Let's Talk Sense...
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Sunday, August 6, 2000 Volume XXV, No. 19
Roswell, New Mexico
In this issue:
Report From Philadelphia, part 1
Let's Talk "Bounce"
Why Such Success?
Enough with Inhibitions Already
A Pilgrim's Progress
Who is Karl Rove Aiming At?
REPORT FROM PHILADELPHIA
Personally, I had a great time. Philadelphia is a great city and
its people were great hosts. But beyond that, the GOP had a great
convention. Let's review a few things.
Let's Talk "Bounce"
I see where media types are citing "NBC" polls or other
somesuch and downplaying the "bounce" Bush is getting
out of the convention, "only 5 points," says Newsweek's
Eleanor Clift. But, just look at the Battleground Poll, a Bipartisan
effort run jointly by Republican Ed Goeas and Democrat Celinda Lake:
July 30-31
Bush Gore Nader Buchanan Don't Know
46 38 3 1 11
August 4-5
Bush Gore Nader Buchanan Don't Know
49 31 6 2 12
(1,000 likely voters, +/- 3points)
From an 8-point lead to an 18-point lead, that's a ten point bounce
from the convention anyway you slice it. In the head to-head sample,
Bush is enjoying an 11-point surge, going from a 47-41 lead to a
52-35 advantage in that same Battleground Poll---without minor party
candidates included.
Why such Success?
No one in political science can begin to tell you with absolute
certainty. As Yogi Berra would say ("half of baseball is 90%
mental"), half of electoral politics is 90% art! In reality,
as I frequently remind candidates, political science will never
be a hard science because no more than about one-fourth of what
we try to do in a campaign can be accomplished by the purely scientific----the
rest truly is art.
And if that is true, and I believe it is---then I have to hand it
to Karl Rove (Bush's top strategist), the RNC and all the great
team in Philadelphia. The Republican National Convention was a triumph
of political artistry and all that that entails.
Scripted? Sure. What else is new? In the age of the first-ballot,
already-decided nomination, everybody's convention had better be
scripted, and the participants had better follow it. Failing to
do so is failure to show the nation your best side in prime time.
Scripting, which the pundits hypocritically pretend to lament, is
never the problem (at either convention) it is what the convention
managers put into the production, in other words it is what is in
the script that matters. And no one can really fault anything in
this convention. It was a veritable triumph of production, symbolism,
celebrity, packaging, entertainment and message.
Marshall McLuhan's oft-cited, and less understood phrase "the
medium is the message," came to mind. Criticize it if you want---
but with only a couple of exceptions (more on those later), the
Republican, and dare I say the conservative, message was not watered
down or compromised in any way. It was there, heard by all---maybe
packaged a little better, maybe delivered by different messengers,
but it was there.
Through it all---often overtly and obviously, sometimes subtly,
was the constant "message" (or was it the "medium")
of outreach, diversity. There will be some who pooh-pooh it, calling
it pabulum for the masses. (I ought to know, I am one of them who
did so.) But get this, and understand it, the Republican Party has
failed to win because of its failure to do this over the last two
presidential campaigns.
Enough with the Inhibitions Already
Call me names. Call me liberal. Call me anti-intellectual. I have
called myself more. The fact is that David Horowitz is right, and
his booklet is correct. We have to fight the liberals and the Democrat
Party using the tactics they have perfected---without, and this
is key--- without becoming like them, without losing the sense of
shame without which we are not fit to govern (as they are not fit).
In other words, we have to swallow our pride and package, market
and produce our message for mass consumption. The only difference
being----and it is a huge one----we must not (as the Democrats did
in the mid-80s, never to return) lose our soul, our sense of shame,
by resorting to lies.
The Philadelphia convention accomplished all of every kind of outreach
and message we could possibly hope for. And we did it without lies,
trickery, deceit, and its accompanying political apostasy.
A Pilgrim's Progress
It has been a long journey for me personally. Over 500 readers of
Let's Talk Sense to the American People from the early '80s through
the mid '90's came to understand my faith in the ultimate triumph
of
carefully-reasoned, historically-documented, philosophically- and
ideologically-grounded argumentation.
It took the end of the Cold War, Clinton, Clintonism and most of
the decade of the 1990's for me to realize that such hopefulness
about the American character (and the American voter) was merely
a foolish dream.
To this day, I believe John Adams would approve of my approach,
and perhaps Edmund Burke, and I would hope to get a C+ from even
the great 20th Century liberal Walter Lippmann.
But Bill Clinton, and this past decade, and in no small measure
the American citizen, the American voter, the people themselves
have helped me apprehend the obvious: John Adams is dead. So are
Burke and Lippmann.
What is alive is the "average American voter" 75 years
into an educational establishment created, nurtured and matured
under the tutelage of John Dewey, and the fruit of his womb (figuratively
speaking). Without going into all that, let's just say this: the
American electorate, despite the explosion of printing, film, cyberspace
and the over-abundance of reading material is LESS educated, less
intellectual, less
philosophically-grounded, less historically literate and less capable
of engaging in intellectually-based (as opposed to emotion-based)
deliberation than ever before.
I may be a slow learner, but I am converted. Karl Rove, and others
like him, probably grasped these realities earlier than I. (I say
"probably" because it is clear the managers of our 1992
and 1996 campaigns were no farther advanced than I---if anything
they were MORE bewildered.)
