Sunday, December 27, 2015
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Scattershooting some after-Christmas sales
-- Why try to understand complicated things like demographics for the decline of your faith when you can blame gays and liberals for waging a “war on religion?”
-- "Things are going great, and they're only gettin' better. We just haven't sold it like we should." -- paraphrasing Barack Obama:
I can't decide whether this astounds me or is just more of the same BS coming out of the White House for the past seven years. A fairly constant refrain from partisan Democrats produces the latter of those two feelings: the "Look at everything the president has accomplished, and imagine how MUCH MORE he could have done if it weren't for an obstructive Congress!" consistent Facebook meme-ology. That ceased working for me in the fall of 2011. You know, once Obama refused to spend any of his political capital influencing the recalcitrant conservative Democrats in swing districts to vote for the legislation that bears his name. Not just in 2009, but as late as 2013, when one of the many repeal votes came up prior to an election year.
Policy as a product to be sold, via teevee advertising and brand research marketed by consultants (polling, etc.). I'm so old I can remember people complaining when we sold the actual politicians like laundry detergent during a soap opera.
Nobody watches those any more -- if you're a monolingual English speaker, that is -- because the writers and actors cost too much to produce the shows. Five hosts on a chat-and-chew, or just one, offering free media to the celebrity of the moment is a real budget-maker for those cost-cutting networks with falling ratings.
Thank goodness for SuperPACS and multiple presidential candidates coming to the mainstream media's financial rescue, amirite? Back to Obama and messaging.
-- And that leads to this.
You can't reason with the Idiocrats, so you might as well push their fear and greed buttons. Seems to be working for the GOP pretty well, yes? Happy New Year!
Among the Christian Right, and most Republican presidential candidates, it’s now an article of faith that the United States is persecuting Christians and Christian-owned businesses—that religion itself is under attack.
“We have seen a war on faith,” Ted Cruz has said to pick one example. “His policies and this administration’s animosity to religious liberty and, in fact, antagonism to Christians, has been one of the most troubling aspects of the Obama administration,” he said.
Why has this bizarre myth that Christianity is under assault in the most religious developed country on Earth been so successful? Because, in a way, it’s true. American Christianity is in decline—not because of a “war on faith” but because of a host of demographic and social trends. The gays and liberals are just scapegoats.
-- "Things are going great, and they're only gettin' better. We just haven't sold it like we should." -- paraphrasing Barack Obama:
“Now on our side, I think that there is a legitimate criticism of what I’ve been doing and our administration has been doing in the sense that we haven’t, you know, on a regular basis, I think, described all the work that we’ve been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL,” Obama said. Meanwhile, he blamed “the media” for “pursuing ratings.”
The president also said during an off-the-record conversation with columnists last week that his Oval Office address hadn’t gone far enough, a shortcoming he attributed to his own failure to watch enough cable news to understand the depth of anxiety.
In other words, the strategy is working, and the White House just needs to communicate that better. The fights against domestic terror and ISIS alike are going great, if only people would understand it.
I can't decide whether this astounds me or is just more of the same BS coming out of the White House for the past seven years. A fairly constant refrain from partisan Democrats produces the latter of those two feelings: the "Look at everything the president has accomplished, and imagine how MUCH MORE he could have done if it weren't for an obstructive Congress!" consistent Facebook meme-ology. That ceased working for me in the fall of 2011. You know, once Obama refused to spend any of his political capital influencing the recalcitrant conservative Democrats in swing districts to vote for the legislation that bears his name. Not just in 2009, but as late as 2013, when one of the many repeal votes came up prior to an election year.
This is humblebrag politics: I’m not great at explaining it, but man, am I great at policy. But does it accurately understand the problems, or what messaging entails? Obama views battlefield success against ISIS as the goal, and messaging as a simple process of telegraphing that. Messaging can be something greater than just the wrapping paper on the policy solution he has chosen. It’s about persuading people to come around to your side, not just telling them why your side is right.
This isn’t the first time Obama has insisted that everything’s going great and it’s just the wrapping paper that needs sprucing up. After the 2014 midterm elections, which saw defeats for Democrats on all fronts, Obama told Bob Schieffer the problem was that he hadn’t communicated how well his administration was doing:
One thing that I do need to constantly remind myself and my team is it’s not enough just to build the better mousetrap. People don’t automatically come beating to your door. We’ve got to sell it, we’ve got to reach out to the other side and where possible persuade. And I think there are times, there’s no doubt about it where, you know, I think we have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we are trying to do and why this is the right direction. So there is a failure of politics there that we have got to improve on.
