The Culture War - It’s Real and It’s Spectacular
So succintly put - in American presidential politics, it’s not about logic. It’s about emotion. And the Dems don’t get it. Or rather - the Republicans get it more. It’s sad that this is the case, but apparently solutions for problems doesn’t pacify the American voter. Bill Clinton got it with the “I feel your pain” and the thumb thing. And he went up against some Kerry-esque competitors (along with getting the Perot assist) and Gore almost prevailed when he frenched Tipper at the DNC in 2000. But this culture war is real and it’s not going away.
M.S. Bellows, Jr.: Republicans Revive “Bittergate,” Dems Flounder
In the two main convention speeches Wednesday night — the big night, Sarah Palin night — the Republican Party revived a major theme of the Clinton primary campaign and made it a centerpiece of the general election, turning what was a contest between candidates, parties, and arguably genders, into one between cultures. And, in a telephonic press conference the next morning designed to counter vice presidential nominee Palin’s well-delivered speech, the Democratic National Committee failed to rise to the challenge, trotting out female Obama supporters to fight yesterday’s policy and gender wars instead of the new, gender-neutral, policy-empty culture war the Republicans have unleashed.
It goes into the whole story behind Obama saying that people in the red states are bitter and turn to guns and religion and anti-immigration during times of economic hoplessness. A regrettable comment, to be sure, and pounced on by Hillary Clinton as well as John McCain both then and now at the RNC. The response by the DNC completely missed the mark, as pointed out by Jim O’Toole:
A little later in the call, Jim O’Toole, politics editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, put his finger right on the Democrats’ problem - their “programmatic” rather than “visceral” responses to Palin’s “empathetic” approach last night - but the Democrats didn’t even seem to understand what he meant:
O’Toole: I’m struck that your rebuttals to Governor Palin’s remarks and the other speakers’ are all pretty programmatic, and that’s fine as far as it goes, but are you concerned that you have - people vote for President partially on visceral reasons too. Are you concerned that you have a kind of an image problem, kind of a narrative problem, in responding to the kind of … empathetic messages that they put forward last night?Gibbs: What exact - what empathetic messages? I may have missed those. [laughing.]
O’Toole: Well, the very familiar attacks on, as another questioner mentioned, Senator Obama’s ‘bitter’ remarks.”
Gibbs then answered adequately, reminding O’Toole of McCain’s forgetting how many homes he owns and a McCain adviser’s description of Americans as “whiners,” but returning again to policy, policy, policy.
Analysis: The Democrats Aren’t Playing The “Frame Game”: Watching the Republican Convention, I’m struck by how deeply different the people on my screen are from the people I saw at the Democratic Convention in Denver last week. Both groups care about their communities and their countries enough to become involved in the political process. Both are excited about their candidates and their parties. Both are engrossed by the sport and spectacle of politics. But, contrary to Republican spin, I didn’t see any blind worship of Obama at the Dem convention; rather, I saw mostly geeks and policy wonks, people parsing the factual details of every speaker’s spiel, people who actually paid attention to the differences between Clinton’s and Obama’s health care plans and who know, as soon as they hear it, exactly how and why McCain’s claims about Obama’s plan to “raise taxes” on them are untrue.
At the Republican convention, on the other hand, I hear entire speeches compiled of bumper sticker slogans (some of them very good). I hear clever-sounding but meaningless lines that haven’t been changed since the Presidential campaign in 1964 (Fred Thompson: “They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the ‘other’ side of the bucket!”). I hear flat-out lies, like speaker after speaker talking about how liberal Washington is (after 6-8 years of Republican dominance of all three branches of government) and promising to allow individuals more choice (McCain and Palin favor a Constitutional amendment banning abortion).
Most importantly, though, I see a crowd mesmerized by those slogans and truisms and lies. They love it. They eat it up. Most don’t know they’re being lied to — but even those who do, don’t mind; for them, it’s not about facts, it’s about feelings.
