Republican strategies: macro-style campaigns render “gotcha” moments and fact checks obsolete

You may have noticed that, since 2008, Republican and Tea Party politicians and candidates have become increasingly brazen, saying things that are far from politically correct and wading into icky terrain with regards to the facts. In this post, I give my take on their new communications strategy and why it’s working so well for conservative politicians.

Before Rick Perry announced his campaign for president yesterday, one of his strategists said something very interesting about their new approach to campaigning. Here’s a quote from a Huffington Post article about this new strategy:

“it was clear from Carney's words and demeanor that he believes the small, but symbolic mishaps that have traditionally sapped candidates of momentum and strength in the past -- John McCain's temper, George W. Bush's DUI, Sarah Palin's reading habits, George H.W. Bush's befuddlement at a grocery store scanner and many others -- are no longer potent. Perry called it the "old playbook" of "gotcha" stories.

The new playbook, he said, "hasn't been written yet."

"In a micro-election, all those attacks may or may not work," Carney said. But 2012, he said, will be a "macro-election."”

What Perry is hinting at is that, in today’s elections, small slip-ups and “technicalities” get drowned out by the millions of dollars spent on advertising getting out the broader messages that resonate with people's emotions. 

Just a few years ago, in 2006, gotcha moments still mattered: George Allen famously referred to an Indian-American as a “macaca.” Some analysts say the fallout tipped the election in his opponent’s favor. Allen’s presidential ambitions (he was a potential favorite at the time) were another casualty. Today this might have had much less impact, perhaps none at all.

For example, yesterday, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was being heckled for saying “corporations are people.” If Perry’s strategists are right, the news cycle will soon leave this incident in the dust and it won’t play even a minor role in Romney’s campaign.

In my eyes, a more insidious manifestation of the macro-campaign is that candidates regularly get away with saying things that connect emotionally with people through prejudice or gut feeling, but are factually inaccurate.

For example, the recent Wisconsin recall elections were objectively centered on public sector workers’ right to collective bargaining, which Gov. Scott Walker and the state GOP representatives were trying to eliminate. Republicans, however, regularly said the election was about forcing public servants to accept cuts in their pay and in their benefits. Although the public workers’ unions accepted the cuts long ago and their protests and recall efforts made no effort to reverse them, the GOP’s message is simpler and resonates more with an electorate that has grown resentful of what they perceive to be special treatment of public sector workers when compared with the private sector’s big layoffs and pay cuts. In the end, for a lot of people, it doesn’t matter that the unions did not resist these particular budget cut: many voters have grown accustomed to associating unions with hardheaded resistance to changes in pensions and pay and will assume that they resisted these particular cuts as well.

[This Washing Post blog entry talks about one of the more blatant efforts to make it look like public workers were resisting the cuts.]

So, republicans are relying on most people not paying close attention to political news and not spending much effort digging into the issues. They tell people what they expect to hear and what is most convenient for the GOP, whether it is true or not. As a result, democrats spend half of their energy just trying to redress the fallacies before getting to the real issues at hand. The republicans, on the other hand, stoke populist angers by hitting their electorate’s emotional chords—at the expense of the truth.

Other examples include John McCain’s claim that Phoenix was the city with the second most number of kidnappings in the world, implying this was tied to illegal immigration, or Michelle Bachmann and other republican politicians and media voices preposterously claiming that President Obama’s trip to India cost $200 million a day. In the past, both of these claims would have led to “gotcha” moments. Journalists would have criticized the perpetrators and the electorate’s perception of the GOP would be adversely affected. Instead, many news outlets went along with the stories, doing almost no fact checking of the GOP leaders, and have still failed to issue retractions. If you look them up now, you will still find many articles that present these obvious fallacies as the truth—you will have to dig to find the fact checks proving they are incorrect. As a result, many people still don’t know these claims have absolutely no basis in fact.

Let me give a personal example of how this strategy can play out. After the BP oil spill in the Mexican Gulf, conservative politicians and media began to report that the Obama administration had refused to repeal the Jones Act, which prevents foreign vessels from entering US waters. The complaint was that the Obama administration was turning away loads of foreign boats that had offered to help in the clean up.

