AmiBlue's picture

    Don’t tell ‘em. Sell ‘em

     Rick Perlstein  writes a brief and enlightening history of the conservative battle to destroy  liberals in First Principles: The Role of Government,  part of the winter issue of Democracy Journal.  The republicans have used the power of media for many  more years than I had imagined and the paranoia that fuels the fight seems to have been around even longer.  (N.B. I’m taking just a few snippets from Perlstein’s article here, but I highly recommend the entire piece.)

     From Perlstein’s article:

    Historically, nothing has terrified conservatives so much as efficient, effective, activist government. “A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive,” the former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued in an interview published in the journal Nation’s Business in 1928. “He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast–a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world–the black plague is a housepet by comparison.”

     The  propaganda battle began in earnest in the 1930s, as you might imagine and it was led by – you guessed it – Big Business.  The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was among the first to sound an alarm and to suggest the weapon of choice:

     Between 1934 and 1937, NAM’s public-relations budget increased twentyfold, to $12 million in today’s dollars, comprising a majority of the flagship business organization’s annual expenditures. “Don’t tell ’em, sell ’em,” was the watchword of the head of NAM’s PR efforts, a DuPont Chemical executive named J. Warren Kinsman. “In the everlasting battle for the minds of men,” he argued, only modern marketing techniques were “powerful enough to arouse public opinion sufficiently to check the steady, insidious, and current drift toward socialism.”

    By  the 1950s they were distributing pamphlets, comic books, and  films to school children and the re-education of union members began. 

    Training workers to vote against their own interest began much earlier than I knew.  GE took up the standard in the late 1940s when one of its employees, Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, entered the fray:

    His main job was merely negotiating labor contracts, but he understood the work as political guerilla warfare: figuring out ways to speak directly to workers, over the heads of their unions, in, as Boulware’s best historian, Thomas W. Evans, explains, “a constant campaign, going on each day for years.”

    Finally:

    And, of course, they hired Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1954. While hosting “General Electric Theater” on television, Reagan traveled to GE factory floors across the country, giving speeches that evolved from Hollywood stories to Boulwarite ideological folk tales…

     So conservatives are old pros at the propaganda game.  It’s part of their DNA by now.  In fact, their campaign has been so effective it seems to have rubbed off on the opposition to some degree.  But never mind that for the moment.  The question uppermost in my mind for now is what, if anything, can Democrats do to counter the propaganda and lies so glibly delivered by the cons?

    The Dems in Congress announced new tactics recently:

    "The idea is to identify hot-button issues early, frame them in a favorable light for the party and allow Democratic senators to relentlessly drive home the point through press briefings, conference calls, newspaper op-eds and local interviews... What makes the approach different is that Schumer wants to place heavy emphasis on rebuilding regional and local press coverage, circumventing Washington's media while trying to generate positive news coverage for Democratic senators at home."

    Will it work? Maybe, but the first thing that comes to my mind?  Why announce your battle plan?  Why not just go ahead on and do it?  Why give the enemy the advantage of knowing when and where you’re going to fight?  The cons are already 20 leagues ahead of us with their simple, but very effective “job-killing” prefix – the job-killing  Obamacare, the job-killing stimulus, the job-killing bailout – you know the drill.  Besides it sound more like the Dems plan to “tell ‘em” instead of “sell ‘em”, which is what we usually do .  Perhaps if they hire a genuine and talented “communications strategist” instead of  some Democratic Party hack they can pull it off.

     

    Comments

    I have heard that Frank Lutz doesn't care which team he works for, just as long as he gets paid.  Anybody wanna start a kitty?


    This is an amazing piece, AmiBlue. Thank you so much for passing it along--and for your own thoughts.  I read it this morning and it spurred me on to blog about it, too.  What's stunning to me is that all along they've hidden nothing--not their strategies, not their motives, not their goals--and still they come out smelling like a rose.  Their power grows and grows.

    That whole "job-killing" mantra seems ridiculous on its face, but damn--it works!

    You're right about the Dems and their goofy counter-attacks.  Why announce what they're going to do?  Because they never learn.  Why do they never learn?  It's the question of the ages, and if anyone comes up with an answer, I'd like to be among the first to see it. (Poor Anthony Weiner, et al. They've scratched their heads bloody and grown hoarse from screaming, and nothing seems to get through to their compadres.)

    Meanwhile, onward and outward and inward and upward and downward.  Whatever it takes. 


    My head is bruised from beating it against the wall with frustration.  We have some smart people.  How can they sit by for decades and not understand the importance of what was happening?  As you say, onward and backward.


    Historically, nothing has terrified conservatives so much as efficient, effective, activist government.

    I remember reading that this is the exact reason conservatives maniacally hated Clinton. As Perlstein mentioned, Republicans had dodged the threat of the next 20 years as the minority party when they defeated health care reform, but Clinton then hit them on their own issues, notably free trade, crime and welfare reform. And then there was the economy. The same dire economic consequences we heard would fall on our heads if the Bush tax cuts were not extended today, were rabidly predicted in 1993 over Clinton's proposed tax hike:

    Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA): We have all too many people in the Democratic administration who are talking about bigger Government, bigger bureaucracy, more programs, and higher taxes. I believe that that will in fact kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession. It might take 1 1/2 or 2 years, but it will happen.

    Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO): However Clinton wants to spin his tax plan, the bottom line is this: It will raise your taxes, increase the deficit, and kill over 1 million jobs.

    Rep. Christopher Cox (R-CA): This is really the Dr. Kevorkian plan for our economy. It will kill jobs, kill businesses, and yes, kill even the higher tax revenues that these suicidal tax increasers hope to gain.

    Ooops.

    Whether those of us on the more liberal end of the Democratic party agreed with all of Clinton's policies or not, they were undoubtedly much better than anything the Republicans would have offered or passed. Besides, most Democrats and swing voters were happy with Clinton. What really screwed with the conservative minds, though, was that Clinton's popularity rose during his impeachment, while their own plummeted, sorta like the black plague:

    “A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive,” the former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued in an interview published in the journal Nation’s Business in 1928. “He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast–a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world–the black plague is a housepet by comparison.”



    What has become clear to me is that conservatives don't simply disagree about how to go about governing, they are absolutely terrified of anything that Democrats might do.  Literally.  I also believe that Obama's otherness - his color, his name, his foreign father, and probably his off-beat mother (even if she was from Kansas) - have magnified the terror and divided the country irretrievably.  Obama probably is aware of how his cultural background has affected many people and that probably is one reason he is so conciliatory so as not to alarm them further.


    You might be right about Obama's reasons to be conciliatory, but it's actually having the opposite effect, and it seems like he should have seen that by now.  They see any attempt to be reasonable as a sign of weakness, and they've proven that over and over again.  He can't reason with them and still be effective.  It's like taking baby steps in the playpen when he should be marching up the mountain.  It's clear they're not seeing him as a threat anymore.  That's bad.


    Obama's fellow pols are not alarmed by him now and I doubt they were before he was elected.  I believe they had his number by the time he had been in the senate a while and knew how to use his concilatory nature to their best advantage.  However, they have used his otherness to their advantage to terrify the voters, the white people and uneducated people who are feeling shaky anyway.  We saw results in the recent election.  There were other reasons for the rout, of course, but the flight of the white middle class was one of them.  Appeasing these frightened people underlies Obama's basic nature at least partly, I believe.  I'm guessing he donned this mantle at an early age. Whatever his reasons, I agree that his tactics are counterproductive in his role as president.  He loses the people who would otherwise fight for him and is left with little choice but to capitulate.


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