A former client of mine, who ran a construction company in Anchorage, once told me that no one is as sensitive as Alaska ironworkers; he always had to be careful not to hurt their feelings or they’d quit and storm off in a huff. That’s a good description of many Republicans, in my experience: physically tough, but they do tear up at those sad country songs. Or, as Stephen Colbert brilliantly put it, it’s about truthiness: “The truthiness is, anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.”
I think this is what bothers me the most. It’s been 8 years of the same old culture crap while the country falls into an economic and political hole run by the rudderless Republicans for the better part of 6 of those years, yet we keep falling for the same old tricks. We even have cottage industries like The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert built up around this frustration. The author even cites to his creation of the word “truthiness”
Amazing, isn’t it? This is 3 years old yet rings every bit as true then as it does now, and without some work by the DNC will continue to ring another 4 years.
Until last night, the Republican myth was, “It’s a scary world, Obama’s young and inexperienced, and McCain is the tough father figure who will care for you.” And Obama’s frame was, “This place you’re at now is scary bad. You need to get away. McCain wants to keep you here, but I’ll lead you to safety.” And Obama was winning in that “battle of frames.”Wednesday night, though, the Republican Party unexpectedly changed frames - and did so brilliantly. The agent of change was Sarah Palin, who suddenly has become the most dangerous person to the progressive agenda since Ronald Reagan himself. Through Palin, the frame has now become, “The government doesn’t understand you or like you. That’s why it’s hurting you so badly. Come to Tough Hockey Mommy and I’ll make them go away.”
And how did the Obama team respond Thursday? With, “Here are our policy prescriptions for creating rural jobs through national investment in alternative fuels research.”
What O’Toole, the insightful Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor, was asking, is this: how’s that policy prescription approach gonna work for you, against Tough Hockey Mommy?
Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz at least understood the question, but she’s betting all her money on the dubious proposition that voters ultimately will vote logic over emotion, explaining (in response to O’Toole) that while her constituents respect her personal story as a mom who bore all three of her children while in office, they reelect her because of her position on issues like reproductive choice and stem cell research. Toward the end of the second audio above, she predicted that “when you look beneath the layers of the surface issues of her [Palin] being a mom, the women voters and voters across the country are going to see that there’s just no there there.”
I’d like to think she’s right - but I don’t. A lot of voters will vote logic, and thus Democratic. A lot will vote emotion; they’re almost all lost to the Republican side. But there are a whole lot who vote both - and to leave out the emotional component, to fail to see and respond to the new Republican frame, is to throw the race. The logical, policy-wonk concepts that actually have the potential to revive small-town America are what Obama will need to actually govern - but to be elected, Democrats also need to appeal to the parts of the brain that Sarah Palin appealed to Wednesday night. This election is both a logical policy contest and, as Jay Rosen presciently pointed out before last night’s debate in a must-read post, a highly emotional culture war. Democrats need to fight on both fronts.
And when you talk about the culture war, the most divisive quote in recent American foreign policy is applicable: “You’re either with us or against us.” That cuts right to the heart of what enough Americans saw in George Walker Bush to elect him despite his history of business and academic failures. He was able to play the part the best. He was able to do what he had to do to get elected. Didn’t matter that Al Gore had solutions, he had the debate zingers - like “fuzzy math.” And with Obama talking truth instead of truthiness, he may just ensure that the only change in Washington is that we’ll have a female VP. Reminds me of that great scene from the movie The American President:
Lewis Rothschild: You have a deeper love of this country than any man I’ve ever known. And I want to know what it says to you that in the past seven weeks, 59% of Americans have begun to question your patriotism.President Andrew Shepherd: Look, if the people want to listen to-…
Lewis Rothschild: They don’t have a choice! Bob Rumson is the only one doing the talking! People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.
President Andrew Shepherd: Lewis, we’ve had presidents who were beloved, who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.
Popularity: 4% [?]
