Note that these ideas are not fully worked out (except for the last one).
Please share widely!
Some thoughts on framing
Reality-based commentary on politics.
Reality-based commentary on politics.
Note that these ideas are not fully worked out (except for the last one).
I would hope that we could leave the McCain marriage alone (ugh) … You only go there if they try to make Michelle an issue, or start to fan the culture-war fires. Use only as a deterrent.
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p>(My grandfather used to teasingly refer to my grandmother as “my first wife”. They were married 73 years, up to her death.)
The Repug framing is war-hero, Washington maverick vs. elitist, empty celebrity who’s not like you.
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p>The Democratic framing is that this election is about the choice between continuing failed Bush policies vs. a change in direction. There are so many failed Bush policies to choose from that McCain supported – and the consequences to America’s economy and standing in the world are apparent.
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p>House-gate, McCain’s ties to lobbyists and the 80’s S&L crisis and other things that deconstruct McCain’s self-narrative are a necessary counterbalance to the attacks on Obama, but I think we could lose if we allow the election to be overfocused on the personalities. Democrats win if the emphasis is on whether the country wants more go-it-alone foreign policy, more energy policies designed by and for the oil industry, more tax policies that benefit the superrich, more cronyism, or whether it wants the Democratic alternative – attention to the needs of working families including health care, education and good jobs.
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p>Those of us who play way over by the Fisk pole should also let Obama focus on health care, education and the economy for this election cycle, rather than issues that may be dear to our hearts but of less priority to the broad majority, such as marriage equality, FISA oversight and liquid coal. Being right doesn’t absolve us of the need to be strategic about when and how to raise our issues.
Bean, it seems precisely the personalities that allowed Bush to win twice — winning quite a few voters who disagreed with his issues, but liked his personality more than Gore or Bush, no?
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p>Jaisu, you pose a good question. I’m not sure #2 works for Obama. He was an organizer then a pol. McCain was a Navy guy then a pol. Organizer v Navy guy?
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p>Your 1st point I find personally appealing, but I think it’s a big handicap for Obama with voters. That a guy lived in Indonesia and Hawaii, combined with a message of “let’s cooperate”, is doom. Perceived as weak. Kerry couldn’t sell the “we need allies” message, and he was a vet.
If we’ve lost three elections on personality, do we really want go fight another on those grounds? Isn’t the team without ethical compunctions about lying about the other guy and playing to people’s worst instincts – and with the more conventional old insider as its candidate – more likely to win that battle?
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p>Those who will be inspired by Obama’s life story and personality will be inspired by him regardless of campaign framing. Obama already has those votes. The demographic he has been having trouble with – the rust-belt working class Catholic voters that broke for HRC – may not prefer to have a beer with Obama over McCain (or Bush, for that matter). But the economic policies of the last eight years, which McCain supported and plans to continue, have been a disaster for them. Those voters need to be pitched and captured based on the promise of change in economic policies. I like Biden as the VP pick for this reason – he’ll do a good job of outreach to the voting group in play.
Can I amend to:
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p>Dems lost last 2 elections on personality….while stressing policy.
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p>I’d like to try to win an election about personality while stressing personality.
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p>But I agree with your point about who we need to win over.
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p>I’d love to see a new kind of 60-second ad: Obama at kitchen table with rust-belt hub, wife, kids. Do a bunch of real sit downs. Then distill the best ones.
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p>[blockquote]He’s hanging out. This family has a sense of humor, so does Obama. They’re joking.
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p>*”We don’t have latte here” and he laughs too, has some iced tea. That sort of thing.
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p>*Wife. “We’re hurting. We don’t want to complain. Some have it worse than us.” Obama’s listening.
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p>*Hub. “I still have my job. But barely. I sweat every day, are they going to close this factory too?” Obama’s listening.
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p>*Obama: You voted for President Bush?
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p>*(Same time) Hub: Yes sir. Wife: He did, not me.
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p>*Well, we ran your numbers. (Pulls out graph). You got a tax cut of $345 per year from him. Thing is, he ran the deficit so much, now you’ll owe Washington $2,700 in the coming years. Actually, we owe most of that Bush deficit to China. So you’ll send it to Beijing. How bout them apples?
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p>*What are these red and blue bars?
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p>*Me and Michelle did better. President Bush gave us a tax cut of $20,000. McCain, he’s the richest, so he got the biggest handout — $9 million of tax relief.
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p>Cut
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p>*I’m gonna cut your taxes. I’m gonna get us out of Iraq and cut the deficit. I’m gonna fight for people like you.
