He can imply that this is a problem that came in with the Age of Obama, but I don't think you can necessarily blame the President for being something of a polarizing symbol--he was made one by people who do what Luntz does. What offends his sensibilities I believe is that this symbol talks back and does engage people to think and invites them to react. Some people disagree with him. He won two elections on 1) enough people agreeing with him and 2) a complete meltdown of what once was a serviceable message machine on the right.
Number 1) and 2) have a lot to do with the changing times. If Luntz wants to get "athwart" that and stop it, good luck. His job in a technical sense--and academic sense if you will, is keeping up with that pesky public. No wonder he once said that the "Occupy" movement scared him, even if he doesn't realize that, whether they are still on the street anymore or not as such, they already changed the language. Inequality matters. Working hard and getting nothing in return matters. The fall of the middle class matters--even if he hopes that these words and phrases don't come up anymore. And despite the best coaching, what can one do when trying to advance the cause of people who need to be told how to run against women without being insulting to women, or how to talk about unemployment without running down the jobless?
Especially when one sounds like this:
"You should not expect a handout," he tells me. "You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don't, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them." The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone. "We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that's why they voted for him," he says. "And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great."
Oof. "Handout"--that's stinking thinking, buddy-roo, as is "entitlement". What if people worked really hard for their homes and barely could afford them (let alone a couple of them!) and didn't have much of a savings--would they be empathetic...with Luntz...hearing that? Nobody voted for Obama because they thought he was paying their mortgage. They just thought he cared whether or not they got kicked out of their houses, and would listen. But it sure is nice to know that Frank Luntz is exactly the kind of guy who would pitch in for his neighbor's barn-raising.
But the point of my writing is to just paint a little word picture--imagine a clown who was very funny and nice and made everyone happy by telling them what they wanted to hear, and passed out nice big candy bars in pretty wrappers. After awhile, some people saw what was behind the face paint, and realized the clown wasn't a very nice clown at all, and was just saying nice things to make people like him. And then they took a better look inside the pretty wrapper of those candy bars, and found they weren't candy at all! And in the dressing room, behind the clown, was a man in a well-tailored shirt and badly tailored hair, with a polishing cloth in one hand, and the other hand in the toilet.
And that was how Frank Luntz got to this point. Maybe he needs to get his hand out of the damn toilet.
5 comments:
The creepiest thing about Luntz is that he didn't read 1984 as a cautionary tale, but as a how-to manual.
Working hard and getting nothing in return matters. The fall of the middle class matters--even if he hopes that these words and phrases don't come up anymore
Luntz' paymasters got "just a little" too greedy. They weren't content to give some handouts to the middle class while misdirecting their attention, and thus their rage, to "welfare queens" and "steak-eating young bucks".
As I've said before, the poor minorities weren't leeches sucking the creamy goodness out of the system, but the canaries in the coal mine, acting as a warning signal. The corporate oligarchs weren't content with skimming the cream off the top, they had to grab the whole damn jug, and working whitey is starting to figure that out.
"He can imply that this is a problem that came in with the Age of Obama, but I don't think you can necessarily blame the President for being something of a polarizing symbol--he was made one by people who do what Luntz does."
You know, Vixen, Bill Clinton was a polarizing figure because of his flagrant serial philandering, often carried out in the Oval Office. Obama is a polarizing figure because of his policies and the way in which he enacts them.
George Bush was a polarizing figure, and I believe I was called a knuckle dragger, a mouth breather, more during his administration than in the reign of "The One." (I sometimes responded by saying that I agreed with this pejorative, because I think no man can call himself civilized who has not read the entirety of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, and I can never get past In a Budding Grove...)
"The One," for example, passed this health care fiasco without one Republican vote. Not one. This is something that rarely happened in previous administrations, and it is simply not something that can be done and still call your country a democracy.
If Clinton had simply learned more effectively to manage his sexual pathology, we on the Right would have thought he was a fairly good Democratic president.
Bush's first choice for defense secretary was Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, a well-known expert on military matters. If you go back to Sam Nunn's era, the divisions between right and left were not so great. I lived in a district that had a Blue Dog Democrat, and right and left got along pretty well.
Well, regrettably, times have changed. And this is why I think we'll probably see a repeat of the last mid-term in the coming one. I imagine Republicans will retain the House and gather strength in the Senate, although I would not care to predict whether Republicans will take over or not.
The huge Republican sweep last time and the one I anticipate this time are both because of the polarizing policies of "The One."
--Formerly Amherst
Huh. You know, I always thought the whole Republican/Clinton animosity had more to do with certain fundamental differences over things like affordable health care, gays in the military, foreign policy, raising taxes, maintaining the social safety net, but now that I think about it, wasn't it Newt Gingrich who said, "I sure agree with Bill Clinton a whole lot, but if there's one thing I can't stand, it's a dirty philanderer."
I could be remembering that wrong. Anyhow, sure, George Bush was treated rough by the liberal side. We called him out on his incuriousity (I don't know that Condoleeze Rice really had to coach him on world leaders with flash cards, but I still do think the Iraq War was underway before he requested a briefer on Sunni/Shia sectarianism. But I'll concede I never made it through Proust myself, although my standard of civilization is mostly low enough to include not invading other countries over what sure looks like it was a ginned-up pretext.
Dear Formerly Amherst, isn't it peculiar that a "health care insurance" scheme dreampt up by Republicans couldn't get a single Republican vote. Why is that do you think??
Pablo
Pablo, maybe you're not joking. I guess you're talking about Romney's role in Massachusetts state health care.
Massachusetts is a very blue state where it is possible to get bipartisan support for their health care experiment.
I live in a very red state surrounded by other red states, and out here Romney would not be able to run for governor on the Republican ticket. Where I live, Romney would be considered a right-leaning conservative Democrat.
Naturally, had Romney attempted to achieve a health care scenario throughout the whole United States, he would have been regarded as ridiculous.
In the red states such a measure would be like trying replace the eagle with an aardvark.
--Formerly Amherst
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