As much as it pains me to admit it, the awful Ann Coulter made an apt point some years ago when she criticized liberals for calling Republicans dumb. She ran through a list of presidents that she said liberals smugly labeled as stupid–Ike, Ford, Reagan, George W. Bush–none of whom were. More to the point, we keep taking refuge in our intelligence. We’ve been to the good schools, we must therefore be entitled to govern. President Obama, as intelligent a man as we’ve had in Oval Office in my lifetime, is unfortunately demonstrating that intelligence is not enough.
Writing in Slate yesterday, Eliot Spitzer showed why the Democrats have lost control of the debate to a party that really offers no answers of its own. Keep It Simple Stupid, says Spitzer. The RepublIcans are “much better at telling stories, narratives that through their simplicity appeal to the public. . . .Exhibit one is health care reform, which fell prey to stories of `death panels’ and demands by Medicare recipients to `get government out of my health care.’ The Republicans successfully exploited the public’s disdain for government—even though it is government itself that is providing the Medicare they so prize.”
Spitzer credits the Republican strategist Frank Luntz (above) as the master of the dark art of phrasing things in a way that wins arguments, and Spitzer is right. Many people spin, but what Luntz does is nearly Orwellian, advising Republicans to support not `off-shore drilling’ but `deep-sea exploration,’ that sort of willful perversion of language designed to gain political advantage. Fresh off of (so far) all-but killing health care reform, Luntz has now published a 17 page playbook designed to torpedo Democratic efforts to reform the financial system. “If there is one thing we can all agree on,” Luntz writes, “it’s that the bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats that in many ways led to the economic crash must never be repeated.” (The full memo appeared in The Huffington Post.) Of course, what is manifestly true is that sensible regulations like the Glass-Steagel Act (which was enacted by Democrats, and which was the truss upon which 75 years of economic stability rested) were repealed, mostly at the behest of free market-minded Republicans, and that, ultimately opened the door for greedy Wall Streeters to gamble away our prosperity. When Republicans have Democrats to run against, the run against Democrats; when they have only themselves to run against, the run against Washington.
Spitzer smartly advises Democrats to focus not only on reforming the system, but on coming up with plain language that explains why the reforms are needed. “Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions for phrases Democrats can use to regain the momentum:
1. It is time to get the cops back on the beat and the bank robbers out of the bank vault. It is your money—not theirs.
2. “Heads I win; tails you lose” is a first-grade joke—not a theory for our banking system. Yet that is the game that has been played on us.
3. If Wall Street wants to gamble on a casino economy, they will not use the American taxpayer as a chip on the table.
4. For the first 50 years after the Great Depression, we avoided disaster—but then Washington bought the oldest line in the book from Wall Street bankers—trust me. We have learned the lesson—and we don’t, and we won’t.”
If this isn’t clear enough, here’s the conservative radio talk show host Michael Smerconish, writing in The Daily Beast, about Luntz’s new position on global warming. Luntz once had the skeptical, George W. Bush position on global warming, but having recently been retained by the Environmental Defense Fund, and having conducted a poll that shows that 57 percent of Americans believe global warming is “definitely” or “probably” occurring, Luntz has arrived at a considerably greener view. Importantly, Luntz was not persuaded by scientific data or photos from space or penguins washing up on the beaches at Rio. Luntz, Smerconish writes, says that the climate change debate can be won by emphasizing America’s need to decrease dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and create cleaner, safer energy sources that would create American jobs and build new technologies that wouldn’t be outsourced to China or India.”
And there’s the lesson for liberals: stop trying to appeal to people’s intelligence, and start appealing to their worries about their pocketbooks and the fears about Third World foreigners.
Weird, huh?