Over the years, I’ve had more than one occasion to write about Frank Luntz and his consulting business. In December 2011, I called him the worst person in the world and described him as “an evil genius who conducts tests on ordinary citizens to see how they can be best deceived into supporting policies that truly screw them over.” I still believe he is a truly malevolent person but, apparently, he no longer works on political campaigns. In fact, he appears to be having some kind of midlife crisis brought on by the reelection of Barack Obama.
In an interview with The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball, Mr. Luntz confessed that he’s kind of losing his mind. After having made a fortune coming up with ways to sell conservative ideas as populist ideas, he’s come to the conclusion that the American people are no longer receptive to any of his messages.
He “sits in front of his 85-inch television, alone in his 14,000-square-foot palace” in Los Angeles, ruing his fate and concerned about the fate of the country.
He thinks the American people have been corrupted, which is ironic considering that he’s always claimed to be a man of the people.
Luntz’s populism has turned on itself and become its opposite: fear and loathing of the masses. “I am grateful that Occupy Wall Street turned out to be a bunch of crazy, disgusting, rude, horrible people, because they were onto something,” he says. “Limbaugh made fun of me when I said that Occupy Wall Street scares me. Because he didn’t hear what I hear. He doesn’t see what I see.” The people are angry. They want more, not because we have not given them enough but because we have given them too much.
I never really knew where Mr. Luntz stood politically, only that he favored Republicans. Now I know.
“You should not expect a handout,” he tells me. “You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don’t, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them.” The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone. “We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that’s why they voted for him,” he says. “And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great.”
Probably the most poisonous word in the conservative dictionary is “should,” because you can’t make policy based on what people “should” do. People shouldn’t get pregnant if they don’t want or cannot afford to raise a child. But, people do have unwanted pregnancies. People should save for their retirement, but many people don’t, and many more can’t. People should pay their mortgage payment, but sometimes people lose their job and the money runs out.
Luntz’s political philosophy is some combination of simple-minded idealism and elitism, totally lacking in empathy. Molly Ball takes him apart:
Luntz’s political ideas, as far as I can tell, amount to a sort of Perotian rich man’s centrism, the type of thing you might hear from a Morning Joe panel or a CEOs’ retreat. We’ve got to do something about the deficit, for our children’s sake. We ought to have universal healthcare, but without forcing people to buy insurance through the government. We need immigration reform, but that doesn’t have to include a path to citizenship. The bankers who contributed to the financial crisis ought to be in jail, but we ought to stop demonizing the financial-services industry. To the tycoons who embrace them, these kinds of ideas are not partisan or ideological at all. They’re the common-sense plans we’d all be able to agree on if Congress would stop bickering and devote itself to Getting Things Done.
You might wonder why Luntz is experiencing such a profound sense of despair. After all, the Republicans still control the House of Representatives and are in good shape to pick up Senate seats. But Luntz is losing his mind because he realizes that the Republicans have no path to winning the presidency. He knows that their message won’t sell on the national level, and no amount of massaging the message will fix that problem. The work he did with the 2012 electorate convinced him that all is lost.
It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. “They want to impose their opinions rather than express them,” is the way he describes what he saw. “And they’re picking up their leads from here in Washington.” Haven’t political disagreements always been contentious, I ask? “Not like this,” he says. “Not like this.”
Luntz knew that he, a maker of political messages and attacks and advertisements, had helped create this negativity, and it haunted him. But it was Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived, had absorbed the president’s message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution. It was a message Luntz believed to be profoundly wrong, but one so powerful he had no slogans, no arguments with which to beat it back. In reelecting Obama, the people had spoken. And the people, he believed, were wrong. Having spent his career telling politicians what the people wanted to hear, Luntz now believed the people had been corrupted and were beyond saving. Obama had ruined the electorate, set them at each other’s throats, and there was no way to turn back.
Why not? I ask. Isn’t finding the right words to persuade people what you do? “I’m not good enough,” Luntz says. “And I hate that. I have come to the extent of my capabilities. And this is not false modesty. I think I’m pretty good. But not good enough.” The old Frank Luntz was sure he could invent slogans to sell the righteous conservative path of personal responsibility and free markets to anyone. The new Frank Luntz fears that is no longer the case, and it’s driving him crazy.