[/blockquote]
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p>To you, Bean, maybe that’s policy. To me, it’s personality.
and they’ll be effective.
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p>But please, no shots of Obama driving a tank, no stories about consultants advising Obama on how to dress to appear more alpha male, no photo ops of Obama hunting. Trying to package our candidates for cultural consumption is so risky – rather than assuaging fears of difference, it has often exacerbated them by making our candidates seem fake.
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p>Obama’s easy charisma and comfort with himself appeal to me. But certain groups see him as a bit of a snake-oil salesman, vain and overambitious – they aren’t charmed by him. That doesn’t mean they can’t vote for him, though, if they have a sense for what he wants to accomplish and prefer it to extending Bush policies that have not worked out so well for them.
prez candidates are constantly packaged. they are never “not packaged.” every appearance, every moment.
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p>i agree with your points — essentially what i hear you saying is “when you package, make sure he is himself.” trying to show “strength” with guns and tanks, or “commonality” with grocery store trips or bowling — that is clunky when it’s not the real guy.
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p>but the REAL obama can sit around a kitchen table comfortably. he can relate, not in a fake way like george bush the first, but in a real way. show that.
Obama’s message on McCain is clear by now: “more of the same” – tie McCain as much as possible to continuity, history, Bush, etc.
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p>Obama’s message on Obama is the opposite: A break with the past. A new kind of politics. Hope & change. We can do better.
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p>So, at the most basic level, it’s all about how McCain is more of the same and Obama is a break with that. A meta-theme is that “more of the same” is out of touch with reality: this is not really a case they have to make, because the public already believes the Bush administration is not where the public is, but it’s something they can reinforce by calling McCain out of touch.
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p>This is a pretty good setup for them. It draws a clear contrast between the candidates. It puts Obama on the side of that contrast that better matches what the public wants. Best of all, it uses McCain’s strength against him – the more he stresses how much more “experienced” he is than Obama, the more he reinforces Obama’s message that McCain represents more of the same while Obama represents a break with that.
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p>Indeed, I think McCain’s campaign seems aware of this, because he really hasn’t been playing up the “experience” theme the way Clinton did, and instead is trying to also portray himself as “different” from other Republicans. Though MCain’s campaign has been somewhat inept at message so far, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see them lurch back and forth on this before settling on a real message.
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p>Obama already beat an “experience” candidate in the Democratic primary who started out with a lot more support, money, and endorsements than he did, despite the fact that she couldn’t be tied to the status quo to anywhere near the level that McCain can. He did it while most of the primary-voting public remained unaware of his broad, varied experience. That was on purpose. You can’t run against an “experience” candidate, as a “change” candidate, while talking up all your great experience. Sure that’d work well with the maybe 20% of voters who pay a lot of attention and analyze multiple faces of the candidates and so on, but for most voters, it’d just muddle your message and mess up the contrast you’re trying to draw, weakening your case about why you should get their votes instead of the other candidate.
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p>For Obama’s campaign to play up “experience” now would be to undermine their own message. I don’t want to see him do it. Leave it to us bloggers, writing for an audience that cares, to talk about that stuff, and keep it out of the debates and the TV ads and the big campaign speeches.
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p>For McCain’s campaign to play up McCain’s “experience” would be to play into the Obama campaign’s hands. I hope they do more of it.
Something that I didn’t really make clear in my initial post – I’m not proposing that the campaign play up these particular issues. I’m suggesting how they (we) talk about these issues when they come up. So if I’m talking to someone, whether in a casual conversation or while doing phone banks or canvassing, and they say, “I’m favoring McCain because of his experience,” I need to be ready. “I think having someone who has been a Washington insider and has aligned himself with Bush’s policies isn’t the sort of experience I’m looking for. We don’t need another four years of the same thing. The fact that Obama has worked as a grassroots organizer in poor neighborhoods tells me that he’s more in touch with what those of us outside Washington are thinking.” Or something like that.
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p>The main idea again is to avoid arguing in the Republican frame. The first two ideas I posted are attempts to reframe a potential conversation.
Reframe an ad that McCain is currently running, which actually started out sounding negative the first time I heard it. The ad opens with the voice-over saying, “Washington is broken – John McCain knows it.” From there it goes into how McCain has tried to clean up Washington and how he is a maverick. An Obama ad could open with exactly the same line, and then call into question what McCain has done about it and suggest maybe he is part of the problem.
I understand that every four years we complain about the election being made about personality and attack our nominees for sticking to the issues.
