Why Republicans Win

[NVMojo]

...there's alot to be said about this explanation ...look at the Swift Boat jerks and their marketing strategy against Kerry ...

snip ...

January 25, 2005

A typical generic blog post written by a Progressive in the last several months would read something like this: "Everyone can sum up the Republican core beliefs in a sentence or two, while Progressives need to search for a candidate who can articulate core Progressive values." Some bloggers might also refer to George Lakoff's "framing" work as a solution to the problem. Not being able to explain your product concept in a sentence is a classic marketing problem, and what these posts show is a budding awareness that Republicans have been out marketing Democrats. Think about this - if you are in a "red state" area you are told a hundred different ways every day why business is good and government is bad and why unregulated free markets work better than democracy. But you are never told the other side of the story.

The Republicans win because the modern Right has developed around the core idea of persuading people to support their ideology, which then leads to support for their issues and candidates. In other words: marketing. The Right developed this persuasion capability in reaction to the dominance of the existing "liberal establishment." Because of this, most of their organizations are designed as advocacy and communications organizations, with the mission of reaching the general public and explaining what right-wing ideas are and why they are better for people. Today's Progressives, on the other hand, think there already is a public consensus supporting their ideals and values, so they have not developed a culture that is oriented around persuading people, and their organizations are not designed at their core to persuade the public to support them.

So you can see how things got to be the way they are. Democrats understand themselves as a political party, not as a movement. The party grew out of a time when people already understood why they were Democrats or not, so there was no need for organizations that talked to the general public about why it is good to be a Democrat. Instead the party naturally focused on elections. And it is still that way. Democrats look for the "right candidates" to appeal to voters. The candidate is expected to "voice" the issues, and develop messaging that works, and is expected to do it after putting together a campaign team, which happens during and after the primaries. The Democrats use the election cycle as a time to come up with specific "issues" and "messages" and educate the voters. Then the campaign is supposed to reach the voters and educate them about the candidate and the issues... This is the old way of understanding politics. The problem is that times have changed -- they have been changed by the rise of "movement conservatism."

more...

http://www.forestcouncil.org/tims_picks/view.php?id=817

[NVMojo]

1. argh!!!!

snip ...

I know it’s hard to give up hating Bush. I myself enjoyed bristling when Bush said the election gave him "political capital," the same MBA-inflected lingo that led him to dub NASA astronauts "space entrepreneurs" (this last word obviously being his highest accolade). But if George W. Bush disappeared tomorrow, kidnapped by Alan Colmes in a Che Guevara beret, everything awful about his presidency would still be in place. Oil entrepreneur Dick Cheney would simply change offices (if not roles). Pest-control entrepreneur Tom DeLay would still be infesting the House. Medical entrepreneur Dr. Bill Frist would still be running the Senate like some ghastly HMO asylum in which sensible conservatives like Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel enjoy less favor than loony morality entrepreneur Rick Santorum. And war entrepreneur Rumsfeld would still be fondling his big stick in front of the whole world. True, Alberto "Quaint Electrodes" Gonzales might not be nominated for attorney general, but I doubt Cheney would nominate anyone less scary.

Put simply, George W. Bush is more a symptom than a one-man juggernaut. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out in their zesty book, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, the Bush administration’s radicalism is actually a kind of culmination. It was born of the right’s deliberate act of reinvention in the ’50s and ’60s, a long, slow process of arguing, thinking, fund-raising and organizing that, after years of defeat, has finally produced what some movement enthusiasts call "the conservative New Deal" ­ no matter that FDR had a mandate and Bush doesn’t. Whether it’s rewriting the tax code or privatizing Social Security to solve an imaginary "crisis," the right has become the agent of change.

more ...

http://www.forestcouncil.org/tims_picks/view.php?id=807

[begin_within]

2. RW figured it out: Image is everything. Fear and greed are the motivators.

[mzmolly]

3. "MARKETING" ... I've been saying this for years.

;)

Excellent read.