I think you have to be pretty much insane to view Barack Obama as setting people “at each other’s throats.” Certainly, nothing the president has actually done should have had that effect. It’s not his fault if his skin-color creates some kind of existential angst in more than half of the Republican base. It wasn’t his decision to treat his health care plan like the second coming of the Bolshevik Revolution.
It’s Frank Luntz who deserves blame here. He’s the one who helped the Republican Party incubate a culture where facts don’t matter and message is everything. If Luntz is having a crisis of conscience, he has earned it. Like Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, he thought he could do the devil’s work and get away with it because he’s so intelligent. Except Raskolnikov was able to solve his problem by confessing his crime and taking his punishment in Siberia.
Luntz is holed up in one of his mansions, all alone, drinking Coke Zero as he watches The Newsroom. There is no salvation for Luntz. His torment will be without end because redemption is impossible. He didn’t make conservative values ascendant. He helped turn a political party into a psychiatric wreck and now he blames the president for the result.
Frank Luntz earned his hell. He can fry in it.
“You should not expect a handout,” he tells me. “You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don’t, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them.”
Odd that a guy claiming to be a man of the people has never heard of homeowners’ insurance.
But I guess pushing false dichotomies is what got him the 14,000-square-foot (presumably insured) home in the first place.
And it apparently never occurred to him that people from ordinary neighborhoods might not have the means with which to help their neighbors rebuild their homes. Nice that Luntz would. Too bad his neighbors are all wealthy and don’t need his money. Hey, I wonder if he would help someone less fortunate.
” Hey, I wonder if he would help someone less fortunate. ” ROTFL
Funniest thing I’ve read all day.
Should Frank’s house catch fire he most certainly would rely on the taxpayer funded firetrucks and firefighters to drive down the taxpayer funded streets to pour municipal water on his home.
And though his neighbors may offer sympathy, they would probably respond to Frank much like, in reality, he would respond to a homeowner who hadn’t had the personal responsibility to carry homeowners’ insurance.
Of course Frank may not carry a mortgage, insured in part by the govt. He may have paid cash for the abode and carry only liability. In which case, he really doesn’t offer much for any of us to relate to.
Here’s the perfect example of his sociopathic elitism:
“When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don’t, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them.”
Yes, Frank.
Because you live in a 14,000 SF home, in a rich neighborhood.
And I’m sure your rich former clients wouldn’t mind building you and even bigger home, for services-rendered.
But life’s a tad different if you ain’t got jack-shit, and your neighbors ain’t got jack-shit, either.
Who can help you rebuild, when they can’t even afford to keep-up with their own rents, mortgages, or repairs, huh, Frank?
Can we come to you?
I’m sick of the whining of these rich and privileged sociopaths!!!
MAYBE WE SHOULD DRAG THAT MONEY OUT OF YOU?!?!?!?!
You can pay willingly, via taxes. Frank.
Or, if you prefer, you can sit there in fear, until the first one who clubs you over the head, and kills you, will take whatever the fuck they want.
“…you can sit there in fear, until the first one who clubs you over the head, and kills you, will take whatever the fuck they want. “
Best suggestion I’ve read all day. Yeah, club him on the head like a baby seal. Only the strong survive, Frank. Nature red in fang and claw and all that.
I’ll spare everyone the origin of this quote, except to say that it involved an acquaintance who found himself in a similar situation: The devil doesn’t take part of your soul, Mr. Luntz.
He has no soul to take.
and luntz so well illustrates, it is an essential part of our white identity that we NEVER question whether the problem is US. it is an unexplained explainer that we’re right, and Obama is wrong.
as luntz has apparently discovered, molding the rest of the world to accommodate such a foundation is a frustrating task to set oneself. copernicus noticed a similar issue, but resolved it by letting go of his problematic assumption. who will be the teabagger copernicus?
(trick question – there never will be one)
Call me mean, but if I’m neighbors with Luntz, I’m probably not going to give him what little is currently in my bank account so that he can rebuild his house, and I seriously doubt he’d be there for me in a time of need.
I’ve never understood how those trying to tear down the safety net can argue with a straight face that private charity is a viable solution to address poverty (you know, like back when people starved and froze to death in the pre-Social Security days). If you start from the premise that most people who receive government assistance are good-for-nothings looking for handouts, then you yourself would never give them a dime of your money as private charity in the event that the safety net was eliminated. It’s nothing but window dressing for people who are interested in a tax cut and want to believe that no one would be harmed by such policies.
“…When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don’t, my neighbors should pitch
in forme in, because I would do that for them.”Fixorated.