My grandparents, staunch conservatives, watch Fox News regularly and heard this. They complained about it to my brother, who is a moderate, fairly well informed liberal. My brother believed them. After all, what reason did he have to doubt my grandparents? And he came to me complaining about the Jones Act and the Obama administration.

When my brother told me Obama had refused to allow foreign ships to help clean up the BP oil spill, I was stunned—I had no idea what to say or how to reply. I couldn’t counter the erroneous claim, because I had never heard this claim before, because I didn’t watch Fox News, because I had never even heard the issue raised in other media sources.

Fox News and the GOP strategists are relying on two things: first, that republican and democratic voters will not mix and many of their distortions will go unchallenged, and second, that if someone who listens to them repeats their falsehoods to a staunch progressive like myself, said progressive will not be able to challenge the distortion, because they have never even heard the issue raised.

The GOP’s new strategy, then, is to say whatever is most convenient, never apologize (i.e. show weakness) if they propagated a falsehood, and rely on the apathy of voters who will never dig a little deeper.

After the above incident, I did some easy internet searches and found that factcheck.org had investigated the matter and concluded that the Obama administration had in fact issued many exceptions to the Jones Act to the foreign ships the administration’s experts declared were needed. The officials did end up turning away some ships, because they received such an outpouring of offers to aid in the cleanup that there were many redundant services offered. Not only were the offers redundant, many of them came with a price attached or would have involved chemical techniques the US government does not approve. Finally, and most importantly, the government was actually worried there would be too many ships in the oil spill area getting in each other’s way and hampering the broader effort to clean up the oil spill. But that story is a lot harder to tell than “Obama blocks foreign ships from helping in the Gulf cleanup!!!!”

Turns out the people talking about the repeal of the Jones Act, notably a GOP rep from Hawaii, had a history of opposing the Act, because it helps local shipping unions throughout the US. The real aim was not to facilitate the clean-up, but to cripple unions.

Still, to this day, if you do a search on this you will see the factcheck.org analysis and then a slew of right-wing talk show hosts, politicians, and internet publications sounding off against the Obama administration for “hampering the clean efforts to protect cushy union jobs” and the like. No retractions, no apologies, they just steamroll right past what might be an image-tarnishing revelation for them. (Read factcheck.org's analysis of the Jones Act "controversy.")

The last part of this new media strategy is to spew so much absurdity into the airwaves that we can’t isolate any of the individual fallacies for long enough to call attention to the way they are distorting reality and using people’s gut emotions for their political agenda. Seriously, after all the “birther” nonsense or the “death panel” fiasco, what media outlet is going to get caught up in calling out something so minor as an erroneous claim that the Obama administration and unions were hampering clean up efforts in the Gulf, or that Phoenix is not actually the city with the second most kidnappings in the world, or that Obama’s trip to India cost $200 million.

But the real story here is not that the right is regularly getting away with saying blatant lies. The real story is that, in the campaigns coming in 2012, the GOP’s explicit strategy is to steamroll past the facts, ignoring convenient “slip-ups," technicalities, and embarrassing gotcha moments, to strike the right tone and appeal to people’s gut emotions, and they will probably be highly successful. Witness the fact that, because I am writing about this new strategy, we are not considering a more important topic, such as the more fundamental disagreements between the right and the left on, for example, the allocation of government spending.

Being able to anticipate the right’s arguments will play an important role in whether the left is able to quickly address and move past the false issues and distortions. One way to do that is for us to keep one eye on Fox News and other right wing media sources and do some fact checking of our own when an argument sounds fishy. That way you won’t end up stammering like me when my brother first told me Obama was keeping foreign ships from helping the clean up effort in the gulf.