On the Right, they developed their movement in response to the existing liberal consensus, which means that their movement developed based on the idea of changing people's minds away from those liberal ideas and values. So the result is that today the Right is structured around persuasion, while the Democrats are not. And their organizations have spent decades studying how best to persuade people.

For Republicans, functions like message and issue development are handled by the multitude of "conservative movement" organizations, not the Republican Party or its candidates. A Republican candidates' job is to voice the messages of the Right but not to develop the messages, like a Democratic candidate is expected to do. The job of Republican campaigns is to take advantage of the issues that their constituency has already been exposed to, not to define the issues from scratch like Democrat candidates have to do. And the Party's job is to harvest the voters at election time.

We have to treat winning elections more like a "business" period.

[Democrat Dragon]

4. I have been yapping about this kind of stuff only to be ridiculed

You see, many of already know that many Rethugs come from business backrounds. When they go from the corporate office to the federal or state office, although their jobs change their techniques do not. They bring many of the methods and retoric from the busines world into the political world. They know the business method, and they know how to use it well.

Many Democrats on the other hand were lawyers. Sure, lawyers know how to convince a jury to pick a certain side using psychological means. But they must realise that the American public is much larger a typical jury. Marketers undertand how to appeal to a WIDE audience, not 15 people.

Another strategy that rethugs use is pre-emptive attacks. They move and plan before the Democrats have a chance to attack.

[NVMojo]

16. I hear ya, Demo Dragon, but it takes some people a long time

to change their point of view and Dems are guilty of not understanding this stuff at all. Even with "Bush's Brain" coming out a couple of years before the 04 election, you'd think Dems would have read that and came up with an anti-Rove strategy but no one did, really.

I am still angry at those swift boat jerks ...with nowhere to go with it. They got away with lying, just like the Rove lying on McCain...or what, that was smearing of truth ...

[Democrat Dragon]

5. KICK KICK KICK KICK!

:kick: :kick:

[Just Me]

6. We have GOT to get past our own "purist" attitudes.

I got slammed everytime I tried to bring this reality to the fore,...and was admonished as being "just another propagandist".

That hurt.

Nevertheless, I kept on advocating that we are failing to be succinct and effective in communicating our own human quality.

BAM!!! I was called, "our little propagandist".

That hurt.

I won't give up.

If we fail to effectively communicate all information towards "THE TRUTH" and fail to spread our common cause which includes ALL people,...we are merely scents in a wind.

Moreover, there is a difference between political "propaganda" and effectively communicating human fact, human reality and human aim towards truth. There is a HUGE distinction.

[calimary]

12. Hate to break it to your detractors, but propagandists are IT just now.

Propaganda IS the ball game.

And if we hope to start turning things around, WE, TOO, HAVE TO TAKE ON THAT MINDSET. I mean, when you have an Andrew Card saying flat-out "you don't roll out a new product in August" - I mean - SHIT!!! That's nothing but sales talk. It's all sales. It's singleminded, and it's sales. Packaging. Perception. Image. Propaganda.

Just Me - don't let 'em get you down. You're correct. They sneer at you out of ignorance. We have to jerk our party AWAY from the purists who are taking us straight to extinction. And believe me, the enemy KNOWS this. They HAVE, INDEED, spent decades studying this, studying us, studying opinion-manipulation dynamics, studying EVERYTHING. While we danced off into the forest with the smug knowledge that ours was the correct path and everyone should just simply KNOW this, the enemy was figuring out how to kick the legs out from under us, and then rolling up their sleeves to do exactly that. The Ivory-Tower crowd has to be sent to the back of the room while the pragmatists take over and get down to business.

I mean, do we want to win or don't we? I'm sure the victims of the Holocaust, in the trains on their way to the camps, thought they, too, were just simply correct and that nothing would happen to them merely because of that fact, and that people would just see that this nightmare couldn't be allowed to stand. And look how that worked out.

[NVMojo]

17. don't give up, Just Me, the rest of them are waking up ....

the Dems need a Karl Rove only slicker and better. Nothing wrong with admitting it has come to that in this country.

