Collective Conscious

Repub­li­cans seem to know every­thing about real adver­tis­ing and pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Rule num­ber one, taken from Al-​​Jazeera:

“You lie and lie until you believe it yourself.”

This seems to be the great­est obsta­cle stand­ing in the way of Democ­rats today. Every­thing Repub­li­cans say sounds great, but is gen­er­ally not true. As Benen points out, in what world do you get away with call­ing a tax cut a tax increase, espe­cially when it was you who sched­uled the increase?

What can Democ­rats do? They can’t sink to the level of the oppo­si­tion. They can’t just waste all their time refut­ing all the crazy crap that the mon­keys throw. And they clearly can’t just sit around and pass pop­u­lar poli­cies; we saw how well that worked out for them.

No, we need a great com­mu­ni­ca­tor. Not an echo cham­ber like Fox or MSNBC, but some­one who can reach out and explain — sim­ply and truth­fully — what’s going on. This is how Clin­ton recov­ered after 1994, and why he’s “good old Bill” today. We need some­one who comes up with talk­ing points as sticky and mem­o­rable as (but much more hon­est than) “death pan­els” and “9/​11 vic­tory mosque.” repub­li­can pro­pa­ganda is pow­er­ful, and for good Orwellian rea­sons. Every word is loaded with emo­tion, and every phrase has an unfor­get­table rhythm. Repub­li­cans, in other words, speak the com­mon lan­guage, whereas lis­ten­ing to a Demo­c­rat speak hon­estly is about as mem­o­rable as doing your taxes.

Democ­rats need to find some­one capa­ble of speak­ing from the heart and not the brain. The mind for­gets too eas­ily, but the heart doesn’t, and that’s why Repub­li­can mes­sag­ing is so effec­tive. They are capa­ble of play­ing up and play­ing off instinc­tive fears of death, of “the other”, and of war, and they are capa­ble of exploit­ing deep fam­ily bonds — espe­cially with chil­dren —  for per­verse ends.

I have never heard a Demo­c­rat say “think of the chil­dren.” Instead I hear gib­ber­ish about “extend­ing the cov­er­age umbrella for depen­dents under the age of twenty-​​six while…” blah blah blah. Must we be so use­lessly cerebral?