Dennis Hastert
After the recent sexual revelations involving Josh Duggar and Dennis Hastert, businesses that replace windows in glass houses are doing very well. Both the Duggar and Hastert cases are about hypocrisy, and psychologists might also say they involve loudly criticizing others’ sexual behavior to cover one’s own past behavior. But both cases offer some sharp political lessons:
Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire
Hillary Rodham Clinton announced last Sunday that she is running for the Democratic nomination for President in 2016. While Clinton is one of the best-known people in the world, more folks might be familiar with knee-jerk labels used to describe her. In fact, Hillary has a long record of commitment to progressive American values. Here are seven reasons to love Hillary Clinton for President:
“If one candidate is appealing to your fears, and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you’d better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope!”
― Bill Clinton
Credit U.S. Supreme Court Justice (and Obama appointee) Elena Kagan with outing the Republican discrimination behind their 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). At today’s hearing before the Supreme Court, Kagan read from the Republican-drafted House Report that accompanied the original DOMA legislation:
Congress decided to reflect an ‘honor of collective moral judgment’ and to express ‘moral disapproval of homosexuality.’
Here’s the entire quote from pages 15-16 of the 1996 House Report:
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” — President Bill Clinton, 1998
“I did not have economic relations with that company.” — Various satirists mocking Mitt Romney, 2012
As happened to President Bill Clinton in 1998, Republican presidential nominee Willard Mitt Romney is learning a tough lesson: legalisms don’t cut it in politics.
During the 1998 Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair, while being deposed in the related Paula Jones lawsuit, Clinton was given a definition of “sexual relations” that appeared to be limited to performing sexual acts upon another person. Clinton was then asked whether, under this definition, he had had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Since Clinton had not (according to him) performed sexual acts upon Lewinsky, he seemed to have answered the question truthfully by saying “no.” However, Clinton’s semantics did not fly in the political arena and, at least in the short term, Clinton suffered political damage and public humiliation.
Amazingly, Willard Romney and his advisers have not learned Bill Clinton’s lesson. Romney (who, like Clinton, has an Ivy League law degree) and his campaign keep falling back on similar legalisms to try to explain Romney’s various public filings and statements regarding his relationship with Bain Capital, and voters don’t seem to be buying it. The specific issue now is whether Romney left Bain in 1999, 2002, or some time in between. Romney created this issue by saying that all the “bad” things Romney’s Republican primary rivals and the Obama campaign have accused Bain of doing — allowing companies they took over to go bankrupt, firing workers at these companies, and outsourcing many of their jobs overseas — happened after February 1999, when Romney had “left” Bain. It’s stunning that Romney has conceded this framing of Bain’s track record to his opponents. However, even with the limited argument Romney has left himself, documents keep surfacing, including Bain’s own Securities Exchange Commission filings signed by Romney, that conflict with Romney’s narrative.
A year ago, we posted the list of Political Phrases Used by Republicans. These are words and phrases the Republicans use and repeat in order to tilt the political playing field in their favor. We expressed the desire to create a similar list of Democratic and progressive phrases, but feared there were too few even to make a list.
Now, a year later, we dare to begin creating the list of phrases that Democrats use, or should use, to help level the playing field against the Republicans. Thus far, however, the list is modest, which is precisely why we wrote A Messaging Manifesto For Democrats. Therefore, we ask for your suggestions in the comments (or via Twitter) as to additional phrases that the Democrats either (a) are using, or (b) should use, and we’ll add the appropriate ones to the list. Hopefully, this list will at some point begin to approach the Republican list in length and effectiveness.
Also, when you compare the Democratic and Republican lists, notice the differences. Democrats tend to focus on things like hope, family, and health, while Republicans focus a lot on life vs. death and good vs. evil. This precisely reflects the competing Democrats’ “nurturing parent” and Republican “strict father” models identified by linguistics professor and political language guru George Lakoff.
Here’s the list:
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.
By now, most of us are familiar with Anthony Weiner‘s personal behavioral lapses in his Twitter sex scandal. However, Weiner’s public messaging failures in this case were also epic. Weiner adopted a strange strategy of denying part of the story, i.e., that he had sent photos of his underwear-clad crotch to a woman via Twitter, but then saying that he could not state “with certitude” whether the picture in question was of him. This vague answer struck many reporters as suspicious, and they continued their media feeding frenzy that, within a few days, led to Weiner’s press conference where he did an about-face and admitted that the picture in question was of him, that he sent the photo, and that he had sent similar photos and/or had similar online exchanges with approximately six other women. Now Weiner’s political career hangs by a thread.
So what could, and should, Weiner have done differently, messaging-wise, once the initial stories about him were publicized?
http://youtu.be/glwjxemLaK8
New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie‘s ill-fated ride to his son’s baseball game on a $2,500 per hour State Police helicopter, after saying that New Jersey can’t afford a commuter train tunnel and other important services, is the latest example of hypocrisy by politicians that hits voters like a stink bomb. Some previous examples of this kind of hypocrisy include:
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
—Vladimir Lenin
According to PolitiFact, the biggest lie of the year 2010 was the Republicans’ description of the Democrats’ health insurance reform bill as “a government takeover of health care”. How many times did you hear that phrase during the Summer and Fall of 2010? If you followed the news at all, probably hundreds. That was deliberate, and, according to PolitiFact, the phrase was cooked up by the Republican Party’s language guru, Frank Luntz. However, leading Republicans made this phrase stick, by repeating it in a highly disciplined manner, whereupon it was picked up by their followers and by the mainstream media. (“Government takeover of health care” or “government-run health care” was also a short, simple, catchy slogan. As was discussed in a podcast last December, such simplicity is also key to good political messaging, and will be the subject of another upcoming Messaging Maxim.)
Repetition of political catch phrases such as “government-run health care,” even when the phrases are false, is one of the Republican Party’s strengths. As mentioned in A Messaging Manifesto For Democrats, the GOP has a huge list of such phrases, including “pro-life,” “death tax” and many more. Leading Republicans repeat these phrases in a disciplined manner every chance they get, such as on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, on every news television interview program on which they are invited, in newspaper and online articles, etc. The result is that the messages, which are framed in a manner favorable to Republicans (and often focus group-tested beforehand), are echoed in the mainstream media, and they sink into our subconscious, thereby tilting the political battlefield in the Republicans’ favor.
This crucial element of repeating political messages is sorely lacking on the Democratic side. Quick, can you think of one catch phrase to describe any Democratic Party policies (or used by Democrats to describe Republican policies)? They are very few in number. Bill Clinton used “mend it, don’t end it” to try to stave off Republican efforts to cancel federal affirmative action programs. But that was more than 15 years ago.
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