At least we don’t have to worry that the Heritage Foundation will be empowered by Jim DeMint’s deep thinking. All he’s got is an idea to do some research into how to market tea bagger ideas better in the marketplace. He says, “one lesson I learned in marketing is that, for consumers and voters, perception is reality.” So, really, his plan is to research how to best distort people’s perception so that they accept his alternative reality. He doesn’t plan on using his think tank to come up with new ideas that might appeal to the voters, but, instead, to change what they want.
Sounds like he’s going to create a soul-crushing environment at the Foundation where actual intellectual activity is discouraged.
Sounds like he’s going to create a soul-crushing environment at the Foundation where actual intellectual activity is discouraged.
When was actual intellectual activity ever encouraged at Heritage?
I don’t know. They are a think-tank.
Didn’t they come up with the Romney-Obama Health Care Plan? Or was it another right-wing think-tank?
Seriously, Boo! And this will be different how?
It is completely unsurprising that DeMint would proceed in this way, and given their servile nature in recent years, it is completely unsurprising that Heritage would welcome him in to do just this.
Nothing new. This is just a variation on the the standard Luntz/Dowd play book of manipulative polling.
I think we can now consign Jim DeMint to obscurity. But watch what the Heritage Foundation “scholars” are doing to implement his reality magic.
The Heritage Foundation is really an empirical test of Abraham Lincoln’s dictum about “fooling the people”.
I liked his parting shot:
This is the kind of climate-change talk I like.
None of that phony “global warming” nonsense for Jim. All it takes is better marketing to convince people that killer hurricanes in New Jersey are perfectly normal.
All he is describing is just a reprise of what Fox News has been doing for the last decade. And somehow duplicating that effort is the answer?
Demint is quite the sharp one.
The “conservative movement” is nothing more than a brand to be sold to the unthinking masses. It’s based on an grand illusion that appeals to many. It always has been. They come up with PR that sounds so commonsensical that no one really challenges it, convince their followers that they are victims of something and divide the middle class, neutralizing their majority power. Meanwhile, that majority is robbed blind and the movement’s benefactors hoard the loot while no one’s watching.
It’s actually genius marketing and Jim DeMint is absolutely correct. Perception is more powerful than reality. Where he’s being stupid is in being so honest about what it is that they are doing. These folks have been sustaining themselves on Kool-Aid for a couple generations, drawing only mindless followers like DeMint to lead their movement.
Of course it’s not fair. And if the conservative brand is to be taken down, we need to focus more on what a fraud and a sham the whole thing is rather than just debating them on the actual issues. Issues are boring. Being the self-righteous victim of The Other is appealing to many. Good and evil, good guys and bad guys, fairy tales about the afterlife are all very sale-able when the day-to-day reality of the target demographic is kept miserable.
OT: How about a retrospective on Hildo Solis’s accomplishments, BooMan? It sure seems the labor movement is more visible these days than it was four years ago.
But ultimately I think it’s even weaker as Wisconsin and other anti-union legislation have shown.
At the risk of over generalizing I think it’s just another example of GOP projection because “marketing” or being told what to think & buy works for them. There’s a ton of social research that “conservatives” are more authoritarian & hierarchical.