Reply #123: We must be pragmatic

[Irreverend IX]

The Dem party definitely needs to change its message. Stubbornly proclaiming "I won't dumb my message down!" is a dead-end loser attitude that won't win us any votes. End of story.

However, I don't think "dumbing down" is precisely the answer. The real answer is to appeal to people on a subconscious level as well as a conscious one. If you scrutinize right-wing material, you'll realize it's designed to evoke a visceral emotional response, and the appeal to reason is often secondary to the appeal to emotion. The Repubs have cultivated, through repeated applications of propaganda, a small set of emotional hot buttons in the minds of their base: greed, fear of the "other," the desire to keep up with the Joneses, etc. Democrats need to find our own set of subconscious buttons to cultivate and use to drive our supporters into the polls. The key to this is to keep the subconscious message in mind with every piece of media we design, and I haven't seen Dems doing this on the level that Repubs do. When I watched campaign ads in '04, I felt that I really got an impression of what Bush was all about. Kerry, on the other hand, never gave such a concrete impression of what he was about. Of course, the images created by the commercials clashed violently with my knowledge of the realities of Kerry and the Bush administration, but those televised images were the only things that reached a lot of voters. Good night, everyone.