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p>But this year I honestly feel on issue after issue every issue is a winner for the Democrats. John McCain had two issues-growing success in Iraq which with Malaki and Bush signing an Obama suggested timetable agreement Id say goes to Obama column. The second issue was drilling which I think most people now realize was a cop out and while it might have temporarily endeared McCain to some people, most independents see through it and we can now go on the attack.
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p>John McCain is wrong on every issue, he is wrong on Iraq, any negative attacks have to go at McCain this way.
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p>Yes John McCain is also in my view personally a jerk, and he is using divisive Rovian tactics against Obama, and yes we should respond to them. But we do not want to attack his wife, we do not want to go on the attack and be brought down to his level. Reducing Obama to his level, reducing the change candidate to the same old politics, if John McCain succeeds at that then he wins the election.
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p>Obama has to stay above the fray and over two simple questions: Are you better off than you were eight years ago? And a followup. Do you want more of the McSame or do you want change?
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p>If most voters will say no to the first question and change to the second than we win.
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p>Biden can now be the attack dog and he finally puts the nail in the coffin on the experience gap. Also I do think its fair especially with the economy as an issue to go after McCain as the actual elitist he is and mention how his family is living in opulent luxury, his wife can make money off of outsources jobs, while the rest of the country is suffering. Thats fair because McCain started it first, and its germaine to the economic issues we need to win on.
Just let Senator McCain talk. He doesn’t seem to help himself. An example. Fact is that neither have been leaders. They are senators, not governors.
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p>Senator Obama seems quite good at letting the public think what they want to think. (What is “Change”, anyway?) As for Senator McCain, it seems he cannot keep from commenting on just about anything, knowledge is not a factor. Let him go on.
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p>Lincoln won the election of 1860 by not campaigning. While that might not be possible now, a low profile might just be the winning strategy.
Fact is back then nobody campaign for himself because it was considered unseemly. The most they would do is write a letter explaining their views on a particular issue if asked. Then came the “front porch campaigns” whereby candidates would speak to visitors to their homes, but would not travel or take the initiative in planning rallies or other events. The full-fledged campaign is a 20th century phenomenon and is greatly enhanced by mass media which didn’t previously exist. If one candidate stays silent, the other one gets to define him and frame the debate on his own. That’s a recipe for disaster.
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p>I occasionally complain about how the collective “we” seems to define our choices as mistakes because they haven’t produced the outcomes we’ve liked. Too machiavellian by half. We have nothing to learn from our mistakes because our mistakes are tiny. The GOP doesn’t play by the rules. Their success (such as it is…) comes from cheating, lying, dog whistles and voter suppression… So stop acting as if the GOP is succesful on legitimate terms. They are not. Our “mistakes” are to play by the rules and to keep some moral clarity. Better to lose like that, I say, than to compromise our principles.
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p>Some GOP ‘frames’:
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p>in 2000, the frame: draft dodging figher jock(-strap) George Bush promises not to do nation building. He also promises to ‘unite, not divide’.
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p>2004, the frame: John Kerry is an entitled, out-of-touch gold-digger with multiple homes. Here, have this purple heart band-aid, too, so we can belittle his service. Come 2008… Never mind all that.
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p>Lessons to learn:
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p>–If frames were that important, George Bush would have been held accountable. If frames were important, John McCain wouldn’t have even thought about running, given the parallels between John Kerry and he, given his financial and nuptial particulars.
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p>– Framing doesn’t change peoples minds. It just gives them what seems to be a legitimate hook upon which to hang their hat. It never creates emotions about candidates, but seeks only to confirm pre-existing dislikes and fears.
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p>The only way we are going to win is if we get good, honest, earnest Republican voters to think.
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p>That’s all that is required: if they think, then we win. And the best part is that THEY WIN TOO.
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p>There’s no magic bullet. We get them to realize that if we win, they win and if we lose, they lose too… It shouldn’t be too hard, but we’re too busy castigating ourselves for ‘mistakes’.
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p>
I hope your attitude isn’t shared by those running Obama’s campaign, because if it is, we’re doomed. It reminds me of ineffective teachers who complain that their students don’t try hard enough or a sports team that comes up short and blames the refs. It can’t be at least partially our fault, can it?
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p>There is no magic bullet, as you say, and we don’t have to get into the gutter. But unless we learn to effectively communicate and get through to enough voters so they first listen and then actually hear and understand our message, we lose. There’s been plenty written on the subject by people who understand much better than I do how the brain absorbs and processes information. If I had to recommend just one thing to read, it’s Thom Hartmann’s Cracking the Code. It’s all about effective political communication and he applies things that he’s learned both from psychology and the advertising business.
