BooMan responded to a story about GOP spinmeister Frank Luntz’s efforts to craft anti-Occupy Wall Street talking points with a post titled “Worst Person in the World.” Luntz is odious, and yet … well, in comments, BooMan and I had this exchange:
ME: He may be the worst person in the world, but I’m wondering if I’ll live long enough to see our side learn one-tenth of what he’s already forgotten about getting the public on your side.
We need a Frank Luntz. Now, obviously, it would be better to live in a system that wasn’t manipulated by Frank Luntzes. But we don’t. So we need one.
BOOMAN: … In most cases, the Republican position serves either a small elite or a sizable minority opinion. They cannot afford to make straightforward factual arguments because, in most cases, people either don’t agree with them or they lack objective third-parties who will back up their arguments.
Democrats frequently can bolster their arguments by appealing to the CBO or to scientific studies or experts in certain fields. It’s much rarer that Republicans can use this type of persuasion….
ME: Problem is, that’s a guaranteed strategy for losing low-information voters — and, really, anyone who has to work long hours and deal with kids and aging parents and everything else life throws at you, especially those who weren’t fortunate enough to go to elite schools, where you get used to processing the work of experts.
BOOMAN: …Let’s stipulate that what Luntz does is very effective at combatting and sometimes overwhelming factual information and expert testimony. But he’s the one starting at a disadvantage.
It takes a lot of work and money to raise and maintain doubt about climate change, for example. You have to found and maintain several think tanks, keep an army of “journalists” and “experts” on retainer, and hold constant conferences to dispense your talking points.
All we have to do is read and cite a bunch of reports and ask experts who are getting paid to do science to help us make the case.
Yes, we could adopt more persuasive language, and that would help us make our case.
But what I am trying to say is that the Mighty Wurlitzer is all the Republicans have….
See, to me, the Wurlitzer is the nuclear arsenal of the right. It’s the right’s most effective weapon. It’s “all the Republicans have”? I’d say it’s all the Republicans need. Sure, it takes a lot to maintain it, but it’s their single most effective tool.
Even in the Bush years, I felt that Rupert Murdoch was the most dangerous person in America — Bush, Cheney, and Rove were runners-up. When Murdoch finally departs from the scene, I’m going to feel the way Egyptians felt when Mubarak fell, or Libyans when Qaddafi died. It’s an inexact comparison, sure — Murdoch and his allies don’t literally repress or silence people. But they silence and repress ideas — progressive taxation, labor rights, the urgency of dealing with climate change, abhorrence of torture, the need to keep America a nation that tolerates all religious faiths as well as absence of faith. And on and on. I don’t want to fight fire with fire. But fire is being deployed every day with extreme efficiency. It’s the most important political story of our times.
Also: see Barbara O’Brien on why we don’t win, and DougJ on why they do.
have a mighty Wurlizter of their own – the bully pulpit. Unfortunately, it’s unoccupied (pun intended) and gathering dust.
It’s been decades since that bully pulpit has been occupied by a genuinely liberal Democratic president.
Ok, this bugs me, so I have to comment. That president you’re referring to is Jimmy Carter. In every way: on policy he was undisputably the most liberal in the last many decades, and he used to the bully pulpit to no end on the issue that was at the time and still is the most important: energy and sustainability.
And here’s what bugs me: today’s progressives tend to repudiate Carter and what he fought for despite the fact that he fought for liberal causes vocally and without hesitation. Sure he didn’t get re-elected, but a lot of that was due to the hostage crisis and a bad economy.
Carter fought to make the nation energy independent, but not via eco-utopian means: conservation, carpooling, and solar hot water, not hybrids and green consumerism. His vision is still the one we need to adopt today, but you’ll rarely find anyone championing it.
I assumed he was referring to LBJ or maybe even Kennedy. Carter pissed off liberals so much that he had two of them (Anderson/Kennedy) run against him in 1980.