Policy as a product to be sold, via teevee advertising and brand research marketed by consultants (polling, etc.). I'm so old I can remember people complaining when we sold the actual politicians like laundry detergent during a soap opera.
Nobody watches those any more -- if you're a monolingual English speaker, that is -- because the writers and actors cost too much to produce the shows. Five hosts on a chat-and-chew, or just one, offering free media to the celebrity of the moment is a real budget-maker for those cost-cutting networks with falling ratings.
Thank goodness for SuperPACS and multiple presidential candidates coming to the mainstream media's financial rescue, amirite? Back to Obama and messaging.
After the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” Obama had been somewhat more conciliatory, saying, “I think that what is absolutely true is voters are not satisfied with the outcomes.” But even then, he wasn’t saying Republicans were right to oppose his stimulus; he was saying he hadn’t enacted an aggressive enough approach to create enough jobs. He wasn’t saying the price tags for the stimulus were too large; he was saying they seemed too large to many people.
In fact, many economists agree that he should have pursued a larger stimulus. There is widespread support for many components of the Affordable Care Act taken singly, despite the many more people who oppose the law in total. But it’s likely that many people would have opposed these efforts anyway. Some would have done so out of partisan, tribal loyalty, which motivates many people’s political positions. Others would have done so out of essential opposition to big-government programs. (Obama actually got at this, saying, “I think people started looking at all this and it felt as if government was getting much more intrusive into people’s lives than they were accustomed to”—though that “accustomed to” seems to again presume that with enough time and the right wrapping, they could be convinced.)
Many Democrats have long thought that white, blue-collar voters, who have gradually deserted the party since Ronald Reagan was running for president, were just waiting for the right approach to lure them back. Democrats look at them as clear allies who are voting against their own interest, if only they could be made to see that. Obama touched on that idea in his Inskeep interview, too:
But I do think that when you combine that demographic change with all the economic stresses that people have been going through because of the financial crisis, because of technology, because of globalization, the fact that wages and incomes have been flatlining for some time, and that particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck, you combine those things and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear—some of it justified but just misdirected. I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. That’s what he’s exploiting during the course of his campaign.This is really just a more delicate articulation of Obama’s infamous comments in 2008 about voters who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” (Inskeep, in fact, mentioned those comments later in the interview.) And it’s not unlike Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? thesis, about citizens voting against what liberals see as their own self-interest.
Many of the disagreements here are about more than messaging. Perhaps those white, working-class voters aren’t getting what they want out of the Democratic Party. (Group identity, rather than policy ignorance, probably goes a long way to explaining the discrepancy.) Maybe people wouldn’t be radically more supportive of Obama’s domestic-policy agenda if they just understood it better. The fact that no one else has a better idea for combating ISIS may indicate the magnitude of the challenge, not vindication for Obama. Explaining to voters why you’re right often requires first taking seriously why they think you’re wrong, and adapting underlying policies to address their concerns. Someone should figure out how to message that to the president.
-- And that leads to this.
The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.
The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.
As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries.
You can't reason with the Idiocrats, so you might as well push their fear and greed buttons. Seems to be working for the GOP pretty well, yes? Happy New Year!
Friday, December 25, 2015
Thursday, December 24, 2015
People are starting to get it
Thanks to Gadfly, via Twitter... this.
I don't know if Ben Spielberg of 34justice reads the same things I read or came to the conclusions I did months ago by reading Brains, but it's not all that big a stretch if you value actual progressivism and do some thinking.
I'm going to do the linear, bipolar Democrats a favor here by making their argument -- the one they need to make to non-voters, not to people like me and Spielberg.
"Not a dime's worth of difference." "Don't vote; it only encourages the bastards." (I have a Facebook friend -- a former Democratic precinct chair, then a former Green, now a voting atheist who uses that second phrase s good bit. THE most argumentative person, in the harshest of various ways, I have ever encountered. And that's quite definitive, but it's also a digression.)
Back on point.
What is developing for 2016 -- and I thought it was obvious before I wrote yesterday's post -- is that the 'status quo' candidate(s) are going to be, indeed already are, at a strategic disadvantage.
That last sentence is the kindest acknowledgment that can be extended to the Clinton folks. Spielberg is about to make up for it, though. Bold emphasis is mine.
Bottom line: if Hillary Clinton loses to Donald Trump, it won't be anybody's fault but HERS. I had to defriend someone on Facebook just yesterday who couldn't understand this, kept typing "Trump/GOP thanks you for your support," etc. and so on. There's no time to waste with horses' asses, led to water, who refuse to drink. Too many people outside the current electorate that need persuading to forfeit effort teaching swine to yodel.
