“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.
After I posted this diary, I noticed Maryscott’s diary, and see that we are basically saying the same thing. She writes:
That is another way of saying that Democrats should start seeing elections “as above all a propaganda struggle.”
Here’s a gooood question: at the Daily DIsh
I thought it was odd that Biden has completely dropped out of sight.
…by revealing the playbook? In other words, can you nullify the effectiveness of GOP strategies by pointing them out to the public? Will people behave more rationally if you point out to them the GOP is playing on their emotions? And if people know the GOP is trying to trick them, will they be less likely to fall for it?
The reason I ask, is that I see the Obama campaign making some efforts to do just that. Obama certainly addresses it in his stump speeches. Does it work? Or is he just preaching to the choir?
Here are two independently produced youtube videos that try to do the same thing (the sound doesn’t seem to be working on these videos, but it isn’t needed):
Sorry – by mistake I replied to this below.
Will people behave more rationally if you point out to them the GOP is playing on their emotions? And if people know the GOP is trying to trick them, will they be less likely to fall for it?
I certainly hope so. Pointing this out will of course just enrage the Republican base more, but it should do some good with people who do not identify themselves as Republicans but are leaning toward McCain.
In a normal country, the Republican Party would be so sullied by now that it would be in its death throes. All that Obama should need to say about McCain is that he is a Republican. The Democrats really hurt themselves by not impeaching Bush. Of course, Obama never said that Bush should be impeached, which undermines his message that he represents real change.