That’s the common response (that because Kennedy, etc.) were upset with him, he wasn’t liberal. Yet if you look at his policies overall (no military adventures of any sort, energy independence and sustainability, drug decriminalization, etc.) he was very much so. And more than that, he was fighting the right fights.
Anderson was liberal for a Republican-turned-independent, but by no means was he liberal overall.
For the times, he wasn’t very liberal. Compared to Clinton? Yeah, he was pretty liberal.
Maybe no military adventures, but wasn’t it Carter who, following Brzezinki’s (sp) counsel, used the CIA to undermine the democratically-elected communist government in Afghanistan? Usually we think the Soviets arrived first, but a lot of sources say they were invited in after we got there and started causing trouble. I’m not an expert on that era but I’d be surprised if we weren’t pulling similar dirty tricks all over the place at the time.
Indeed it was. Brzezinski was a cold warrior, but of the Kennan variety rather than Kissinger. Don’t misunderstand me: I have a great respect for Kennan and a good deal for Brzezinski, but “national interest” for me is inherently problematic.
I have a copy of The Grand Chessboard around here somewhere waiting for me to get to it…Kennan’s a new name for me though. I’ll look into it.
George Kennan was the guy who posed containment as policy. Meaning: don’t drop bombs on Russians. They are good people with a bad government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Article
He was a diplomat who lived in the USSR and had personal relationships with real Russians. He actually gave a shite about them as human beings.
His policy prescriptions as well were successful by 1989/1991 depending how you want to date it.
Awesome! Thanks for the links. It’s a slow Friday at work.
Carter wasn’t all that liberal. His quest for energy independence was his one good thing. He actually started the quest for deregulation, not Ray-gun.
he used to the bully pulpit to no end on the issue that was at the time and still is the most important: energy and sustainability.
How’d that work out?
The bully pulpit as the equivalent of the Mighty Wurlitzer? No, not really.
Exactly.
The bully pulpit isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Though part of my point is that we shouldn’t throw the message out with the messenger. Carter’s message is the banner we need to hold up today, and really should be the central one for OWS.
And there have been no “genuinely liberal Presidents” since day one of this country, mythology aside.
What irritates me about the whole “bully pulpit” thing is that it’s basically meaningless without a support mechanism, which the Republicans have quite well. Bush gave a speech, or announced a policy? It was repeated throughout the conservative media, conservative commentators wrote columns praising it, and conservative blogs jumped in with it as well. President Obama makes a speech? For all you’d know, it’s met with a “meh” by the media, and no matter how liberal what he said was, the liberal commentators and blogs will indulge in a massive screamfest about how it isn’t what they want. Then they run around whining that he’s not using the “bully pulpit.” Give me a break.
If genuine liberals had the numbers, at the polls, that would not be the case.
It’s not enough to be right.
I have to say that the bully pulpit is the most overrated tool the President has at his disposal. Yes, FDR used the fireside chats well, but they were not nearly as effective as events requiring radical solutions.
The consensus among political scientists and media researchers in support of this position is roughly equivalent to the consensus among climate scientists that the atmosphere is warming due to human activity.
And yet, there’s this cadre of people who continue to insist that pretty speeches from the President are the prime mover of our politics.
How much good is a bully pulpit without a Wurlitzer to put it on a 24/7 loop?
is it if it’s unused?
At doing what? It’s never been successful at moving votes in Congress.
This comment should be in bold capitals.
I guess I just don’t understand what they want the bully pulpit used for. If they think it will get us more liberal legislation, they’re dreaming. But I think it can set a narrative, and encourage movements like OWS to form to give political space to pols in the future. This is where I’d like it used. However, I have no illusions that it will somehow move legislation. That’s never been the case. It’s US Gov/Politics 101. In fact, in college, it was a question on one of my tests:
“When presidents try to influence Congress by appealing to the public (“going public”), how successful are they?”
Answer on the test: “d. Rarely successful”
Isn’t it the opposite?