Here is another olive branch.
Clinton people can do their thing, Sanders' people can do theirs, at least until he is disqualified. It makes more sense than to continue antagonizing each other on social media, no? I don't think not voting sends the right message -- somewhere around 75% of Americans already do that, and I don't get that the powers that be are listening. I also don't think writing in Sanders' name in November is a good way to go, but at least it's a protest vote and not a protest non-vote.
An alternative to vote in favor of, and not against some objectionable candidate or party -- outside the 'left-right, left-right' -- that matches up best with one's progressive populist principles. I also think that the movement -- a political revolution, thanks Bernie -- makes the strongest statement when it advocates for a living wage.
Bernie Sanders has many of the right economic ideas, but he's also still too beholden to the military industrial complex as well as an abbreviated version of the Second Amendment (truncating the "well-regulated militia" part, like the NRA and all of its adherents do). And I simply don't think that his social justice message is going to reach enough minorities to help him get to the lead, and even if he got a sudden groundswell of support that pushed him to the front after winning Iowa and New Hampshire, that the DNC establishment would allow him to claim the nomination.
So the question remains: cast no vote, cast a symbolic protest vote, or cast a vote that really sends the loudest message to the DNC. The choice has always been, and will continue to be, yours.
All the best of the holiday season to all my readers. A few Toons posts lie ahead but nothing serious -- unless circumstances warrant -- until after Christmas.
If Hillary Clinton ends up winning the Democratic nomination for president, some Bernie Sanders supporters will vote for her anyway. I can respect that decision. While the differences between Democrats and Republicans are often overstated -- to give just two examples (there are many), the same people advise Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz on foreign policy and Hillary Clinton is at least as cozy with Wall Street as most Republicans -- there are some real and important reasons to worry about a Republican White House. The Supreme Court and heads of agencies are, in my view, the biggest concerns in this vein. I'd have low hopes for Hillary Clinton's appointees but no doubts that they'd be better on balance than those offered by a Trump, Cruz, or Rubio.
Yet I will not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. While I understand the lesser-of-two-evils mentality, I disagree with it; most of Clinton's policy positions are unacceptable to me. If Sanders loses the primary, I will probably vote for Jill Stein.
I don't know if Ben Spielberg of 34justice reads the same things I read or came to the conclusions I did months ago by reading Brains, but it's not all that big a stretch if you value actual progressivism and do some thinking.
Wouldn't that be a strategic blunder, some friends and family ask me? Democrats who aren't quite as polite ask if I'm an idiot. Don't I realize that this type of thinking led to George W. Bush becoming president in 2000 and that I may similarly "blow this election" by deciding to vote my conscience?
The premise of these questions, however, is completely wrong, and not just because, as Jim Hightower documented at the time, voting records show that "Gore was the problem, not Nader," in the 2000 election. In fact, refusing to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election is both a principled and strategic decision that I encourage more people to embrace.
There are two possibilities when it comes to my vote: it will either impact the outcome of the election or it won't. If my vote won't impact the outcome of the election, I might as well vote for the candidate with the best policy positions, regardless of his or her supposed electability.
If my vote will impact the outcome of the election, I may have to decide which matters more: (a) the differences between a bad Democrat and worse Republican over the next four years or (b) the degree to which I'd undermine our chances to enact fundamental change to a broken political system in the long-run by pursuing a lesser-of-two-evils voting strategy.
I'm going to do the linear, bipolar Democrats a favor here by making their argument -- the one they need to make to non-voters, not to people like me and Spielberg.
"Not a dime's worth of difference." "Don't vote; it only encourages the bastards." (I have a Facebook friend -- a former Democratic precinct chair, then a former Green, now a voting atheist who uses that second phrase s good bit. THE most argumentative person, in the harshest of various ways, I have ever encountered. And that's quite definitive, but it's also a digression.)
Back on point.
... (T)he type of political "pragmatism" that would lead someone to choose (a) undermines power-balancing policy goals. Because politicians and Democratic party officials know that many voters think this way, they have little incentive to listen to our concerns. Instead, they can pay lip service to progressive values while crafting a policy agenda and decision-making process more responsive to wealthy donors than to their constituents.