*Update: I recently had an exchange with a conservative in the comment section of the Huff Post in which he tried to blame the unemployed for being too lazy to get jobs. I made the point that they lost their jobs because the Bush administration failed to regulated the financial industry. To that, he responded with one of these bizarre arguments mentioned above, which caught me totally off guard: he said that, in 2003 the Bush administration tried to regulate Fanne Mae and Freddie Mac, but Barney Frank and the democrats stopped the effort, saying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not in a crisis. After I got over my initial surprise, I did some fact checking: Fox News and right wing media sources have been spreading this argument to shift blame for the 2008 crisis onto the democrats. Barney Frank actually helped forge the legislation under question, and opposed it at the last moment, because the Bush administration and Congressional republicans added in last second changes that Frank and other democrats believed would make it harder for lower-income people to find housing. Fank did not encourage anyone else to vote against the bill and it passed the House despite his “no” vote. It was then shot down in the GOP-controlled Senate on the Bush administration’s orders. Read Barney Frank’s reply to the GOP’s rewriting of Congressional history. And this is factcheck.org's analysis of the back-and-forth claims.

If you’ve encountered a similar fallacious, distorting argument before, leave a comment describing the encounter and maybe I’ll feature the topic in a future post.

Second update: WOW, some people still don't believe that the kidnapping claim and Obama trip claim are erroneous and can't do an internet search to factcheck them on their own. Here's the links:

Phoenix kidnappings:
http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2010/jun/28/john-mccain/mccain-says-phoenix-second-kidnapping-capital-worl/

Obama's India trip:
http://www.factcheck.org/2010/11/ask-factcheck-trip-to-mumbai/

2. Banding together: progressive demographics and the politics of marginalization

This is my second post in an ongoing series on public perception of the democrats and the misconception that the US is generally a right-leaning country.

In my last post I showed that, historically, consistently more Americans have identified with democrats than with republicans, yet republican talking-points still so often portray us as isolated left-wing radicals. Taking a closer look at the demographic makeup of the progressive voter base goes a long way to explaining why it is so easy for republicans to make us feel like marginalized extremists, disconnected from Mainstreet, mainstream America.

The left wing draws heavily on minorities and, despite the fact that, when African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, and (some) Caucasian-Americans come together they form a strong coalition that almost always outnumbers the republicans, it’s very easy to make minorities feel like, well… minorities. Taking into account the underrepresentation of all minorities in politics and the history of political discrimination which they have faced, it is understandable that so many minorities translate the alienation they feel in their everyday lives into widespread disaffection with a political system that locks them out. Thus the transformative potential of a candidate like Barack Obama.

When you consider that the other group that regularly tends to vote democrat, women, has also faced intense discrimination and prejudices in their personal, professional, and civic lives, I think you begin to see why it is so easy for the right to make us feel isolated and marginalized: on some levels, it’s the truth! Even though women make up a slight majority of the general population, they are still severely marginalized and underrepresented politically. One of the more frightening aspects of the 2010 elections were that only 49% of women voted democrat and 48% voted republican. This probably has a lot to do with lack of voter enthusiasm on the left, but it's a dangerous trend nonetheless, especially given the republicans' new strategy of fielding fiery conservative women like Palin, O'Donnell, Haley, and Bachmann.

The last bastion of left-wing electoral power comes from the lower-income brackets, from all races, both men and women. Small wonder that they, too, feel shut out from a political system that does little to help them deal with the harsher realities of capitalism: unemployment, expensive health care, underfunded schools, abusive bureaucrats and police force… If you need concrete examples, I strongly suggest Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent article on the new face of poverty since 2008: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/nickel-and-dimed-2011-ver_b_922330.html.

The constituent parts of the progressive electorate face discrimination in their personal, professional, and civic lives. What the right has done is exploit our sense of alienation to make us think that our ideas, our movement, and our leaders are just as marginalized as we feel in our day-to-day lives, which is very far from the truth: when we band together, we form a strong plurality/majority of the electorate.

The right is relying on our diversity as an electorate to keep us from turning the tables on them. This has been a problem for the left throughout North America and Europe as left-wing organizers have struggled to help workers unite with immigrants, minorities, women, and most recently the LGBT community to realize that they have the same interests and must work together. Considering the many prejudices that already exist, it’s very easy to understand why it’s so much harder to unite this electorate than to split it up. It’s also something to be very proud of: despite coming from extremely diverse backgrounds, communities, and paths of life, all of these groups regularly come together under the large tent of progressive politics. 

It’s also comforting to think that progressives are making inroads in the fastest growing demographic: Hispanic-Americans.

