscal accountability. Successful corporations have very specific budgets, and virtually all spending is highly scrutinized. Plouffe notes that, “People on the campaign could not make more than a certain amount—$12,000 a month… If you were a deputy you got paid X, if you were an assistant, you got paid Y… From a fiscal management standpoint, Obama was very clear that he did not want to end up with a debt in the primary or the general, so we just planned accordingly. We didn’t spend beyond our means.” (emphasis added)
5. A willingness to take significant financial risks and depart with the norm to be on the cutting-edge. This sentiment was echoed by the Obama campaign at many levels. Team Obama got the idea of peer production, which is quickly becoming the premiere business model of leading corporations like IBM, Boeing, BMW, and Goldcorp. In addition, as Patrick and Soren point out, Obama invested the campaign’s resources in a very unique way – remember the advertisements the campaign ran on an Xbox 360 racing game?
6. A corporate infrastructure. Since when does a political campaign have both a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and a new media director – let alone a Chief [Anything] Officer?

In business, constant innovation is crucial. Fall behind and your competitors will likely crush you. Find a decisive edge and you stand to profit immensely. Plouffe’s comments and the results of the election demonstrate that business and politics are actually two very similar animals.

Crossposted at NextGenGOP.

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?

The Freedom Coalition is scrambling. Bipartisan bailouts and a profligate Republican Party seem not only to have conjured up the specter of Keynes but the American Left in force. The left has outsmarted the center-right Freedom Coalition in all the ways that count. That is, our democratic republic is, and always has been, about getting that 50 percent plus one. The left has figured this out and put the bulk of its investments behind this fact. And while we may like to tell ourselves that 'politics goes in cycles,' no one may credibly doubt the effort and organization of Democrats and progressives and the failure of the Freedom Coalition to adapt.

Meanwhile, as libertarians smugly explained the irrationality of voting – you know, clustering problems, paradoxes and the improbability of the tie-breaking vote – leftwing activists have spent a fortune in time and money getting people to do something irrational. And it worked. Aging right-wingers have been content to jockey their wingback chairs and will their estates to AEI, Cato or Heritage, so these goliath think tanks can print up yet more high-quality policy reports 250 people will read. This is a problem.

The Think Tank Bubble

F.A. Hayek is known among freedom lovers as describing the structure of production. The idea is often rendered as a triangle cut into thirds, like a simple hierarchy: At the top are the raw materials (say, silicon). The second slice is the capital goods (assembly line). Then come the consumer goods (iPod, marketing). The idea is of a production process whereby resources pass through each stage before finally satisfying human wants and needs.  Likewise, we can imagine socio-political change going through a similar process. First, you have some abstract academic theory, which filters down to the think tanks and policy shops, finally to be run through the legislative sausage grinder or presented to voters as talking points. That's the 30,000 foot view. From ideas to policy to implementation (or from academia to think tanks to ordinary politics). Obviously, the structure of social change is much more complicated than this simplified model reveals. But it's largely correct. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Now, if we look at the average "freedom portfolio" we're going to see something that will go very far in explaining the Freedom Coalition's most recent voting booth humiliations—an investment bubble. Too many resources are going to think tanks—that is, that second slice of the structure. (The left has put most of its resources into implementation, never mind academia, which it has always owned.) Any renaissance of the Freedom Coalition will require freedom-lovers to divest themselves of legacy think tanks and start putting their freedom investments into something else. But where?

First, the Freedom Coalition is going to have to play catch-up on the one hand and tit-for-tat on the other. To figure out how to compete, it will have to look at the competition for benchmarks. What are they doing right? If the Freedom Coalition does its due diligence, it will find a second-mover advantage. Then, the right is going to have innovatively to reconfigure itself around what it has learned: new media; mass media, branding and marketing and get out the vote (GOTV)—and any other unseemly aspect of deadweight activism. Individualist-types may find this unsavory. We prefer ideas and analysis to groupish activism. We relish the holistic logic of market solutions and believe the world must kneel to rational argument. Tough. That's not the world in which we find ourselves. So unless we're prepared to argue with the machine or take up arms and rebel, we've got to play the implementation game and play it better. (Part Two here - Max Borders, Free to Choose Network)

We simply cannot afford to lose a generation of young voters to the Democrats. As a follow-up to my first post from a few days back, I’d like to propose some specific changes that would better serve the Republican Party in recapturing the youth vote.

Establish a Young Voter Outreach arm of the Republican National Committee

We need to fight tooth and nail to bring young voters back to the Republican Party. Yes, the Young Republican National Federation and College Republican National Committee exist. The problem is that neither of these organizations actively serve to “sell” the Republican Party to young voters – rather, their purpose is to engage young voters who are already affiliated with the GOP. Thus, the Young Voter Outreach arm would serve to accomplish this, demonstrating to young voters that the Republican Party actually cares about winning their vote and is not just the party of older generations.