[Just Me]

20. Thank you both for your encouraging words.

I had to face my own negative perspective of propaganda in order to get past feeling hurt (insulted, actually).

I still view "propaganda" as a means to deceive in order to achieve a goal/objective that would not otherwise be recognized. "Propaganda" also implies that "the people" are unworthy and/or unable to make the best choices for their country based upon the facts.

Whereas, I view our people as perfectly capable of successfully determining their own fate and the fate of their country IF they are an informed people.

My objective has always been to accurately inform people about what our government is doing in our name and to concisely communicate why the noble objectives and principles (which are merely paid "lip-service" these days) our country has embraced ("equality", "opportunity", social/economic justice, etc.) are worthy of full implementation.

So, I would distinguish "propaganda" (which has deceptive ulterior motives) from the effective information and inspiration campaign that we need to pursue.

[gulliver]

7. It doesn't hurt to have a payroll.

The Republican party is tied to wealth and corporate money. Republican leaders, "government servants," commentators, and lobbyists alike can expect a nice paycheck. Try doing that when your core philosophy is protection for the powerless, the environment. There is no "peace industrial complex."

[Democrat Dragon]

8. Kick

you don't have to give up your values while winning. Use business strategy to deliver the TRUTH.

[blue4barb]

10. Let's not forget that the republican corporations include

almost all the businesses that own/control the voting machines.

[Debs]

9. Marketing, definitly

But the right has some built in advantages. Power understands the divide and conquer strategy in a visceral way, its bred into them, its in the DNA. Also as long as media is paid for by advertising therefore by bussiness, the media will always have a built in conservative economic bias. Then there is the lying, the right has no shame, its surgically removed at birth so they can stand up and tell the most outrageous lies without a hint of insincerity or embarrassment, they can call war heroes cowards, tell those who are going to be screwed how good it will be for THEM when the give the rich huge tax cuts, any lies that are convienient they will tell, this total lack of integrity is a huge advantage. Their constituents are more ready to just believe anything they are told no matter how little sense it makes and repeat it, if it is said by power, by those of authority it is the voice of GOD. So no matter how many times they find out they have been lied to the next thing they are told is still gospel. Its a huge advantage, ours is most people agree with our values. Take care of the poor, universal health care, anti-imperialism, letting people live their own lives, all these are hugely popular positions. Make no mistake it will be a tough fight but its one that CAN be won.

[leesa]

11. Because they lie, cheat and keep the public so confused and afraid

they don't know whether they are coming or going.

[orleans]

15. agree!

my daughter's friend's mother who calls herself a dem (but she's not--she has ultra conservative views and is also--from what i gather from our conversations--awaiting the rapture like so many) kept telling me she was voting for bush because we could get attacked again.

it didn't seem to matter to her--every time i pointed it out--that we were attacked under his watch and all he was doing the month before was dicking around down on the ranch playing with barney rather than taking those p.d.b.'s seriously--or even reading them at all.

fear fear fear.

they used to say that sex sells. well, i guess that's all changed.

[Democrat Dragon]

13. kick

[Selatius]

14. I hate to say it but propaganda goes hand-in-hand with politics

The only question is how much truth there is in one's propaganda. In short, what's the truth-to-lie ratio in the message? There are very few politicians who do not have skeletons in their closets.

[NVMojo]

18. having worked on both sides of the media ...I can tell you that one of

Rove's strategies is understanding how the mind works when it hears bad news or rumors or reads it. He understands that people remember the first thing they hear and if it is negative, it's like a double imprint on the memory and even if a retraction is made or the story is changed, they still remember the first story on it and it influences them. Changing their perception becomes very difficult and Rove knows that, thus he does his smear campaigns and whisper campaigns, knowing it is imprinted on the mind and most people won't go looking for verification ....

[BlueInRed]

19. Yeah, it's just like

your first impression when you meet a new person. The old saying, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. The saying applies to the selling of ideas as well. Whatever you hear first does tend to stick.

And then there's the technique of repeating a lie so often that people begin to think it must be true -- another imprinting technique. Bush is big on that one as well.