Six things that persuade people to support a candidate
1. the candidate is on my side
2. the candidate believes in something other than him/herself
3. the candidate is a strong and effective leader
4. it’s easy to make an emotional connection with the candidate
5. the candidate has integrity
6. the candidate is inspiring
This is Campaign Management 101.
So is this:
1. emphasize your comparative advantage
2. neutralize your opponent’s comparative advantage
See how Rove destroyed Kerry, below the fold.
Kerry and Edwards used economic and family issues to appeal to the average person. They talked about two Americas, one with good schools and health care, and one without. They tried to portray Bush as on the side of corporations, not on the side of the people.
In a slumping economy, with rising health care costs, this was very effective. To counter it, Rove emphasized how different Kerry was from the average joe. He’s French. He went to fancy schools. He’s an elitist, his wife is foreign, and strong-willed. He’s from Massachusetts. He windsurfs. By painting Kerry this way, they made people feel like Kerry wasn’t a regular guy. He wasn’t on the side of the regular guy.
This neutralized Kerry’s advantage on substance.
The next step was to make people believe that Kerry didn’t believe in anything other than himself. Kerry provided the ammunition by refusing to forcefully recant his vote authorizing the Iraq invasion. Painting your opponent as a flip-flopper is the best way to make them look like they don’t believe in anything. It also makes them look indecisive, and it makes them look weak and ineffective. In short, it is the most effective tool in the campaign manager’s box. Kerry let himself be defined as a flip-flopper, and that was the single biggest reason he lost.
Meanwhile, Bush refused to admit mistakes, and stayed relentlessly on message. He was able to project himself as strong and decisive. He remained vulnerable on his effectiveness, and that is one reason the election was so close.
Bush also carefully cultivated his regular guy image to make it easy for people to identify with him. He spent countless hours at the ranch, clearing brush, wearing blue jeans, and riding around in a pick-up truck. Kerry’s handlers were unable to create a similarly convincing illusion.
When it came to questioning Kerry’s integrity, the flip-flopping did a lot of work. But it was the Swift Boat Veterans that really damaged him. By calling into question the truthfulness of Kerry’s recollections of his service, they made people question his integrity. They also neutralized Kerry’s comparative advantage as a veteran, over Bush’s record as a deserter.
On the last issue, neither candidate was remotely inspiring. That issue was was basically a wash.
Rove is not a genius. He just followed an age-old electoral playbook. Meanwhile, Kerry’s handlers played it too safe, and they were ineffective in neutralizing Bush’s advantage as a strong and decisive wartime leader.
Is there a problem for candidates like Kerry in that they find such stuff — like clearing brush — to be utterly distasteful and quite stupid, and can’t bring themselves to do it?
Also:
Kerry’s handlers were unable to create a similarly convincing illusion.
And it did not help when they showed Kerry windsurfing. It looked so effete compared to the fake cowboy. And the hunting display was kind of lame too. We won’t mention the hockey game.
I think Kerry was sincere about the windsufing, hockey. (Hunting — I don’t know…does he hunt???)
Those are the things he probably does in his spare time. He’s an outdoor sports guy. Nothing wrong with that; so am I.
I just think that BushRove’s painting him as an elite stuck so well and so early, that when he did the things he normally did, it just killed him.
But they knew he was being portrayed as an elite, so smart campaign managers would have told him not to go. And if he still went after being told not to, well, it’s his own fault then.
What I’m trying to say is that windsurfing was Kerry’s version of clearing brush.
Too bad we elect our Presidents based on brush-clearing and not ideas, huh?
You know, as a commentor above points out.. we don’t know if Kerry really lost.. since the outcomes were so close.
Even if he did win fair it seems to me that the candidates are so bland that the differences between them are slight. OK. Kerry has more integrity (not hard). However, every candidate we get now is from Yale, rich, or at least with their fingers in the wealthy elite’s pie.
I concede that I’d put a dogcatcher in office rather than have Bush up there but our choices run from the merely opportunistic to the downright exploitative.
A future campaign slogan may as well be “Vote for me! I just want to feather my nest! At least I wont ruin the country and take away your free speech and the right to your own body like the other guy would!”
:/ /end rant
The “elite” characterization stuck early because every major publication had several writers who loved starting articles with “the patrician John Kerry”. Even the Financial Times and the Economist did it. Over and over and maddingly over.
Once the characterization stuck, it didn’t matter how much Kerry actually did manual work around his house or engaged in macho sports. The press would mock him. It’s not that his handlers couldn’t create a similarly convincing illusion; they couldn’t get recognition even when it was the authentic John Kerry. And about windsurfing. I’d love to see W windsurf; reckon Jon Stewart can arrange it?
And a lot of the problem with the hunting trip and the hockey game was that the same press covered it that was spreading the “patrician” meme.
Rove didn’t do it by himself. He sat at the elephant Wurlitzer and played his own pipes.
And several of my previously trusted newspapers and magazines lost at least one subscriber.
Kerry’s failing is that his staff was running the 2000 election all over again–if not the 1992 one. They were not prepared for the BushitStorm that Rove unleashed. They thought that the Bush campaign was corrupt and dishonest but could believe that they were that corrupt and dishonest.
Yeppers. Too many Democrat’s campaigns are run like, well, campaigns.
We ran the Republican campaigns down here as businesses. We attacked each other like business do, not like politicians.
It’s MUCH more devatstating, especially in our ad-steeped culture.
Gore won.
Kerry won.
Well, I think so too, but it should have been a blowout, since Kerry ran against worst.president.ever.
has shrunk the Republican Core to what is essentially the Red State Haters or, 20-24% of the vote. You can track those numbers in things like the Schaivo propaganda campaign.