Broad popular movements like OWS don’t come out of presidential rhetoric. Rather, presidential rhetoric gains traction when it dovetails with a broad popular movement.
Certainly, OWS didn’t grow out presidential rhetoric. Genuine popular movements grow as a response to objective conditions.
Yeah, that’s how it happens in practice because pols are pols…but I still think in Obama’s case it was different. Not that I thought he could get through what some people thought, but I wasn’t under the impression that OFA was going to be infused with the DNC. Maybe like a MoveOn.Org thing…not an arm of the DNC, but still part of “Team Donk” to get agenda through.
That still requires independent movements, but it wouldn’t abandon the organizing part. Maybe this if that failure Tim Kaine wasn’t the DNC head it could have been effective in the way I imagined it in 2008.
Kaine may not be the most effective DNC chair e’er, but the big problem with 2010 was that between 2006 and, especially, 2008, Democrats had picked, to use a widely-used metaphor, all of the low-lying fruit there was. Democrats took seats in a slew of GOP districts in addition to basically all the swing districts. All things being equal, the President’s party loses seats in the midterm, and this was all the more so because Democrats did so well in the two elections prior to 2010.
Add to this the fact that ACA actually passed. Whatever its inadequacies, it is a universal health care bill. Pushback was more or less inevitable. Obama knew he had to pass something in his first two years or he was through, and he did so.
I saw it given conditions as something of an achievement that Democrats held the Senate. One affects conditions only, and the difference between effective and ineffective leadership is the quality of responses to conditions, most but not all of the time.
This as a total aside: one of the things Obama takes some measure of s&#t for is that he doesn’t do a bunch of very visible executive orders on controversial issues. “He’s weak, he’s a stooge!” He avoids doing so because using executive orders for policy changes opens the way for legislative undoing of said executive order, or, worse, establishes executive order rather than legislation as the primary means by which policy changes are made. That might be good for Napoleon III, Bismarck, or Cheney, but it’s not what democrats, small “d,” are about.
I don’t think they grow out of objective conditions, whatever those are. They grow out of a realization that the rhetoric doesn’t match what the “leaders” are doing, or even trying to do. Ironically, OWS probably owes as much to Obama’s campaign rhetoric about “change” as anything else. Speeches may not immediately move Congressional votes, but I think they can powerfully influence the long-term expectations that eventually coalesce into activism.
You mean WITH a Wurlitzer to screw it on a 24/7 loop.
The mighty wurlitzer is all they do need. Just look at Ruth Marcus from yesterday!! And she’s supposed to be one of Kaplan’s liberals!! As I said a few days ago, the “liberal media” is one of the great con jobs ever sold.
Media-production craft is great. Seeking to direct a message at the widest possible audience it totally necessary and good. But ultimately whatever the form of the message it’s not stronger than reality. So yes, imperial power warps reality for it’s occupants (and it feels pretty good don’t it), most 1% think more or less they are going to live forever and they’ll be the one to get away clean from whatever unpleasant externalities their general incompetence entails (as do we all more or less probably). And many do! But we see the outcome of this attitude on a now recurring basis as pretensions to political or economic or imperial inevitability get repeatedly exploded and publicly humiliated. As a plan for dealing with the future, mere sophistry and sloganeering sucks and will be quickly replaced by stronger social systems. As Booman says, all someone needs to discredit them are the facts they’re so eager to misdirect us from.
Crafting a messsage or building a strong messaging structure is not the same as seeking to dupe the populace and coughing up mantras of doublespeak that forestall critical thought. That’s not what a movement for the future needs. When that’s all you have left as message than on a national platform you get the traveling clown show the republicans have been putting on. They made themselves collectively dumber going in that direction. The wurlitzer is really not as strong or as inevitable as it wants us to believe, and the mentality it illustrates will continue to give us pratfalls and pie fights on the global stage.
The most insidious part of the Mighty GOP Wurlitzer is that Democratic candidates are forced to subsidize it with media buys during campaign season.
