If you watch or listen to the Republicans and much of the mainstream media, you might think that the Affordable Care Act is nothing but a website that is having problems. However, Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed in the New York Times last Saturday that sets the record straight, and shows us how to frame the Affordable Care Act properly.
Now that Republicans have failed to stop the Affordable Care Act, their next tactic is to battle the Act in an anecdote war. The mainstream television news media love anecdotes, because they are small shiny objects around which the media folks can get their short attention spans. We saw this anecdote tactic play out, for example, during the recent GOP shutdown, when the media reduced many big, important issues about government to a small sideshow dispute over the World War II Memorial.
Good intentions are not enough. The facts are not enough. To win in politics, you must go on offense. That’s why going on offense is Messaging Maxim #1. And that’s why the Twitter hashtag #GoodbyeGOP, which has been trending in recent days, is so good.
The video above is the latest example demonstrating that U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is the Democrats’ communications rock star, and the conscience — or what should be the conscience — of the Democratic Party. Here, Warren does everything right when introducing her new bill to give students the same rate on their loans as banks get from the Federal Reserve:
Why do Democrats always seem to snatch weakness from the jaws of strength? The Republican War On Women is an important issue for Democrats. It’s another vivid example of how Republicans favor big corporations and wealthy individuals instead of middle class Americans. Republicans keep providing ammo in their War On Women, from trying to redefine rape to attempting state-sponsored rape in Virginia to Ted Nugent‘s latest vile attacks on Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. In other words, we know the Republican War on Women is real. So there’s no need to say it’s real.
Saying the Republican War On Women “is real” sounds defensive, as if the assertion is in doubt. It isn’t. Like gravity and the curvature of the Earth, the War On Women is now so obvious that it no longer needs to be proven. When Democrats play defense, they lose. When the Republicans say President Obama‘s Affordable Care Act is “socialist”, do they then explain that “socialism in the Democratic Party is real”? No. When the Republicans say the Democratic-sponsored Buffet Rule is “class warfare”, do you hear them say “and class warfare is real”? Nope. The Republicans have learned Messaging Maxim #1: Go on Offense.
Democrats also need to go on offense and have the confidence to talk about the Republican War On Women without backpedaling to say it’s “real”. We need to point to the almost daily salvos fired by Republicans in this war, and say that the Republican War On Women is hurting families, and hurting America.
Mark the beginning of April as the time President Obama amped up his campaign rhetoric against the Republicans to a new level. First, on April 2, President Obama, as shown in the above video, turned the tables on the Republicans’ long-running charges of “judicial activism” against judges appointed by or aligned with Democrats, and said that if the conservative-controlled U.S. Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act or its health insurance mandate provision, that would be “judicial activism”.
Then, on April 3, President Obama came out swinging against Republican Congressman Paul Ryan‘s budget plan, and, by extension, the entire Republican philosophy of “trickle-down economics.” According to President Obama, the Republican plan, containing more tax cuts for the wealthy and drastic spending cuts for lower income Americans, “is thinly veiled social Darwinism.”
In both of these cases, President Obama followed Messaging Maxim #1: Go On Offense. It was a page taken from the Republican playbook, and it may well be extremely effective.
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Before the past few Thanksgivings, some media outlets have run pieces advising readers or viewers on how to respond to right-wing, Fox-concocted talking points that one or more relatives might regurgitate at the dinner table. As the above video from this past November 23 indicates, Ed Schultz invited Occupy Wall Street hero Jesse LaGreca on MSNBC’s “Ed Show” to do just that. Jesse does a good job using logic, facts, and figures to respond to the right-wing talking points raised by Ed. However, if you’re simply being reactive rather than proactive in these situations, you’ve already lost the political argument.
Former President Bill Clinton is considered by many to be one of the best politicians of the 20th Century. His intelligence and command of facts and figures are something to behold. But check out this recent interview regarding the debt ceiling debate, where Clinton’s skills fall short in the face of a barrage of right wing talking points in the form of questions to Clinton by CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer:
Clinton answers that the media need to be careful about calling President Obama’s call for shared sacrifice “class warfare”, which is a good response as far as it goes. But then Clinton embarks on long, fact-based answers that are likely to cause most viewers (and, apparently, Blitzer himself) to tune out. Such lengthy recitations, while no doubt accurate, are no match for the visceral buzz words like “class warfare” and “bitter” contained in Blitzer’s questions. That’s exactly why those words are a key part of Republican talking points.
President Obama invites progressive black rapper Common to read poetry at the White House, and the folks at Fox “News” explode. It was perfectly predictable, since Fox and the Republicans have been waging a race-based cultural war on Barack Obama since Obama began running for President. That race war has included Reverend Wright, Van Jones, ACORN, the “New Black Panther Party”, Shirley Sherrod, and others as proxies for Obama in the Republicans’ “Scary Black People” strategy.
This time, the war on Obama (using Common as the proxy) was launched by Fox and Republicans contracted to work for Fox, including Sarah Palin and Karl Rove. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly then challenged Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” to a debate on the subject of Common, and Stewart took the bait. Many progressives are cheering, saying that Stewart will clean O’Reilly’s clock with the facts. Bad idea. Once such a debate is being held — on O’Reilly’s Fox “News” home turf, of course — Fox, O’Reilly, and the Republicans have already won.
As this video shows, former President George W. Bush, talking about privatizing Social Security in one of his phony Republican-stocked “town hall” events in May 2005, said:
in my line of work you gotta keep repeating things over and over and over again, for the truth to sink in. You gotta catapult the propaganda.
What Bush probably meant by “catapult” was to vault over what he called “propaganda”, i.e., reporting and political advocacy that disagreed with him, indicating that privatizing Social Security and leaving seniors’ finances to the forces of the stock market would be extremely risky, and, during the Bush years, when the stock market tanked, would have driven millions of seniors into poverty. But Bush was really following Messaging Maxim #2: Rinse and Repeat. Bush’s repetition of his message was the propaganda itself, and thus “catapult the propaganda” for Bush really meant to propel his own propaganda through repetition. In the case of privatizing social security, it didn’t work.
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