But it doesn't matter when (even if it was last year) they figured
this out. What is important is that Bush is surrounded by people
of great talent and great skill. What is crucial is that for the
first time in more than
a decade we have people in important positions in our national campaign
who know as much as their counterparts do about the reality of communicating
with the great middle muddle of the American electorate. Their craftsmanship
was on display for the past week in Philadelphia. In reality it
has been on display since mid-Spring.
We can take nothing for granted. This race will be bitter, I expect
nothing less than outright evil from Bob Shrum and those surrounding
Gore. But I feel (yes, "feeling" is an okay word in its
proper context) good about our team, our candidates and the shape
of our campaign.
Who is Karl Rove aiming At?
The cold hard facts are these:
The conservatives, whose vehicle for advancing their agenda is the
fragile coalition (about as solid and reliable as a 1968 Ford Fairlane,
if you want to carry the metaphor further) known as the Republican
Party, constitute only about 30% of the electorate. Only about 30%
of the people can be moved by the kind of argumentation---and in
fact by the kind of campaigns---I would have put forth, if left
alone and unsupervised before I learned better. In a good year,with
a strong tailwind, and the right conditions we might edge thatsolid
base upwards toward about 35-37%.
The liberals are no better off. Let's just say for the sake of argument
that roughly the same percentages apply to them. Their coalition
is fragile too----and their vehicle is analogous to a 1963 Corvair.
That leaves the great middle. This is perhaps as many as 40% of
the American electorate, depending on the year. But it is certainly
never less than about 25% of the electorate. In 1992, Bush got 37%
of the to Clinton's 43% and Perot's 19%. This means of the mushy
middle, Clinton beat Bush about 8 to 2, with Perot getting 19 (virtually
all his votes come from the politically homeless). In 1996, Clinton
beat Dole about 14 to 6 in the muddled middle, with Perot getting
8. Looking at it this way helps us to see how badly we were beaten
among those who make the difference. When the two major parties
are compared (leaving out the Perot vote each time) Clinton took
70 to 80% of the major party votes---that is a testament to how
much better their teams have been at appealing to the non-ideological.
These are the people for whom ideological appeals are useless. They
are useless because they are meaningless. To be successful with
an appeal to history, to reason, to the philosophical, one must
have an audience which can relate to that which is being argued.
This audience cannot.
Those are the people who saw Colin Powell---but did not really hear
(I am not making this up) what exactly he had to say, nor can they
tell you one line, one phrase, or one word of his speech.
What they can essentially tell you is this: A Black man, a retired
general (famous from the Gulf War---they saw him on TV) is a Republican,
and is very much for Bush. Similar comments apply to the panoply,
the entire host of characters who paraded across the stage in Philadelphia.
Condoleezza Who? Well, she was a black woman, she looked good, she
sounded good, and she is a Republican. Isn't there some diversity
or something somewhere in all this?
I mean this reflects the depth of analysis all this is going to
get from these folks---and understand---most didn't see it at all,
but the same holds true nonetheless. Most will get this through
second-hand analysis or "received analysis." They will
"sense" it from various sources, or have it filtered down
to them, either by the media, their friends, discussions at the
water cooler, wherever. This is not to criticize them...nor their
audience, but to reflect reality.
I have nothing but the highest praise for Karl Rove and all of the
RNC and Bush teams. I had never heard of "the Rock," nor
half the music and rock stars who performed or appeared. But those
appeals, combined with the clearly designed appeal to blacks, Hispanics
(I would say especially to Hispanics) Asians, Pacific Islanders,
Native Americans, and all others was nothing short of extraordinary.
This is to say nothing of the appeal to women, which was also a
triumph of style, substance and timing.
Finally, it must be said, that the leading gay Republican spoke
at the convention. He said nothing of special rights for homosexuals,
In fact he made absolutely no reference to any "gay agenda."
He just spoke. That is perfectly in keeping with the Republican
message: we are tolerant, in the original understanding of the term.
While we do not support special rights, we recognize gays as human
beings
who should not be harassed or assaulted or otherwise mistreated.
For the great one-fourth of the voters who hold the outcome of this
election in their hands (perhaps a staggering 27 million people)
the Republican National Convention was a triumph of communication.
Communicating with these voters is not about intellectual reasoning,
but about making them feel good about our candidate, our party,
our leadership, our sense of "fairness," "justice,"
"inclusion," "diversity," and on and on. We
can say all we want to the 30 to 35% who are with us already, and
they will nderstand. But to these others we must show. It was a
great show.
One last sobering thought....
As the more intellectually grounded and more philosophically based
of the two major parties, we are actually very fortunate. Remember,
about 104,000,000 people voted in 1992. That figure went down to
exactly 96,236,625 in 1996. This year, we can expect somewhere between
100-108 million Americans to cast a vote for President. But that
leaves out 100 million people. That's right. The preliminary estimate
from the Census Bureau shows a population of 205,000,000 adult Americans--
(18 and over) who will have been counted in the 2000 census by next
February.
Theoretically, this 100 million-person entity could enter the electorate
at any time. God save us.
All the evidence suggests that they are far less educated, far more
distant from reason, far more difficult to communicate with than
those already voting. Think about it.
Keeping the faith.
In the next issue:
Celebrity Interviews (Rod talks with):
Chris Matthews (his prediction of a Gore victory)
George Stephanopolous (on Dick Cheney)
The week in Philadelphia:
The Parties
The Demonstrations
The Police
The Organization
The Floor Management (Republicans for "Choice")
And much, much more.....