And the “when” does seem a bit predictive, like Luntz is getting ready to burn the place down, but just hasn’t decided how to make it look like an accident.
No worries, friend. You can’t afford to live in his neighborhood.
Yes, Frank’s shriveled, tiny soul will fry in hell. He’s got so much blood on his hands.
The first time I really started listening to him in 2004 he was celebratory in his mood about how he had nudged the American public into war hysteria and an invasion of Iraq. I would call him a turd, but turd’s have a much more dignified function.
An absolutely horrid criminal of a man. I’m trying not to go Godwin, but I think he is a member of the few people who make up some of the most monstrous propagandists of modern history.
Here’s an interview on Moyer’s show in 2004:
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript327_full.html
And here’s a lengthy, informative interview with Luntz on an NPR program, Fresh Air:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6761960
There was ZERO doubt about his personal political viewpoints. The moment here that chilled my blood, that let me know Luntz is not just an ideologue, but a dangerous one, is his justification of the use of misleading phrases in order to achieve policy goals, in this case the elimination of the inheritance tax. “The average American views ‘Orwellian’ as a negative, that being Orwellian means that you mislead.” Luntz says here at the 5 minute mark. He explains that Orwell’s essay on language (presumably “Politics and the English Language”, though Luntz lacks the desire to be clear about that) actually means that language should be used accurately and precisely.
You and I know that the adjective “Orwellian” refers chiefly to the author’s “1984” and its use of provocational political propaganda that attempts to paper over cognitive dissonance for the use of a totalitarian dystopic government (“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength”). Orwell understood the power of deceptive language in politics and was angered by it. He created “1984” and other works in response to the horror he felt about the misuse of language.
Instead of being educated about what NOT to do by reading “1984” , it’s clear that Luntz read it and thought, “Hey, that’s a pretty good idea!” Which is why he’s one of the worst people in the world, and one of the many reasons why I wholeheartedly agree with BooMan here.
Oh yeah,
Similar themes in the piece I mentioned. And the arts he employs to dodge responsibility for 100,000+ dead Iraqis (by 2004) is a “marvel” to behold. He works very hard to rationalize how his work is not deceiving anybody.
He appears to be so absorbed by word games that he has lost all possibility of honest self examination.
The man who peddled in projection for the rubes is upset that they no can no longer be fooled into believing his bullshit.
And it is Obama’s fault.
Remember, folks, conservatives totally rely on cognitive dissonance and projection to stay sane. Take one away, and they become sad conservatives.
Should we buy in January that Luntz is not participating in the 2014 cycle? Smells like a set-up. Watch this guy carefully.
And if it is true that his despair is over the public not buying what he’s selling, then we might have arrived at some disenthrallment of the public in which they are more willing to believe their “lying eyes” than to believe Frank Luntz’s narrative.
It is not identified, but what are the demographics of the public that Frank Luntz is in despair over? If it’s older white voters, that would be very interesting indeed.
It’s very interesting for a political grifter to be so emphatic about self-reliance. But all too commonplace.
This isn’t a Lee Atwater-style deathbed confession. This is an ad for work.
First Atwater, the Luntz. When does Rove arrive at the gates of hell?
He’s become the political version of Scrooge, and it reads like comedy. A well-deserved fate.
“corrupted”
Yes, indeed, corrupted. Apparently having the fucking truth dawn on a few percent of the brainwashed multitude constitutes “corruption” to this Dr Faustus. Recognizing the massively increased (and increasing) economic power of the American plutocrats is “corruption”, not common sense.
Kind of comic that one of the “conservative” movement’s Joseph Goebbels figures despairs that his lies are losing some of their effect, although the entire interview may just be more conservative disinformation. Sort of hard to believe that the leading rightwing amoral propagandist is having a, um, crisis of confidence during an era where (as Steven D informs us) the monstrous Koch bankrollers are pouring almost a billion bucks per election into the loathsome Luntz’s “industry”.
