THE TALKING HEADS WERE RIGHT – by Jim Kent

No matter how you feel about that musical group, their classic concert album had valuable advice for certain politicians--as you may recall, its title was “Stop Making Sense.”

Most of my Friends-and-Relations are Democrats and most of the rest are some variant of Independent.  I don’t talk politics or government with any Republicans unless I’m sure they aren’t RINOs—“Republicans In Name Only,” which in this case means MAGAts, the thugs and twits who have adopted the name of the party but none of its principles.  Although I have been a registered Republican for most of my life, I hope my party doesn’t win any elections  for any office in the United States for at least a decade.    

This is a source of unease for me because my  friends the Democrats seem in recent years  to have forgotten two key facts: 

1.      Government and politics are different endeavours.

2.      You don’t get to govern if you don’t get the politics right.

Following are some things I have learned about politics since the later years of the Truman administration.   I believe them to be nearly universal even outside the US, but I’m always struggling not to succumb to the common error of confusing the love of truth with the need to be right.

First:  In a modern democratic polity above a certain size, the swing voters in elections are always the ignorant and ill-informed.  This is not cynical or even pessimistic, it’s just true.   It’s not that voters are dumb or even uneducated.  They just have other things to attend to in their lives.  You can be a brilliant astrophysicist or engineer or baseball manager or Shakespeare scholar without ever reading the U.S. Constitution, or being able to articulate how Republicans and Democrats are different,  or understanding who actually pays tariffs, or even knowing who your Senators are or what the US Civil War was about.   

Because they have other legitimate and immediate concerns, most people are ignorant about how government works and ill-informed about what it’s doing, or has done, or can do.   People vote because they believe they should, and I happen to think they’re right.  So how do they decide who should get their votes?

Second, then: People don’t pay attention to government unless it does something they feel is egregiously wrong, or an election is impending.  Since they don’t understand much about government, these feelings can lead them astray.  Presidents and members of Congress and governors have very little control over local school systems, the price of eggs, the weather or the economy, but candidates for those offices routinely pretend they do.  They make promises they have no real-life way of keeping.  Because voters don’t know this, they ascribe more power to the gummint than it actually has, and become disenchanted when promises are unkept.

Third, as you have doubtless surmised, voting is almost never an intellectual exercise.  That’s why banging on about statistics and issues and policies and such does not win elections.  With very few exceptions, anecdotes and emotions win elections.  Explanations don’t.   Willie Horton wins elections, even if there’s only one of him.  “Welfare queens” win elections, even if there have been maybe six in the history of the world.  Illegal immigrants who commit crimes win elections, even if they are a vanishingly small proportion of  that population.

However, it is hard to make a winning campaign issue out of a success story, because here in the home of the brave we are more comfortable being scared than being reassured.  An outstanding program that helps parolees stay out of trouble is a one-night story on the feel-good closing bit of the evening news.  The one graduate of that program who goes off the rails is good for at least a week in the opening segment, and then again for the trial. 

Fourth, though, positive messages can win elections.  Woodrow Wilson ”kept us out of war,” at least for a while.  FDR’s campaign song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” was factually inaccurate, but voters wanted to believe.  Clinton and Obama got elected partly on variations on the theme of hope for a brighter future of some kind, largely by leaning heavily on their bios. 

But just happytalk unsupported by relatively specific proposals won’t work.  And the success of a positive message depends heavily on the messenger in ways that a scary message doesn’t.  Imagine Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson trying to cheer us up.

Whether the chosen approach is positive or negative, it has to be consistent and unrelenting, even before any recognizable campaign starts up. Americans have never had any discernible memory or attention span.  The last-minute substitution in ’24 of the chirpy veep was just annoying.  It might have succeeded, though, if the Good News Bears had started it earlier and made it convincing—not by data and statistics and logical arguments, but with stories of individuals and famiies and neighborhoods, profusely illustrated with film clips.  

Fifth, you can’t win with the same campaign twice, even if it worked the first time.  The Democrats did well in the ’22 off-year using the abortion issue and the (accurately) perceived threat to democracy, so they kept at it.  However, they reckoned without the dismally short attention span and memory of the voters in a democracy.  Their campaign in 2024 was shopworn and tedious.

You can’t win with the same campaign twice if you lost, either, by the way.  The Democrats’ Coastal Crazies seem to believe that the party lost in ’24 because they hadn’t made their message clear.  That was partly true--they never figured what their message really was, and by the time they figured something out, it was too late and voters didn’t like it anyway.

However, sixth: Abstractions are not good campaign issues, and complexity always loses to simplicity.  Except in unusual circumstances, voters will not get excited about democracy or equality or freedom as such.  That Sort Of Thing helped in the unusual circumstances of  ’22, but wore out pretty fast.  Outraged stories about parents who had to send their kids to public schools that required vaccinations or taught evolution were successfully cloaked as stories about threats to religious freedom or parental rights.  These and similar distortions propagated by my gang’s culture warriors were met with earnest data-laden rebuttals by the Ds.

Liberals and moderates are…well, liberal and moderate  This tends to mean that they strive to think the best of people and to rely on reason to persuade voters.   This is useful when you are in a government trying to get things done, but by and large it doesn’t get you elected.  You win elections with emotions and anecdotes and simplifications.  After that you can govern with data, statistics, and sensible policies.

You have surely seen the movie “Men in Black,” so perhaps you remember the scene where Will Smith says the populace should be told what’s going on.  “People are smart,” he says. 

“A person is smart,” Tommy Lee Jones responds.  “People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”  This is essentially accurate.  So you campaign for the people, but govern for the persons.

Mario Cuomo, the late Governor of New York, is credited with saying (before he became late), “You campaign in poetry but you govern in prose.”  That’s the idea.

And finally, seventh: Slogans and shibboleths matter because they distill how you want voters to feel, not necessarily what you want them think.  For this to work, simplicity Is always to be preferred.  In the first Clinton campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid” was an internal mantra, but releasing it to the public imprinted it on the collective memory.

So I have never understood why the Ds abandoned a perfectly lovely slogan from several decades ago:  “Democrats help people.  Republicans judge people.” 

I suppose they felt the need to explain it, but The Talking Heads had the right idea.