Consultant tells Democrats to go for the gut, not brain

The Baltimore Sun

The Democratic Party sets Drew Westen's "frontal pole aflutter." But he's not at all happy with his party's leaders. A professor of psychology at Emory University and the founder of a political and corporate consulting firm, Westen believes that by betting the farm on rational appeals to dispassionate voters, Democratic strategists and standard bearers have created a "Bland Old Party" that "speaks softly and carries Massachusetts."

While the party with heart speaks to the mind, Westen argues, the ruthless Republicans win election after election by understanding that political brains are emotional brains and manipulating positive and negative feelings during campaigns.

Based on the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, Westen's new book, The Political Brain, a savvy, scary, partisan, provocative, take-no-prisoners-political primer, with cautionary tales drawn from the emotionally-challenged Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry campaigns, each of which snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

When he compartmentalizes reason and emotion, contrasts the two parties, stylistically and substantially, and scripts the responses candidates should have made to attacks by their opponents, Westen tends to go over the top. But his analysis of how and why political rhetoric stimulates voters' "networks of association, bundles of thoughts, feelings, images, and ideas" will be instructive, if also infuriating, to political junkies, no matter what their partisan affiliation.

Successful candidates, Westen emphasizes, present a master narrative, "an emotional constitution." No one did it better than Ronald Reagan, whose story revolved less around his biography, than his faith in enduring American ideals: individualism, independence, military strength, fiscal restraint, patriotism and religion.

Recognizing that voters' feelings about values - and the trustworthiness of a candidate - trump their beliefs about specific policies, Reagan turned the Rooseveltian discourse about the role of government on its head. He called taxation "confiscation," the Great Society "a costly social experiment," and regulation of the market "economic tinkering."

Since "The Great Communicator" left the White House, Westen suggests, Democratic "policy wonks" have deconstructed issues, with appeals to logic, self-interest and practical utility, while Republicans continue to frame them in emotionally laden language.

Bush administration strategists design names for every bill they send to Congress - like "No Child Left Behind" and "The Clear Skies Act." After testing with focus groups, Republicans referred to the "estate tax" as the "death tax."

And they understood that repetition of the phrase "The War on Terror" activated "death-related thoughts (through a process psychologists call 'mortality salience manipulation') and support for the president and his Iraq War policies - even among liberals."

Westen wants Democrats to play the same game. They should talk about a "climate crisis" instead of "global warming," mention that the river running through President Bush's ranch is too polluted to fish, and show polar ice caps crumbling.

Recognizing that the word "control" turns off gun owners, they should run ads showing Middle Eastern men in a gun shop, pulling AK-47s off the shelves, and ask, "What's the point of fighting terrorists abroad if we're going to arm them over here? Last time I looked, you didn't need a semi-automatic to hunt deer."

Instead of refusing "to respond in kind" when George W. Bush attacked his credibility on campaign finance reform during the presidential debates, Westen believes, Al Gore should have launched a blistering assault on the governor's character.

"While I enlisted to fight in Vietnam," Gore might have said, "you called your daddy and begged him to pull some strings so you wouldn't have to go to war. ... While I was working hard, you were busy drinking yourself and your family into the ground."

And Westen urges Democrats to attack Republicans' opposition to abortion by calling it "a rapist's bill of rights" which gives every sexual predator the right to choose the mother of his children.

Is this playbook good politics? Westen doesn't "game" the possibility that some of these left hooks will expose Democrats to Republican right crosses, framed as moral outrage at the "politics of personal destruction." Nor does he reflect on the debasement of political culture inherent in his recommendations.

Reason doesn't always buckle at the knees whenever emotion roars. But even if it does, there's got to be a better way to appeal to "the better angels" in that bundle of thoughts, feelings, images and ideas.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

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