So the Rightwing fairy tales weren’t workin’ so well in the focus groups, according to Faust, er, Frank—who so long ago sold his soul to the devil that I have to wonder exactly when Mephistopheles is planning on showing up at the Luntz mansion. Merely bleating “class warfare!!” didn’t shut the rubes up anymore, eh Frank? That trick only worked as long as the rubes refused to believe there WERE any classes in class-free Bootstrap America. Once the (actual) class system became visible to the mass of economic losers, class warfare maybe didn’t seem so bad, haha. If only…
Anyway, it doesn’t really strike me as too much of a private “hell” that poor Frank has to endure, with his mansion(s) and 10 foot plasma Teevees in the penthouse sauna. Fuck you Frank, you served and profited by the worst monsters of corporate and reactionary power imaginable, and now you’ve revealed the full extent of your braindead “conservatism” (“shouldn’t expect a safety net” eh, even after 80+ years of social security? that’s “CEO moderate” thinking?)
You deserve a lot worse than mild disillusionment that your appalling lies and repulsive frauds just don’t seem to have the same ol’ magic anymore…
“Luntz is holed up in one of his mansions, all alone, drinking Coke Zero as he watches The Newsroom.”
hahahaha
this describes several people I can think of. And perhaps this justifies the existence of Newsroom: it is required to babysit people like Frank Luntz.
I picture him as a latter-day Howard Hughes, shunning contact with the outside world, fearing contamination by disease, letting his fingernails grow and washing his hands over and over and over in his own personally concocted hell.
Two nickels just dropped in reading Media Matters critique of 60 Minutes’s slam of clean energy.
Like I said above, watch this guy carefully. The plutocrats are rigging the media even more than they had.
You are on to something there, for sure. The Battle for the Public Mind is morphing ever deeper into our communicative functions as the question ‘Will Truth become the coin of the realm’ unfolds.
A similar dynamic is unfolding re the Israeli propaganda (hasbara). Luntz is a tool of the warmongers to quell the right wing reactionaries, while Zionist propaganda serves to quell the liberal intelligentsia.
Personally, I’m past many of the reactions that BooMan seems to go through and have boiled it down to…
I’m beyond anger. Not going to kill myself being angry with a grifter. But…the challenge is to think and come up with how to win elections with some reference to natural and social realities. How to defeat the the billion-dollar media iron curtain. I would have called it the wall of sound, but I respect Motown music too much.
Wall of noise? Its whole purpose is to jam the signal.
In a just world, Luntz ends up like Marat in the bathtub.
No, Nooners. Don’t.
if only he were exiled to any version of earthly hell. Instead he’s living at least like a five percenter and apparently doesn’t even have to work anymore. If that’s hell, most of the other ninety-five percent would say, sign me up for that.
There once was a frog who gave a scorpion a ride on his back so as to cross a river. The scorpion stings the frog half way across, and the frog asks why. The scorpion says “because I’m a scorpion”.
Frank Lunz is such a frog. He has made a career out of appealing to our worst instincts. Now it has repaid him by stinging him.
Please explain how it is that Luntz, a new contract with CBS in hand as a “political consultant”, the same term they use for Cook and Larry Sabato, has been “stung”.
As long as he can influence the masses with his wordsmithing, there will be continue to be lines of people willing to throw money at him. And I think he’s begun to realize the jig is up, a contract with CBS won’t change the that. As the saying goes, you can fool some of the people…
Luntz’s comments sound not like a crisis of conscience (he’s clearly not sorry for his effect on this country), but like a crisis of self-confidence.
He is used to being perceived as a god, but he is ceasing to be able to keep up the façade of invincibility as ever-increasing segments of the electorate fall victim to the heartless policies he and his acolytes have promoted for the last 3+ decades.
Once a large enough percentage of the population, who perceive themselves as good and hard working, lose everything – or close enough to everything, and find that they are suddenly automatically re-cast as lazy, shiftless, handout-seeking, unwilling-to-work “takers,” they recognize the lie.
There is no amount of additional lying that can replace the scales that fell from their eyes.
THIS is why the republican strangle-hold on our country will fail, despite their ownership of the media, their gerrymandering, and their thuggish followers’ bullying behavior. We are on the verge of a tipping point. As more and more students leave high school unable to afford college; and more college students leave school unable to meet the obligations of their debt peonage due to a complete lack of jobs, while being unable to unshackle themselves from the debt thanks to republican policies; and more and more middle aged people in the primes of their careers find themselves standing on the periphery of the job market, looking in with no hope of regaining a family-sustaining income, there will come a time when too many people are in the outcast group to remain subjugable. And then things will change.
Yep. Luntz realizes that reality is making his message a more and more difficult sell, and now it’s too difficult even for him. That’s got to be demoralizing for someone who is as proud of his “craft” as he is.