Add to that another 20%, the core non-thinking, non-questioning Mass Media slurpers that pretty much accept whatever they hear; and are too lazy to ask questions or do a little digging. With this group you’re up to around 40-44%.
So with this 40-44%,
all you have to do is delete enough votes in one column and invent enough votes in the other column and you can win a couple of key Electorial College states. It would help to try and delete votes and add votes in a number of other states to provide some cover and up the total…
Rove has been loosing and his appeal has been directed more and more to that supposedly solid core of Red State Haters. The other 20% will never be reached by a message that is at odds with the propaganda pushed by the Paid-For-Press, but they will abandon someone who betrays their thin veneer of trust. This support is slipping. This is why Rove is out in public view. The message is no longer believed by more and more of the “core” and the slurpers.
Rove has dug himself a deep, deep, deep hole and he continues to dig…
Any second-rate team can win if the refs (the paid-for-press) are on their side. But since the team is not the one actually winning, they don’t know how to play to win. And sooner or later they loose. Always.
The thing to keep in mind is that cheating teaches the opponent to play harder.
In late June and early July, I really thought we had the makings of a blowout, Kerry was pulling away in the polls and he was starting to talk about values. Talking about how values are what you do, not what you say. Talking about his own values, what he learned about from his parents, and about how they were much closer to conservative heartland values than anything seen in Bush’s actions. This was a very effective tact, even if it wasn’t the best possible one.
All he had to do to win was keep giving the same speech over and over and over again, until the press had no choice but to discuss it in mind-numbing detail because there was nothing else to write about in the campaign. This should have been the centerpiece of the convention, too. His service in Vietnam was not the proper centerpiece–it was simply an example of what he learned from his parents, as was his opposition to the war when he got home.
But no, he had not the slightest clue of how to connect image and issues. Well, I’ve got a little secret: there is no way in hell for a Democrat to win unless they are able to do that. Because we’ve got the American people on issues, we’ve got them by 10-20 percent, at least. It’s the image we lose them on, because that’s the basis on which most people vote.
We don’t have to lie about our image. We just have to focus on the most effective aspect of what we already are, and connect it to what we believe, and why. And then repeat it 10,000 times until done.
But what to do when what the candidate does normally not fit the image/issue connection?
Kerry liked to windsurf. If he does it, he looks out of touch. If he does soemthing else, he’s not being sincere.
Hey — did we maybe make the wrong guy our candidate??? 🙂
Windsurfing wasn’t the problem. Kerry is a veteran. Bush–notwithstanding all his protestations–is not. Kerry should simply have spent a lot more time visiting veterans in hospitals. Then, he should have invited some of them at appropriate stages of recovery to join him in some windsurfing.
It’s not, like, rocket science.
Because Rove’s playbook was a “known”, the election was not his success, but Kerry’s failure. The democratic party leadership is still in dire need of anal-cranial surgery.
A-bloody-men. Perfect analysis, dead on. This is what it all came down to, and this is why Kerry was a bad candidate, and why Dean probably would’ve won.
The key to all this is that Bush’s image is just an illusion. He’s really even more effete and upper-class than Kerry is, but he’s good enough at acting to look manly and blue-collar for the five minutes needed for a photo op. Dean’s recent comments – about the Republicans not doing honest work, for example – were intended to directly counter this. Which is why the Republicans started screaming so loudly about them, and why Biden and Edwards and friends started attacking Dean.
Still Too Wordy: Those 6 Points Equal
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy…. –ML King, “Beyond Vietnam”
by Gooserock on Fri Jun 24th, 2005 at 09:50:56 AM PDT
(Sorry, Gooserock … the right margin setting of 500 made the page scroll to the right for people with 600×800 screens, so I changed it. I changed the DIV code and i think this is a bit better than my first attempt.)
If this analysis is right, and I think there is a lot of truth in it, for my money, John Edwards best fits this description for 2008.
I think, however, there is more to it than just the candidate. We have to find a frame our issues, probably in the same manner as a candidate. That will take a lot of feet on the street.
Lately, I have been thinking about “guerilla” issue advertising. By this, I mean leaving fact sheets that counter right wing lies in public restrooms, grocery stores, etc. I think that advertising like this could fit in these 6 persuasion points. I don’t know – what do you think?
I’m afraid Kerry provided all the neutralization of his comparative advantages pretty much on his own.
I would have gone to hell and back in search of the right pig lipstick, but he just wasn’t a good candidate.
There were two events that helped set in stone the image of John Kerry as a “waffler who will do and say anything to get elected” and a “hollow man” who stood for nothing.
Kerry provided both of them, ready-made for the Bush Campaign Team. In fact, Kerry so easily handed the Bush Team the ammo they needed to clinch their image making that one had to wonder if maybe, just maybe, God was a Republican after all 😉
1st Event:
In rebutting a Bush ad criticizing him for voting last fall against $87 billion in additional funding for US troops in Iraq — a supplemental appropriation that included money for body armor — Kerry responded,
“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”
2nd Event:
He let Bob Shrum tell him not to respond to the Swift Boat Liars until the damage had already been done. As my mother, at the time, said:
“If he can’t even defend himself against outrageous lies that attack his character and integrity, how can he defend the U.S. in the age of terrorism?“
John Kerry was sunk after the Swift Boat Liars got through with him. And his campaign team was so stupid and incompetent that they had no clue. John Kerry was so afraid of making a mistake and thereby not realizing his life-long goal of being President, he didn’t tell his staff to go fly a kite … and get out there that same day, with the gloves off, and give those Swifites their just desserts. Sad, but true. I knew then that John Kerry was not the right man. Unfortuantely, he was all we had.