Forced to? Says who? The shit-for-brains campaign consultants?
Yeah, they could limit their media buys to the networks and newspapers owned by liberals.
I love the idea of Democrats putting as much as they can into organizing and boots on the ground, but you can’t be seriously suggesting that they abandon media buys entirely.
The GOP used the Mighty Wurlitzer to its medium-term advantage beginning with Nixon you could say, but certainly with Reagan. Medium-term is what it is good for. I suppose if Obama goes down in 2012 I’ll retract this, but I can’t see how Luntz’ basic approach is a replacement for actual policy that improves things for most people, which is what Obama does. ACA improves things for most people.
There was a swing to the GOP in 2010 which got them a House in which to trumpet their insanity. All they have is message, and it shows. Also, there are real reasons they didn’t take the Senate as well, primarily due to the downside of their focus on manipulative rhetoric. They are at the point where the leadership can’t tone it down, because they lose the footsoldiers.
The center-left could get a fair amount of short-term mileage from the type of manipulative messaging Luntz specializes in, but efforts are better used to rely on facts and create policy which produces good facts. The GOP focused all its energy on tactical advantages at the expense of real strategy.
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” — attributed to Sun Tzu
They’ve got the noise part down, but damn, defeat is a long time in coming.
Right!
I would add more substantively: you’re right, defeat is a long time coming. I am convinced that the GOP will cease to exist within my lifetime, because I can’t see how it mends itself. That’s not a good thing. I see it limping along, progressively losing a bit more than it gains back but not disappearing, for decades. It shows no sign of moderation, because as other comments have noted, one can get rich on speaking fees by feeding the base’s insanity. Palin will never need to work again, so it’s not so bad she can’t get a job in this town.
We have a two party system, so it would be much better if the other party would clean up. No sign of it happening.
Also, I have no sense of how precisely the GOP will go Whig, but it will happen. It’s really only the persistence of racism that is keeping it going as strong as it is now.
The way they’re going now I actually don’t think they can keep it up that much longer. The demographics are also against them. The media is what’s keeping them “alive”.
A while ago it occurred to me or more likely someone I had read and conveniently forgotten that the GOP is a virtual party. They implement no actual policy, but had the appearance of being political. They checkmated themselves with their own discourse. Witness Bush/Rove’s unsuccessful attempt (and racist attempt in its assumptions) to appeal to Latino voters through anti-abortion nonsense.
I’ve said it before: Fox/Limbaugh is the true axis of evil.
Where does Roger Ailes rank in your Canyon of Neros?
Ailes is a tool, literally and figuratively.
Steve M.–I’m afraid I’m with you on this one. Booman’s position is basically that the truth will out. In the long run that may well be true, hence the generally progressive arc of history. In the short term, not so much.
At the risk of a Godwin’s law violation, Pravda and Goebbles would have been amazed to discover that not only can you effectively deceive the people, it can be self supporting, in fact you can get filthy rich doing it.
I don’t know that there is really a whole lot of disagreement between what Steve and I are saying. I guess I’d say that the Republicans have an infrastructure to plug Luntz into, and then he is brutally effective. But it’s the network that is more important than the ‘science’ of what Luntz is doing. We don’t so much need to emulate Luntz as figure out a way to compete with the reach and entertainment value of the Wurlitzer.
Exactly.
I’m not even sure that the arc of history tends progressive. It seems that way now at the end of a fairly progressive century, but history and its arc belongs to the victors, especially in an era of non-physical data–literally, nothing is written is stone anymore, so it’s impossible to know what information would survive a hypothetical right-wing reign of terror.
At present, there are also plenty of right-wing “history” programs for elementary schools teaching that the Constitution was drafted according to biblical principles and libertarian social economics, and a whole slew of other lies that I can’t stomach recounting here. Newt is in charge of at least one of them, although I can’t remember which; I’m always mildly astonished when I recall that he’s considered a “historian.”
