Christopher Caldwell: Stupidity and the US way
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: May 5 2006 20:45 | Last updated: May 5 2006 20:45 Copyright by The Financial Times
Among political consultants, it has long been an article of faith that the US is so dependent on cheap petrol that no populist trick to make it cheaper goes unrewarded and no tax on it unpunished. Prices at the unheard-of level of more than $3 a gallon raise the incentives for demagogy. Bill Frist, Senate majority leader and a hopeful for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, offered a novel plan recently – a $100 rebate to consumers, to be paid for out of taxes on oil companies. It was not the biggest or boldest plan, but it appeared to stroke the median voter’s sense of entitlement in the accustomed direction.
Appearances were wrong. Editorial pages were almost unanimous in opposition. Dr Frist’s Republican colleagues condemned the plan as “stupid”. Radio talk shows crackled with derision. What happened? It would be comforting to imagine that Americans’ grasp of energy policy is getting more sophisticated. There is some evidence that this is so – long waiting lists for the new hybrid vehicles offered by Toyota, for instance. But another reason is more likely. While many voters dismissed the plan on its merits, more common were accusations that Dr Frist was “patronising” them. His plan seemed the kind of public-relations stunt that only the most cynical political consultant would devise. Since such gimmickry has been the communications tool of first resort under the last two presidencies, voters’ sudden impatience with it demands an explanation.
The episode coincides with the publication of Politics Lost, a new book by Joe Klein, a veteran political reporter for Time magazine. The book’s thesis is in its subtitle: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You’re Stupid. It is an alternative history of US politics since the 1960s, told through the political consultants who interpret and woo the electorate. Mr Klein thinks “campaign professionals” have debased politics. Rot set in with the scientific opinion sampling developed by the pollster Pat Caddell in the 1970s, which allowed politicians to tailor appeals to critical groups of voters. The focus of politics shifted from clear matters of “who gets what, when, where and how?” to mood music and emotional massaging. As Mr Caddell described his strategy for the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976: “We didn’t talk about numbers or issues. We talked about themes.”
One would think that this change might make politics more soaring, inspiring and poetic. It did the opposite. Before the arrival of Mr Caddell and others, Robert F. Kennedy used to quote Aeschylus in the black inner city. Closer study of voter preferences rendered this sort of ambitious oratory inadvisable. There were far more votes to be harvested if you could use references your whole audience was sure to understand. Consultants set about finding them. A “great leap forward in the sterilisation of American politics” was achieved when the Republican consultant Frank Luntz began convening focus groups to gauge reaction to specific words and phrases. He discovered that Americans responded better to “tax relief” than to “tax cuts”, and disliked the estate tax more when it was called a “death tax”. The problem is that slogans do not make tough decisions, people do. And this politics brings worse people to power. As messages have grown more sophisticated, candidates have become more formulaic and passive. The chief skill that consultant-driven politics rewards is that of mincing words.
Particularly for Democrats. In Mr Klein’s view, their decision to lead the assault on racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s was a noble one, but it required more long-term rhetorical courage than the party had at its disposal. When problems with a racial element began to fester – when, for instance, urban crime quintupled during one five-year period in the 1960s – Democrats ignored them. They advanced their programmes of affirmative action and forced bussing behind a guard of euphemism. Mystification became the main job of Democratic consultants – pretending, for instance, that there was a difference between affirmative action (good) and quotas (bad). The liabilities built up have yet to be discharged. Both John Kerry and Al Gore paid a heavy price in their presidential campaigns for Democrats’ history of being (in Mr Klein’s phrase) “the party of the complex, clause-draped sentence”.
Mr Klein clearly considers Ronald Reagan the towering political figure of recent decades. The consultants Reagan hired were “peripheral” to his political stances and their main task was to “let Reagan be Reagan”. Bill Clinton, his only rival, was less under the consultants’ control than it appeared. “He picks his consultants according to where he wants to go,” as one of them, Stanley Greenberg, put it. Of course, when Mr Klein notes this, he un-says much of the thesis of his book. Inimical though they may be to bold, declarative language, consultants are not primary but secondary phenomena. They remain retailers, not manufacturers, of party ideologies. Voters can refuse to buy what they are selling.
The question is whether we are witnessing such a refusal now. Mr Klein has speculated elsewhere that the internet may restore old-fashioned, off-the-cuff spontaneity to US politics. But there is just as much evidence that the internet tends to shore up the superficial politics of recent decades. The political bestsellers and television shows that have flourished since the dawn of the internet are not marked by any advance in political imagination. If there is a growing impatience with sloganeering, its cause probably lies elsewhere. Terrorism, war, the New Orleans floods or something as yet invisible may be altering US voter “demand”, much as the Democrats’ failed social programmes did on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election. There is, after all, such a thing as a political predicament too serious to spin one’s way out of.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Published: May 5 2006 20:45 | Last updated: May 5 2006 20:45 Copyright by The Financial Times
Among political consultants, it has long been an article of faith that the US is so dependent on cheap petrol that no populist trick to make it cheaper goes unrewarded and no tax on it unpunished. Prices at the unheard-of level of more than $3 a gallon raise the incentives for demagogy. Bill Frist, Senate majority leader and a hopeful for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, offered a novel plan recently – a $100 rebate to consumers, to be paid for out of taxes on oil companies. It was not the biggest or boldest plan, but it appeared to stroke the median voter’s sense of entitlement in the accustomed direction.
