Snarky Behavior

I had the opportunity to meet with the communications director for one of the major presidential candidates yesterday, and it was really quite jarring how much emphasis this person placed on issue framing.

First of all, the sit-down confirmed my suspicion that political campaigns for front-runners are reactive and not pro-active… they work from the unitary level of the median voter and then craft rhetoric that appeals to pre-confirmed emotive psychologies.

To differentiate: a pro-active approach would be more about re-framing issues and inspiring people to think about issues and consider outside of their prejudices.

The pro-active approach of course is the truly “rational” tactic because reason requires choice, and choice requires consideration, or thought, between two or more ideas. The reactive approach is completely rhetorical and crafts messaging around what people want to hear, as teased out in meta-analysis of blogs, focus group testing, issue polling, etc.

Of course the reactive approach is completely rhetorical. Candidates can say one thing and mean something completely different. They can emphasize a value even if it’s ordinally and/or cardinally ranked far below another, sometimes conflicting value.

In his book “The Political Brain,” author Drew Westin says, “ in politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins.” Take for instance the issue of security. The psychology of the conservative brain is hard-wired to be more cognizant of its own mortality, and thus react harshly to images and signifiers of death. Republicans won in 2004 by reminding their base of the spontaneous and unexpected nature of terrorism, as demonstrated by the attacks of September 11, 2001. Democrats lost because they tried to attack an emotive issue (unexpected death and destruction) with a rational one (no strong causal link to Iraq, poor information management and leadership allowed cracks in security, etc.)

Now Republicans have the uphill battle because they’re fighting against the emotive response of betrayal and lack of trust, not to mention the “us vs. them” populism sweeping through the nation.

I don’t know what to make of this. People obviously express a preference for hearing what they want to hear. This leads to two problems: 1) candidates say things for effect, and not to explain their true positions or intentions, which leaves the voters feeling betrayed and apathetic toward the political process (a “sticky downward” cycle); and 2) candidates promise things based on rhetoric that they can’t feasibly deliver on (i.e. Clinton’s universal health care in ‘96, Bush’s democratization of the Middle East in 2003). Which leads to emotions of betrayal and anger (I doubt voters would be as angry as they currently are about a manufactured war based on false evidence if things were actually going as planned in Iraq).

Is that the evolving nature of democracy, or can something be done? Policy experts are always clamoring for more “transparency,” but is that really a consumer preference? Or would transparency be yet another aspect of democracy that Americans take for granted, and not actually exercise?