Finally, some of the democratic electorate is made up of people like me. I’m a white male who votes progressive; I’m from a primarily white region, and I have lamentably few African-American and Hispanic-American friends. If this is your situation, chances are you really are an outspoken progressive voice in your community: Caucasians, especially Caucasian males, are the core of the right’s electorate. In fact, this trend is only becoming more pronounced, with the biggest GOP gains since 2008 coming from this demographic. Take a look:  

http://www.pollwatchdaily.com/2011/07/22/republicans-post-big-party-identification-gains-among-white-voters/

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/101109 (analysis of a Tea Partier)

[And this is wonderful essay a blogger at the Nation, Jamelle Bouie, explaining how the Southern Strategy is playing out today and how the trends amongst minorities and whites mentioned above, particularly in the south, are becoming more pronounced.]

Most members of the democratic Congress belong to this demographic—white males–and thus really are isolated, outspoken progressive voices… amongst other white males that is! If only our representatives were as diverse as our electorate!

Despite knowing these demographic trends, since the Iraq War I have felt very alienated by my community, and that sentiment has only increased since 2008. I’m sure that many of you, my readers, feel the same way: we were as relieved to see a democratic president then as we are horrified at how strange American politics are now. 

What we see in Washington DC: a very vocal conservative minority (controlling only one chamber of Congress) painting the larger progressive majority (controlling one chamber of Congress and the White House) as extremists, is mirrored in the greater population: a vocal conservative minority made up primarily of white males branding a larger, more diverse, progressive majority extremist.

But, if you’re like me, it’s not enough to just know more Americans are progressive than conservative, we want to meet those people and commiserate with them. Well, the solution is easy to point out and much more difficult to put into practice: we need to build communities of support that bridge differences in race, class, nationality and immigration status, and sexual-preference. Another way to meet more progressives is just to increase the number of ladies in your circle of friends, which is easier sad than done for a nerdy guy like me... Chances are, if we get out of our demographic bubbles, we’ll find there are a lot more progressives out there than we’d thought!

Tomorrow, in my last installment in this series, I’ll talk about the New Left, the fading of the working class foundation of progressive politics, and how this contributed to the fragmentation of progressive politics into various smaller single-issue advocacy groups.

PS The blacklisted, union-funded film, The Salt of the Earth, does a great job of showing how difficult it can be to get minorities (in this case Hispanics miners) to band together with women to win a labor dispute. This clip from another great film about a real strike, Matewan, shows the same difficulties, but between white and black coal miners. It sends shivers up my spine every time I watch it, enjoy:

Special request: London riots

This post is in response to a reader's request that I say a few words about the London riots.

On the one hand, there are very legitimate reasons to protest and occasionally to riot. On the other hand, these days, so often, the people with the will to riot are not the people who know how, when, or why to riot.

One sad feature of left wing politics throughout Europe and North America is that the kernel of progressive movements: organizing and leading people who are frustrated, marginalized, and angry to constructive political action, has been mostly lost as the working-class manufacturing base of progressive parties faded demographically and progressives struggled in the 80s and 90s to appeal to middle-class voters. I want to quote a passage from the NYT that I just keep coming back to over and over:

“There’s an illusion that grass-roots activity just begins spontaneously, that people get mad and suddenly say, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore!’ ” says Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University. “But that’s not how it happens.”

Intellectuals used to play a big role in organizing labor. In the 1930s, Communists and socialists were a major force. Later, labor unions stepped in.

But today’s unions are not set up to serve the unemployed; they generally organize around workplaces, after all.

I think what we've seen with the London riots and with riots in the suburbs of Paris and elsewhere are that, without solid organization and leadership from left-wing activists, they often amount to little more than looting and a bad PR stunt for rough urban areas with a lot of minorities.

This is actually a very dangerous situation for everyone, because as the economy worsens (and it looks like it will), there will be more frustration, more widespread chronic unemployment, and perhaps more rioting and protesting. A lot of people have nowhere to turn and nothing to lose. With no major political organization containing and directing this energy, it will just end up legitimating right wing politics and prejudices about the unemployed, poor, urban youth, and immigrants.