Appearances were wrong. Editorial pages were almost unanimous in opposition. Dr Frist’s Republican colleagues condemned the plan as “stupid”. Radio talk shows crackled with derision. What happened? It would be comforting to imagine that Americans’ grasp of energy policy is getting more sophisticated. There is some evidence that this is so – long waiting lists for the new hybrid vehicles offered by Toyota, for instance. But another reason is more likely. While many voters dismissed the plan on its merits, more common were accusations that Dr Frist was “patronising” them. His plan seemed the kind of public-relations stunt that only the most cynical political consultant would devise. Since such gimmickry has been the communications tool of first resort under the last two presidencies, voters’ sudden impatience with it demands an explanation.
The episode coincides with the publication of Politics Lost, a new book by Joe Klein, a veteran political reporter for Time magazine. The book’s thesis is in its subtitle: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You’re Stupid. It is an alternative history of US politics since the 1960s, told through the political consultants who interpret and woo the electorate. Mr Klein thinks “campaign professionals” have debased politics. Rot set in with the scientific opinion sampling developed by the pollster Pat Caddell in the 1970s, which allowed politicians to tailor appeals to critical groups of voters. The focus of politics shifted from clear matters of “who gets what, when, where and how?” to mood music and emotional massaging. As Mr Caddell described his strategy for the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976: “We didn’t talk about numbers or issues. We talked about themes.”
One would think that this change might make politics more soaring, inspiring and poetic. It did the opposite. Before the arrival of Mr Caddell and others, Robert F. Kennedy used to quote Aeschylus in the black inner city. Closer study of voter preferences rendered this sort of ambitious oratory inadvisable. There were far more votes to be harvested if you could use references your whole audience was sure to understand. Consultants set about finding them. A “great leap forward in the sterilisation of American politics” was achieved when the Republican consultant Frank Luntz began convening focus groups to gauge reaction to specific words and phrases. He discovered that Americans responded better to “tax relief” than to “tax cuts”, and disliked the estate tax more when it was called a “death tax”. The problem is that slogans do not make tough decisions, people do. And this politics brings worse people to power. As messages have grown more sophisticated, candidates have become more formulaic and passive. The chief skill that consultant-driven politics rewards is that of mincing words.
Particularly for Democrats. In Mr Klein’s view, their decision to lead the assault on racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s was a noble one, but it required more long-term rhetorical courage than the party had at its disposal. When problems with a racial element began to fester – when, for instance, urban crime quintupled during one five-year period in the 1960s – Democrats ignored them. They advanced their programmes of affirmative action and forced bussing behind a guard of euphemism. Mystification became the main job of Democratic consultants – pretending, for instance, that there was a difference between affirmative action (good) and quotas (bad). The liabilities built up have yet to be discharged. Both John Kerry and Al Gore paid a heavy price in their presidential campaigns for Democrats’ history of being (in Mr Klein’s phrase) “the party of the complex, clause-draped sentence”.
Mr Klein clearly considers Ronald Reagan the towering political figure of recent decades. The consultants Reagan hired were “peripheral” to his political stances and their main task was to “let Reagan be Reagan”. Bill Clinton, his only rival, was less under the consultants’ control than it appeared. “He picks his consultants according to where he wants to go,” as one of them, Stanley Greenberg, put it. Of course, when Mr Klein notes this, he un-says much of the thesis of his book. Inimical though they may be to bold, declarative language, consultants are not primary but secondary phenomena. They remain retailers, not manufacturers, of party ideologies. Voters can refuse to buy what they are selling.
The question is whether we are witnessing such a refusal now. Mr Klein has speculated elsewhere that the internet may restore old-fashioned, off-the-cuff spontaneity to US politics. But there is just as much evidence that the internet tends to shore up the superficial politics of recent decades. The political bestsellers and television shows that have flourished since the dawn of the internet are not marked by any advance in political imagination. If there is a growing impatience with sloganeering, its cause probably lies elsewhere. Terrorism, war, the New Orleans floods or something as yet invisible may be altering US voter “demand”, much as the Democrats’ failed social programmes did on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election. There is, after all, such a thing as a political predicament too serious to spin one’s way out of.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
posted by Carlos T Mock at 9:43 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home