Effectively communicate? Wow! I didn’t see that one coming! Sheer GENIUS!
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p>And taking cues from psychology and advertising?!? Whew… thought we were gonna slide into manipulation there. I do feel better though, knowing that I am, in fact, to blame.
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p>I’ll see your psychology and up you one Book of Job. Job earned his reputation for patience, you see, not because he endured the suffering (he did not endure it very well, actually…) but because he consistently refused to accept responsibility for a situation not of his making and having no cause in his behaviour: he would not confess to a sin he did not commit, though his three friends argued consistently that he must have brought this suffering upon himself.
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p>And as for psychology… it seems to me that trying to apply the tenets of psychology to the situation would endeavor a great deal more time on the couch for your average bathroom trolling anti-gay, purple-heart bandaid wearing, crooked to the marrow pseudo-ethicist, adulterous Republican than for anybody here at BMG.
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p>Oh, and…
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p>
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p>Dude… Torture? War? Corruption? Cheney?! Russia v Georgia?!? Both Arafat and Sharon are history and we STILL haven’t made progress in the region??? What about this situation doesn’t already spell D – O – O – M?? I hope you’re not trying to stave off catastrophe… it’s already here. It’s up to us to dig out and rebuild.
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p>
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p>And the presence of any number of teachers who complain about their students doesn’t make any of the students saints, no matter the level of the teacher… same goes for sports. What’s your point?
Well, I’d say that it was pretty clearly that just because Republicans cheat doesn’t leave us blameless. If we know that our opponents cheat, it becomes incumbant upon us to figure out a way to win despite their cheating. That’s not to say that we stoop to their level, but we have to adjust our game accordingly. Any coach will tell you that.
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p>And as far as your suggestion that taking cues from psychology and advertising smacks of manipulation, it depends on what you mean by manipulation. If you were going to ask your boss for a raise, would you try to do it when he’s in a good mood or a bad one? Is asking him when he’s in a good mood manipulative? Possibly. It’s also immensly practicle, though. And it’s not as if asking him when he’s in a good mood guarantees that you’ll get the raise; it just guarantees that he’ll react more favorably to your arguments.
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p>If you truly believe that all we need to do is get Republicans to think, than you shouldn’t be so dismissive of the techniques that are designed to put them in the state of mind where they actually will think.
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p>-Seth
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p>This doesn’t follow… It’s not clear at all: You adjust your game for a variety of reasons, some having to do with the level of your opponent, some not. You adjust if they cheat. You adjust if they don’t cheat. You adjust for weather. You adjust for sunlight in your eyes. You adjust.
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p>But if you adjust ONLY AND DISPROPORTIONATELY in response to your opponent (and specifically by accusing yourself of ‘mistakes’ that you DID NOT MAKE) how can winning have any meaning? You’ve not only accepted your opponents terms but you’ve also tacitly agreed that NO OTHER TERMS ARE VALID. How’s that working for ya?
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p>Everything Jasiu wrote is reactive and responsive: it’s a twitchy defensive flinch and it purports to diagnose something as a ‘mistake’ when clearly it isn’t. Every ‘frame’ he proposes is merely a catch-up counter-accusation that hollows us out by playing on emotionalism .
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p> You bet I care about getting people to think: but ask yourself if these ‘techniques’ feel better than they are in reality? Labeling Cindy McCain as “his second wife” is just a feel-good slice of smug, no? I can’t see where that’s a ‘technique designed to put them in the state of mind where they actually will think‘. Quite the opposite.
I don’t think I’m going to convince you of this, which is fine. But I see elsewhere that you admit that you don’t know why these races are so close, yet you go all snarky on someone who is trying to work it out. Whatever.
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p>All I know is that the one time I heard Bill Clinton speak live, he had my entire focus. I hung on every word. And so did everyone else in the ballroom – he was able to bring his voice down to a whisper and everyone could hear just fine. No other speaker has ever been able to command my attention like that. I want to know how he does it.
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p>I know that the introduction of the phrase “death tax” had an effect on the estate tax debate, and still does. I want to know why.
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p>I know that when Nixon said, “I am not a crook,” I felt in my bones, “He’s a crook”. I still feel that any time I see it. I want to know why.
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p>And if that knowledge allows me to communicate as a better campaigner by using some methods I discover and avoiding known pitfalls, I don’t see that as being immoral or negative in any way.