Just to make it absolutely clear though, I don't blame the rioters. I think many of them have very real frustrations. I think it is the left's collective responsibility to take a much more proactive stance in leading these people to more constructive political action. On a broader scale than just this riot, a lot of us on the left have this idea that a more progressive society will rise out of the ashes of capitalism. This is very far from the truth. If people are not mentally prepared and organized into an effective political force, it could just as easily lead to an end of law-and-order or a strong, authoritarian right-wing counteraction (witness the calls for a military response and Cameron's response...)

With this goal in mind, one thing we can all do is be a lot more honest with ourselves and with the people around us about what we believe. Today's left needs desperately to reevaluate its values and reestablish its core principles so that it can make a strong, constructive response to the right wing's vandalizing of government's most basic functions.

Here's the NYT article I keep mentioning in full. Right wing bloggers have picked up on it to try and shame the NYT for saying the unemployed ought to turn to communism. It's really worth a read: The Unemployed Somehow Became Invisible

***Update: Prime Minister David Cameron, also known for having said that multiculturalism has been a failure, called the riots "criminality, pure and simple," but is criminal behavior ever simple? Isn't crime, in all its forms, always tied to broader sociological, economic and cultural issues? Although it saddens me to see peaceful protests degenerate into looting, Cameron denying that this has anything to do with larger issues in the UK and Europe insures that the government will do little to address the underlying issues.

Also, this is a hilarious interview on the topic:

1. We’re not alone: A plurality of Americans are democrats

This is my first post in an ongoing series on public perception of the democrats and the misconception that the US is generally a right-leaning country.

Other developed nations have been racing ahead of us when it comes to enacting progressive policies; left-wing politicians in the US regularly face charges that they are not patriotic, that they are socialists–New England, Ivy League elites out of touch with mainstream, mainstreet Americans. And if you spoke out against the Iraq War, like I did, chances are you felt like an isolated heretic in a sea of conservatives. Heck, that’s how I still feel most of the time when I turn on the news and hear about what’s going on with the Tea Party!

But believe it or not, polls tracking partisan trends sends 2004 show that a consistent plurality of Americans identify with democrats. When these polls are expanded to include sympathizers (people who generally vote republican/democrat but aren’t necessarily members of either party), we find the same trend: with very few exceptions, more Americans sympathized with the democrats than with republicans from 2004-2010. When sympathizers are included, we also find that for most of the 2004-2010 period either a majority of Americans or a very significant plurality (almost a majority) supported the democrats.

Here are two well-regarded polls tracking partisan trends. Rasmussen shows a more consistent democratic trend in the US, unbroken until November 2010; Gallup includes the sympathizers and shows a strong democratic trend despite a little bit of variation.

The Gallup poll: http://www.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx

The Rasmussen poll: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/mood_of_america_archive/partisan_trends/summary_of_party_affiliation

Of course, both polls show that since 2010, there has been a lot more back and forth between republicans and democrats. For now though, let’s content ourselves with the knowledge that from 2004-2010, more Americans identified with democrats than with republicans. I’m going to have to write an entire post later on why things started getting mixed up: what’s happened since 2008 on the right is unprecedented in American history and deserves a much closer look.

Now, what about before 2004, you ask? The Pew Research Center has shown that more people supported democrats from the 1930s all the way up until 9/11, when republican affiliation jumped to about 30% and democratic membership fell to 31%. They point out that, actually, it wasn’t until 9/11 that republicans had even close to the membership of the Democratic Party. Since then, as shown above, more Americans support democrats than republicans, but the margin is much smaller.

As the study points out, since Republicans have higher voter turnout rates, the smaller advantage of the democrats puts them at risk in elections. I'm sure we all remember Bush/Gore, when the country consistently polled democrat, even voted democrat, and yet still lost the election by a hair's width.

Granted, for a good deal of the period in the Pew Research Center study (1930s and on), the democrats and republicans did not represent what they do today. Many people switched sides during the Civil Rights movement, thanks in part to the Southern Strategy–republican pandering to the rise of the white middle class in the south and their racial prejudices. Still, since that realignment and up until 9/11, the democrats solidly trounced republicans when it came to the raw number of people identifying themselves with either party.