Maybe the truth will eventually out. I hate to sound cynical, but I think it’ll need a lot more help than it’s getting before that happens.
Being good instead of evil limits your options. It’s true.
Boo-hoo-hoo. That’s not fair, etc.
You sum it up.
Doesn’t mean you can’t fight smart. So we have the facts on our side, and the facts don’t appear to be working. What’s wrong with focus-grouping to find better ways of communicating the truth? That’s not evil, it’s intelligent.
I’ve thought for some time that Abe Lincoln, “you can fool some of the people…” wasn’t nearly as close to reality as P.T. Barnum, “…a sucker born every minute” (or whoever actually coined that one).
I think they go by, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all the time. BUT if you’ve got the media, fooling some of the people all the time is good enough.
This whole discussion of the “bully pulpit” is ridiculous. It fails to control for whether the public is behind the stand or not. If the public is overwhelmingly behind a proposal, the so-called “bully pulpit” is extremely effective. It just hasn’t been used for the last three years on any progressive issue that the public, especially those who voted for Obama, were enthusiastically behind.
There is another aspect to this “bully pulpit” argument that has always bugged me. It is one thing to contend that the “bully pulpit” would have been of no use in winning on a progressive issue; it is quite another to use that as a cover for not telling the truth to the American people about the nature of a problem, who caused the problem, and how it needs to be fixed.
IMO, that is the standard we should hold presidents to. Not blame him/her for tactical errors, or failing to overcome unmovable opposition, but did he/she tell the truth about the nature of the problem, who or what caused the problem, and how it needs to be fixed?
In that regard, we are looking at a missive fail IMO. But YMMV.
Sorry, should be massive fail. LOL
Massive fail. LOL
Actually, I’d say that “missive fail” works just fine in your context.
If the public isn’t behind a particular stand, the bully pulpit can be an effective instrument in helping to swing opinion. It’s not necessarily immediately effective, but having a coherent message and repeating it has proven over the long term to be highly effective for the right. And anyway, on most of the pressing issues we face, I’d say the public is pretty solidly on the progressive side of things, they’re just not getting that reinforcement from the top. I’m not saying PBHO isn’t saying the right things; he doesn’t get suitable amplification from the media, and there’s a massive daily deluge of oppositional propaganda coming from the right on every issue imaginable.
That’s been my problem with PBHO so far: I don’t think he’s been aggressive enough pointing out the obvious to the mass of voters who apparently can’t work out the obvious for themselves. It should be a matter of common knowledge by now that tax cuts don’t create jobs, for instance, but apparently it takes a 24/7/365 cycle of a couple years of nonstop mantra shouting for even something so blatant to soak in.
I don’t blame Obama for not getting things done in light of the unprecedented obstruction he’s been faced with, I just think he could be doing a better job of telling the public who’s to blame–and use names, starting with “Republicans,” but not leaving out the turncoat Dems either. That said, I’ve been pretty happy with his approach of the last few months.
All Luntz is doing is applying a simple form of social construction analysis to political consulting. This is something invented by progressive academics, and something that progressive political scientists publish on all the time. Frank Luntz just has the insight to actually read their stuff and put it into practice, unlike most progressive political advisers. (Kind of like Karl Rove had the insight to read Saul Alinsky and put Alinsky’s approach to work –for evil instead of good.)
Calling them “low information voters” is of a piece with Obama belly-aching on behalf of the so-called “party of the people” about the plight of the middle class.
The middle class is rich doctors and corporate lawyers.
Hot shit Obama’s own kind of people.
And they are doing fine, just like him.
The people on the ropes in America today are the American working class.
Let’s just tell the truth, here among ourselves.
One side of the problem is stupid working class voters who put racism and idiot religion ahead of their own class interests.
The other side is the plutocracy doing its best to hammer the American working class, and doing it very successfully, by enlisting the support of those stupid working class voters.
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”