At a certain level, politics is more primal than most of us care to admit.
I got an example of that this last campaign when in an attempt to win over my older sister to Johon Kerry. I listed my reasons she should vote against George W. Bush. I listed my reasons for supporting John Kerry. When I finished, she said: “I just don’t like his smile.”
I’ve diaried in a previous diary how long it took me to get over that.
But there’s a lesson to be learned and John Rogers of Kung Fu Monkey blog I think hits on it well.
(more on the jump)
Rogers, a former standup comic and now screen writer, had a great post on his blog Kung Fu Monkey called “Learning to say ain’t” about what John Kerry and other Democratic candidates often fail to do:
My bigger point, leaving all the fancy policy stuff to the wonks who delight in them, is that the art of politics is convincing people to connect with you. When you have an idea, and the other guy has an idea — if you don’t connect in some primal way with the listeners your idea is never even going to get considered, no matter how much better it is on a rational level. In theory, “We’re sending guys to fight in Iraq without body armor or properly equipped Humvees and then cutting taxes on rich folk” is literally the worst idea I could come up with to play in a mill town, unless that sentence ended with “… and then, your sons kiss each other.” And yet the RR (Radical Right) gets a pass on this. Why? because as soon as guys like John Kerry (and God bless ’em, Al Franken and Janeane Garofolo) open their mouths, all the audience hears is “snobby snob snob think you’re so smart!”
Now who the hell am I to even think I have something to contribute here? Well, let’s say the candidate’s job is to walk into a room of complete strangers and get them to like him. Connect with him. Wow, the few rare politicians who can do that, they’re worth their weight in gold.
I did that for twelve years. So did hundreds of other people you’ve never heard of. We’re stand-ups, and that’s the ENTRY-LEVEL for the job.
A good stand-up can walk into a room, a bar with no stage and a shit mic, in the deep goddam South or Montana or Portland or Austin or Boston, and not only tell jokes with differing political opinions than the crowd, can get them to laugh. With all due respect to our brother performers in theater, etc., we can walk into a room of any size from 20 to 2000 complete strangers with no shared background and not just evoke emotion … we can evoke a specific strong emotion every 15 seconds. For an HOUR. A good stand-up can make fun of your relationship with your wife, make fun of your job, make fun of your politics, all in front of a thousand strangers, and afterward that same person will go up and invite the stand-up to a barbecue.
In short — every club audience is a swing state.
His lesson comes from what he learned the hard way (and as I always say, “Bad experience is the BEST teacher):
One night in Rawlins, Wyoming, the headliner — a sweet road comic named “Boats” Johnson — took me aside.
“You’re a good joke writer. I mean, damn, there’s some smart stuff in there.”
“Thanks. But, uh…”
“They don’t like you much.” Boats handed me a beer. “Second show. Longneck. Always a longneck. Bring it on stage. Sip from it every now and then.”
“I don’t really drink on stage –“
“Fine. Fill it with water. Don’t bring attention to it, just sip from it.”
I shrugged. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. Learn to say ‘ain’t’. Don’t change the jokes. Just learn to say ‘ain’t’ every now and then.”
The shows went, much, much better after that. I told the same gun control jokes, the same pro-gay marriage bits, the same making-fun of the culture wars jokes. But now I was killing.
There are two lessons to be taken from “Learn to say ‘ain’t’.” First, the fundamental dynamic in all crowd interaction is us vs. them. Period. It’s sad. Oh well. Get over it and win.
Go read the whole post. It’s worth it IMO.
For a long time I’ve wanted to write a diary about “What the DNC can and should learn from professional wrestling.”
It’s simple theater. Yes I know it’s fake. Everyone has known it’s fake since 1982. The only ones who care about pro wrestling being fake are elitists who like to look down on pro wrestling by pronouncing it fake as if the rubes didn’t know. Please.
Professional wrestling manages to put butts in the seats and make people stand to cheer even when they know it is stagecraft. How? By playing on the emotions.
Senator Harry Reid has managed to do a lot of good as the Minority Senate Leader. But the former boxer has to steal some plays from the professional wrestling playbook. He’s got to become more of a booker.
In pro wrestling, the booker gives the wrestlers a rough outline of what he’s looking for in a match and who will win. Great pro wrestlers like Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Mick Foley and Bret Hart can turn those moves in the ring into high drama. Glances, forearm shots, jumps off the ropes and near pinfalls might be the moves they’re using, but it’s an interpretative dance with a story about winning and losing and good vs. evil and sometimes good vs. good.
It’s about building suspense and generating heat. And that’s something that Dr. Howard Dean and Reid need to begin doing for the Democrats. We’re fired up, but we’re only a small part of the party. At my local meetings, there’s an air of defeatism hanging over that should be eliminated.
And in pro wrestling, there are tricks to generating heat even when losing.
When Barbara Boxer stood up to challenge the Ohio ballots, a good booker would have leaked to the media that she was going to do that so it gets coverage. But then he would have told the other senators, “OK, after she does her challenge, Byrd I want you to go next…” and so on so that all of the Democrats stood to show unity. It still wouldn’t have mattered to the outcome. But it would have shown Democrats throughout the nation — us, the regular folk who sometimes need our simple theater to give us reasons to stand up and cheer instead of hanging our heads down low — that our party was united. That counting every vote mattered. That election reform mattered.
It didn’t happen that way. I offer it as an example even though I realize in the thread the gist of my diary risks being lost to t he Ohio fraud/vote counting issue.
But my point — and I think the post at Kung Fu Monkey’s (which is much more fun to write than John Rogers) is too — is that for as much as we want to believe voters can be won over by better framing, by logic, by appealing to their sensibilities, we need to do more than that. We need to win them over emotionally. In addition to Reid’s behind the scenes maneuvering, some of us out here need our theater from our Democratic leaders.
