“Our ads have been pretty tough. I just have different philosophy: I’m going to respond with the truth,” Mr. Obama told a voter on Friday, responding to a question about whether Democrats would suffer the same fate they have in previous presidential campaigns. “I know there are a lot of Democrats and some independents and some Republicans who really want change and are getting really nervous because they have seen this movie before.” (link)
The truth has stopped playing a significant role in American politics some time ago. It’s disquieting that Democrats still do not appear to have realized that. Democrats have still not learned that if Republicans run their election campaigns using highly effective marketing techniques, Democrats must be able to effectively wield such techniques themselves. Appealing to voters’ rationality alone is not going to win you elections.
George Lakoff has a good post laying out what Obama and Biden are doing wrong.
Post-Palin, the Obama-Biden campaign seems to have become the Gore-Kerry-Hillary campaign. They are running on 18th Century theory of Enlightenment reason: If you just tell people the facts, they will follow their self-interest and reason to the right conclusion. What contemporary cognitive scientists have discovered (See my new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain), and what Republican marketers have known for decades, is that the Enlightenment theory of reason doesn’t describe how people actually work. People think primarily in terms of cultural narratives, stereotypes, frames, and metaphors. […]
Realities matter. To communicate them, you have to make use of real reason. That’s what Obama did in the nomination campaign when he used his personal narrative to communicate about the country’s needs. Obama needs to go back to being Obama. The Obama campaign’s job is to shine a light on those realities through Obama’s unique personal qualities as a leader and communicator.
The Obama campaign has problems with conservative populism. They don’t seem to understand it. Conservative populism on a national scale was invented in the late 1960s. At the time, most working people identified themselves with liberals. […]
Conservative populism is a cultural, not an economic, phenomenon. These are folks who often vote against their economic self-interest and instead vote on their identity as conservatives and on their antipathy to liberals, who they see as elitists who look down on them. Simply giving conservative populists facts and figures won’t work.
They tend to vote for people they identify with and against people who they see as looking down on them. The job for the Obama campaign is to reverse the present mindset that the Republicans have constructed, to reveal the conservatives as elitist Washington insiders who cynically manipulate them, to get conservative populists to identify with Obama and Biden on the basis of values and character, and to have them see realities through Obama’s leadership capacities. Not an easy job. But it’s the real job.
It’s pretty clear by now that once again, the Dems were complacent, thinking that the Republican brand was so tarnished that the election would be theirs to lose. But with their deep understanding of marketing, the Republicans, by nominating Palin, have succeeded in rebranding themselves.
Obama needs to do two things: do a better job of making rural voters think that he is not so different from them – and being a policy wonk as he has lately is not going to do the trick – and make it a main part of his narrative that McCain and Palin are out to fool the American people.
Of course, Obama has started doing the latter with his “lipstick on a pig” remark and by saying that the American people are “smart”. But he really has to spell it out.
If they do this correctly, the Democrats still have enough time to prevent the Republicans from pooling wool over the American people’s head yet one more time. But I am not sure if the Democrats have it in them to see this election as above all a propaganda struggle.