The Pew Research Center study: http://people-press.org/2003/11/05/part-1-party-affiliation/

Historically then, America is not a conservative nation, and certainly not a republican nation. If you’re a progressive out there feeling lonely, you’re definitely not alone. You shouldn’t be afraid to speak out for what you believe–much of the alienation is self-enforcing: conservatives tell us we are marginalized extremists out-of-touch with mainstreet so we don’t speak our minds when we’re around “normal” people, and we probably often mistake solid democrats for republicans.

The fact that so many of us live in the closet politically also means that a large swath of the population, folks who aren’t particularly keen on politics and aren’t sure who believes what and who they agree with, don’t know what progressives stand for. As it turns out, many progressive policies, such as raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, are very popular, even amongst conservatives. Undoubtedly, if we spoke out more in our everyday lives, more people will know what we stand for, and consequently, more people will realize they already support some of the fundamental tenets of the American left.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the democrats’ voter base, which draws heavily on minorities and women, and how this might feed into the perception that we are so isolated.

Why I don't blame Barack Obama

After disappointments in the extension of the Bush tax cuts, budget deal, and especially the deficit deals, liberal bloggers have started castigating Barack Obama for his incompetence at the bargaining table. Although I agree that the results in these recent deals were disappointing, I don't blame Barack Obama.


I never expected much out of Barack Obama. As someone who believes fundamentally in the progressive nature of the free market and, like most democrats, thinks the government should only protect people from the worst excesses of the free market, he was never going to come along and drastically change the way Wall Street works. He wasn't going to impose heavier taxes on the rich (repealing the Bush tax cuts is just the start, since they really only amount to a few percentage points off the historically low tax rates rich people pay now); he wasn't going to launch a massive works program to make sure everyone had a job; he wasn't going to be a vocal critic of corporate influence in American politics.

At the very best, we can only expect Obama to put off the nation's backslide into the economic abyss. Granted, I thought he would be able to turn things around for maybe 5 years or even a decade and never expected that we'd already be facing a recession now, but then again, who could have predicted the disturbing and wacky events of the past two years. Death panels? Michelle Bachmann? Donald Trump? Birthers? Threatening to not raise the debt-ceiling? One of the reasons the left is still so unorganized is that many of our minds are still trying to figure out what the f*** is going on, which I fully sympathize with. But it's definitely time to stop staring at the freak show on the right and get down to business.

If we had elected McCain, the crisis we're expecting to start on Monday would have come two years ago, when republican leaders were struggling to wrangle enough votes on the bailouts and stimulus to keep us from backsliding into a depression.

In short, the first reason I don't blame Obama is that we, as voters on the left, should know we are electing representatives who are very moderate historically speaking. FDR democrats had a much more progressive vision of the world and were more willing to make drastic changes in the economy. We have let the wild cries of "socialist!" on the right go to our head, such that we go out of our way not to appear as extremists and not to elect extremists. But now we've seen that, no matter how moderately conservative Barack Obama becomes, the right is still going to call him a radical Kenyan Islamic communist.

The second reason I don't blame Obama is that the left is not fired up at all about what is happening. We are entering a new phase of American politics, one in which civic involvement is going to become increasingly important. If the 51-52% of us who sympathize with the left don't want to see our values steamrolled, we are going to have to speak out a LOT more to combat this stereotype that the US is inherently conservative.

Whereas the Tea Party has been turning out to town halls and launching protests, we just sit at home despairing about how inherently conservative the US is. Hogwash! Most polls show a plurality* of Americans sympathize with the democrats. The only reason the right is dominating the debate is that they are louder and more organized. It's high time that we started to respond in kind with the massive protests and civil disobedience that we are known for.

Protesting and engaging in civil disobedience will raise the profile of the progressive side of American politics and drown out a good bit of the "libtard" mentality that currently gets so much coverage in the media. It will also go a long way to making Obama's job easier, because, let's face it, even as the moderate he is, he hasn't been able to do most of the things he wanted since he got elected because of the unprecedented opposition he has received from the right.

You hear that noise? It's me tapping my foot impatiently. Let's get on the move! Let's go stand up for what we believe!

*Edit: changed "majority" to "plurality" in  the third to last paragraph. More on polling, partisan affiliation, and support for democratic priorities to come.