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p>Here’s one example. During the Patrick campaign, another volunteer told me that when someone asks her, “Why should I vote for him?”, she’d reply, “I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you why I’m voting for him.” Then she’d go into her reasons. I had people asking me that all of the time also (because I’d wear my button everywhere), so I started doing the same thing and sure enough, I had heads shaking and thank-yous from people, every time.
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p>When I read the Hartmann book, he discussed this. He calls it the “indirect you”. People do not like being told directly, “you should do this” or “you don’t want to do that” and they might tune out the rest of what you are saying because something in the brain is saying, “I don’t want to be told what to do”. But there are ways, such as the one above, to avoid that turn-off and get your message across. And it’s effective.
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p>Is that manipulation, or just good communication skills?
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p>I’ve been trying to work it out since the bourgeois riot of 2000*. I good and guarantee you I’ve gone and thought thru every permutation of tactics, strategy, psychology, gamesmanship and history. This is where I’ve landed. You’re so all-fired sure that your emotionalism trumps my logic that you think you can just dismiss me… But I know you’ll land here too, sometime…
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p>Look, I ain’t saying what works. I honestly don’t know if anything works. THATS HOW THOROUGHLY FUCKED WE ARE!! And when you are well and thoroughly fucked, like we all are, then you got to figure out a way to keep your own sanity and not lose oneself to cheap emotionalism, petty cynicism and the moral fog that envelops us. That’s kinda the only way outta tragedy alive and intact.
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p> But I do know what doesn’t work and that’s when Democrats try to act like Republicans. All I hear is “attack, attack, attack.” Clinton tried that in the ’90’s and ALL he got for his troubles was more trouble, Ken Starr and impeachment. Guess what? Attacking the GOP only gives the right wing assholes a hard-on. They love it!!! They actually get off on it. Isn’t that twisted? You betcha… But what happens then? The GOP takes off the gloves… and we devolve into an endless, pointless, embittering swamp of sadism and mutually re-enforcing anger and triviality and ennui that has nothing to do with thinking. Nothing at all. They are not going to stop. They aren’t going to cry ‘uncle’ and are seemingly immune to logic. They are going to devolve unto a deep place where, and this I guarantee, you don’t want to go. Is that the campaign you want?
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p>Is this the country you want?
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p>Step back from the pointless back-n-forth and just see it for what it is. You see a thoroughly corrupt GOP ( I mean, really, thoroughly and truly corrupt to the very marrow…) that in just about every action they perform contradicts every statement and every declaration they make. It’s mind-numbing to look at the sheer amount and pull of tension in the difference between what the Republicans say and what the Republicans do.
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p>You would think, applying a rational approach to the situation, that they would have long since collapsed under the sheer weight of their contradictions. The cognitive dissonance is nauseating me at a pretty distant remove!! But no… they go on.
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p>You point it out. They go on.
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p>You point it out again. This time with illustrations! They go on.
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p>You itemize the loonnngg list of Republican hypocrisies. They go on.
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p>You engage their arguments and win, handily and soundly, again and again. They go on.
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p>You wait for them to collapse out of sheer mental dissonance. They go on.
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p>You underline, chart, graph and map exactly where the statements are diametrically opposed to the actions. They go on.
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p>You attack them. They go on. You attack them with a real frenzy. They return with more frenzy… and you might even get a smile outta them.
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p>You tell me, now, what mistakes I’ve made??
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p>* “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
chad-miss, starving hysterical dimpled,
dragging themselves through the palm beach streets at
dawn looking for an anger fix,
angle-headed spinsters burning for the egregious
connection to the Ken Starr dynamo in
the machinery of the right….
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p>That’s your framing of what I’m saying. You are missing the point that I’m talking about the entire brain – which doesn’t divide up nicely into emotional and logical processing.
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p>I don’t think we’ve gone through a similar process and you obviously do not want to hear about mine, so this is my last response.
… If you can’t handle what I’m saying… good luck trying to convince people who don’t even think Barack Obama is an American… And if you think I don’t want to hear your story (tho, truly, I do…) you’re in for a rude awakening. Try not to hurt yourself.
…during an election, not after.
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p>There is a science to political campaigning, just like there is to marketing and advertising or any number of other things. Certain things have been proven time and time again to be effective, others not so much. What’s more, an increasing body of neuropsychological study is beginning to explain why this is (check out The Political Brain).
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p>While these truths may be unpalatable (I certainly find it disturbing how little rational thought goes into people’s political decision making), ignoring them certainly won’t help.
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p>-Seth