This arm of the RNC must be overseen by – surprise – a Republican under the age of 30. It would be responsible for working with the RNC’s eCampaign folks to launch new, state-of-the-art websites, blogs, and other online projects that are designed specifically to appeal to young voters who are not necessarily Republicans. One of the goals of these projects should be to serve to answer crucial questions like, “Why is the Republican Party’s platform the right one for me as a young voter?” or “Why should I, as a young voter, be alarmed about the Democrats’ plan to [insert bad policy here – redistribute the wealth, raise taxes, etc.]?”

But there’s more. As a Party, we need to begin building and then maintaining a strong base of young, up-and-coming Republicans, who in the near future can begin running for the U.S. House and Senate. These young candidates will help allow us to pursue a 435 district strategy while bringing new, fresh faces to the table. Therefore, the Young Voter Outreach arm would be responsible for identifying and recruiting these folks, but more importantly, it would encourage them to begin running for local offices and provide training sessions to show them how to run for an office and win.

Differentiate from Democrats Through Ideals of Limited Government

Over the next two years, the Democrats will look to expand government in many ways. As I noted in my first column, many young voters are decidedly libertarian, and thus they’ll frown on these changes – a circumstance that Republicans, as the party of free-markets and personal liberty, can capitalize upon.

Despite this, young voters are going to find it difficult to support the Republican Party if it remains the party that condones government intervention in such issues as gay marriage or the behavior of two consenting adults in their own bedroom. These socially conservative issues may be important to voters in the other generations, but in the eyes of many of my peers, government has no place in getting involved in these matters. Indeed, the Republican Party’s continued support of government involvement in these issues continues to reinforce the notion to many young voters that the GOP is the party of the older generations.

Clearly, some sort of common ground needs to be reached if the Republican Party wishes to appeal to the young voting bloc while not losing social conservatives. In terms of policy, what could this balance look like? On issues such as gay marriage, Republicans could advocate the voters in each state making their own statewide decision. Specifically, California’s Proposition 8 is a phenomenal example of how the voters – rather than the government – can determine their state’s position on this sort of issue. Abortion, however, is a slightly different animal. If you believe (as I do) that life begins at conception, then abortion is, quite simply, the infringement of another human being’s right to life. Since the federal government is charged with protecting people’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Republicans can fairly argue that it is the federal government’s responsibility to fight to limit abortion.

Taking this all into account, a forward-looking, pro-young voter platform statement for the Republican Party of the future should look something like this:

The Republican Party is the party of individual freedom, limited government, and personal choice. At the federal level, we will fight to reduce the size of government and make it more accountable to the people who fund it. We will fight to protect every human being’s God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And at the statewide level, we will work with the citizens to protect and preserve the traditional values upon which this great nation was built.

Rethink Our Branding and Organizational Identity

This one’s so simple, yet we cannot underestimate its importance: the fact is that a huge part of what drew young voters to Barack Obama was his hip, corporate-like branding and identity. Some might argue that this is shallow, but I strongly disagree. Instead, this is the reality of effective marketing. Indeed, it is the same reason that some brands flourish and while others fail miserably. Marketing is one of the most critical topics in the business world, and Barack Obama has taught us that it can be equally as significant in politics.

Just look at a side-by-side of the two candidate’s logos. Obama’s “O” logo probably has near 100% brand recognition – you don’t need the “Obama ‘08″ below it to know what it represents. On the other hand, if you took away McCain-Palin and left only the star at the top with the two lines extending out from it, would anyone have a clue what it represents? Nope.

Further, Obama’s simplistic yet impeccably memorable slogan of “hope” and “change” were consistent and didn’t change in the slightest since he entered the race. McCain didn’t maintain such a consistent message, and unfortunately, his “Country First” slogan that was implemented near the end of the race does not have the appeal of “hope” and “change.”

Fortunately, the Democratic Party itself does not have a branding or identity advantage over the Republican Party. This creates a unique opening for the GOP to take the initiative. Redesign the RNC’s logo and GOP.com to reflect the trends of Web 2.0. Find a unifying, clear-cut message for the party that carries wide-spread appeal. And most importantly, offer resources so that our candidates as well as our state and local parties can do the same.

Conclusion

The changes that I’ve identified in this post are necessary for the Republican Party to transform itself as the party of the future. A huge component that will be necessary to accomplishing this is the GOP’s ability to attract younger, fresh faces – the people who are this country’s future. Ultimately, the changes I propose all add up to one overreaching goal: to transform the Republican Party into one that represents all generations and embodies the core principles that make this nation so great.

This entry is cross-posted at NextGenGOP.