Why Republicans Win [View All]

[NVMojo]

...there's alot to be said about this explanation ...look at the Swift Boat jerks and their marketing strategy against Kerry ...

snip ...

January 25, 2005

A typical generic blog post written by a Progressive in the last several months would read something like this: "Everyone can sum up the Republican core beliefs in a sentence or two, while Progressives need to search for a candidate who can articulate core Progressive values." Some bloggers might also refer to George Lakoff's "framing" work as a solution to the problem. Not being able to explain your product concept in a sentence is a classic marketing problem, and what these posts show is a budding awareness that Republicans have been out marketing Democrats. Think about this - if you are in a "red state" area you are told a hundred different ways every day why business is good and government is bad and why unregulated free markets work better than democracy. But you are never told the other side of the story.

The Republicans win because the modern Right has developed around the core idea of persuading people to support their ideology, which then leads to support for their issues and candidates. In other words: marketing. The Right developed this persuasion capability in reaction to the dominance of the existing "liberal establishment." Because of this, most of their organizations are designed as advocacy and communications organizations, with the mission of reaching the general public and explaining what right-wing ideas are and why they are better for people. Today's Progressives, on the other hand, think there already is a public consensus supporting their ideals and values, so they have not developed a culture that is oriented around persuading people, and their organizations are not designed at their core to persuade the public to support them.

So you can see how things got to be the way they are. Democrats understand themselves as a political party, not as a movement. The party grew out of a time when people already understood why they were Democrats or not, so there was no need for organizations that talked to the general public about why it is good to be a Democrat. Instead the party naturally focused on elections. And it is still that way. Democrats look for the "right candidates" to appeal to voters. The candidate is expected to "voice" the issues, and develop messaging that works, and is expected to do it after putting together a campaign team, which happens during and after the primaries. The Democrats use the election cycle as a time to come up with specific "issues" and "messages" and educate the voters. Then the campaign is supposed to reach the voters and educate them about the candidate and the issues... This is the old way of understanding politics. The problem is that times have changed -- they have been changed by the rise of "movement conservatism."

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http://www.forestcouncil.org/tims_picks/view.php?id=817