Luntz sounds exactly like a rich father who is outraged that his children insist on living their lives as they wish, and not the way he wishes. The people lack character, the ingrates!
The 0.1% are showing their Dickensian attitudes.
I like this bit, myself: “But it was Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived, had absorbed the president’s message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution.”
Boiling it down you can see that Luntz doesn’t like Obama’s accurate description of the results of Republican policy. Colour me surprised.
Luntz doesn’t like the Republican characterization of Obama’s positions; he is either high on his own supply in that statement or shilling the same ole GOP message.
Obama has taken much too many pains to avoid discussing class divisions, haves and have-nots, and redistribution of any kind.
It’s astonishingly, offensively false to claim that Obama’s message concentrates on class division. Luntz is projecting like a mofo here; division is HIS game. It’s such a funhouse mirror of reality, it’s practically an expression of a mental illness IF he’s being real here. I see the same possibility others do on this thread that Frank’s “crisis” might just be a new version of his bullshit.
Wonderful comment about Lunz on another blog:
http://pragmaticobotsunite.com/monday-open-thread-the-underground-railroad/#comment-1189353881
“I think you have to be pretty much insane to view Barack Obama as setting people ‘at each other’s throats’.”
It’s called “projection”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
This is what I mean when I say that working class White folks clinging to that Whiteness.
I’ll say it again….they wanna cling to that Whiteness..
FUCK THEM.
………………………………..
The Return of the Welfare Queen
Republicans are launching a class war with racial undertones–and hurting the poor whites they’ll need to win in 2014.
By Beth Reinhard
December 12, 2013
The welfare queen, she has risen.
Spawned by Ronald Reagan to turn blue-collar whites against the Democratic Party, then buried by Bill Clinton with a law “ending welfare as we know it,” she’s been excavated under the first African-American president as Republicans inveigh against the costs of health insurance and food stamps for the poor.
Twenty-five Republican-led states have–astoundingly–rebuffed billions of federal dollars under Barack Obama’s signature health care law to offer Medicaid insurance to more poor people. To justify this unprecedented rejection of federal relief, these governors and state lawmakers say they just do not believe Washington will keep its promise to pick up the tab. Republicans in Congress are egging them on, denouncing Obamacare’s disastrous launch as proof of the arrogance and folly of big government.
But all of this opposition carries an unmistakable undertone of class warfare, a theme easy to exploit in states such as Kentucky, packed with low-income white voters who have a strong distaste for the federal government. To hear the rhetoric coming from Capitol Hill and the campaign trail, Medicaid and food-stamp recipients are a bunch of shiftless freeloaders living high on king crab legs and free health care, all on the backs of hardworking Americans.
Medicaid expansion is “the principal reason your kids’ college tuition is going up,” Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky charged at a press conference here.
New Medicaid recipients “have no personal responsibility for their health,” said state Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, a Republican running for the U.S. Senate, in a memo from the state capital.
And in Louisiana, Senate candidate and Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy hypothesized about a single woman forced to pay high premiums under Obamacare who thinks her neighbor could make more money. “But he would rather work fewer hours or work for cash or, perhaps, live out of wedlock so that he and his girlfriend both qualify for the taxpayer-provided free insurance,” Cassidy wrote in a newspaper column.
The tirades don’t stop at Medicaid.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-return-of-the-welfare-queen-20131212
A lot of people are telling me that their dentist or doctor is telling them that they are raising their fees because they “are losing patients because of Obamacare”. This includes Democrats as well as Republicans. I always ask, “How can more people being insured possibly cause them to lose patients?” If any of my healthcare professionals told me a lie like that i would drop them in a shot, because what else will they lie to me about? In 1992, my then family doctor (long since retired) was chairman of the county “Doctors for Bush”. I also had to submit my own insurance claims because he thought health insurance was somehow “something for nothing” (apparently ignoring insurance premiums). Still, he never told me out right lies. He just had a diametrically opposed view of life.
I’d rather be watching the newsroom all alone in a mansion drinking Coke Zero than living my life.
All I can say about that!
What a putz, he has all that money and free time and is sad cause he cannot spin lies to people and have them believe his spun lies.
Must be deficient in his cognitive abilities if that is all he can do with his time.
Frank Luntz is a great man. His most recent work has been with the Fox News Channel as a frequent commentator and analyst, as well as running focus groups during and after presidential debates. Luntz’s specialty is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.
_______
Radu
Hahahahaha! Go away.