That dynamic is on full display already in the 2016 Democratic primary election. Clinton is campaigning against priorities, like single-payer health care, that Democrats are supposed to embrace. While early union endorsements for Clinton initially improved her rhetoric on education issues to some degree, she is already backtracking to assure corporate donors that her positions are unchanged. The unions who endorsed Clinton early have no negotiating power relative to rich donors who make their support contingent on Clinton pursuing their interests; given that fact and her record, she seems unlikely to keep her promises if elected.
The Democratic National Committee's actions are also illustrative. The party establishment lined up behind Clinton before the race even started, and the DNC's debate schedule is, despite their protestations to the contrary, quite obviously constructed to insulate Clinton from challenge. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's recent decision to suspend Sanders' campaign's access to its voter data (in response to a data breach by a since-fired Sanders staffer; the access was restored after the Sanders campaign sued the DNC) has caused even party loyalists to believe that the DNC "is putting [its] finger on [the] scale" and pro-Clinton journalists to acknowledge that the DNC's behavior "makes Clinton's lead look illegitimate, or at least, invites too many 'what ifs.'"
What is developing for 2016 -- and I thought it was obvious before I wrote yesterday's post -- is that the 'status quo' candidate(s) are going to be, indeed already are, at a strategic disadvantage.
Both Clinton and party leaders are making a mockery of many of the principles the party is supposed to stand for. And pledging to support Clinton in the end -- no matter what she and the DNC do -- enables this kind of behavior. It's hard for me to see how we will ever fix our political process and reclaim our democracy by refusing to draw some lines in the sand.
I could accuse those who disagree with that assessment of propping up a sham political system. I could say that, by downplaying the unfounded smears the Clinton campaign has spread against Sanders and insisting that we must support Clinton in the general if she wins the nomination, they are destroying the Democrats' credibility and thus helping to ensure ever more privilege-defending and corrupt elected officials and government policy. But it would be a lot fairer of me to acknowledge that a lot of the Republicans are really scary, that my strategy isn't guaranteed to work the way I think it will, and that people evaluate the risks differently than I do.
That last sentence is the kindest acknowledgment that can be extended to the Clinton folks. Spielberg is about to make up for it, though. Bold emphasis is mine.
Similarly, those who disagree can continue to accuse people like me of "helping the GOP" in the 2016 election by pointing out that the Democrats have extreme flaws and don't always deserve our support. But it would be a lot fairer of them to acknowledge that millions upon millions of people have suffered at the hands of lesser-of-two-evils candidates over the years, that an open commitment to support a lesser-of-two-evils candidate robs voters of bargaining power, and that the Democratic Party has brought voter discontent upon itself.
Bottom line: if Hillary Clinton loses to Donald Trump, it won't be anybody's fault but HERS. I had to defriend someone on Facebook just yesterday who couldn't understand this, kept typing "Trump/GOP thanks you for your support," etc. and so on. There's no time to waste with horses' asses, led to water, who refuse to drink. Too many people outside the current electorate that need persuading to forfeit effort teaching swine to yodel.
Here is another olive branch.
Hopefully Sanders will win the Democratic primary and this discussion will become a moot point. In the meantime, it's good for those of us who believe in social justice to push each other on our tactics. We would just do well to remember that reasonable people with the same goals can disagree about which electoral strategy is most likely to help us achieve them.
Clinton people can do their thing, Sanders' people can do theirs, at least until he is disqualified. It makes more sense than to continue antagonizing each other on social media, no? I don't think not voting sends the right message -- somewhere around 75% of Americans already do that, and I don't get that the powers that be are listening. I also don't think writing in Sanders' name in November is a good way to go, but at least it's a protest vote and not a protest non-vote.
An alternative to vote in favor of, and not against some objectionable candidate or party -- outside the 'left-right, left-right' -- that matches up best with one's progressive populist principles. I also think that the movement -- a political revolution, thanks Bernie -- makes the strongest statement when it advocates for a living wage.
Bernie Sanders has many of the right economic ideas, but he's also still too beholden to the military industrial complex as well as an abbreviated version of the Second Amendment (truncating the "well-regulated militia" part, like the NRA and all of its adherents do). And I simply don't think that his social justice message is going to reach enough minorities to help him get to the lead, and even if he got a sudden groundswell of support that pushed him to the front after winning Iowa and New Hampshire, that the DNC establishment would allow him to claim the nomination.
So the question remains: cast no vote, cast a symbolic protest vote, or cast a vote that really sends the loudest message to the DNC. The choice has always been, and will continue to be, yours.
All the best of the holiday season to all my readers. A few Toons posts lie ahead but nothing serious -- unless circumstances warrant -- until after Christmas.
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