Democratic vs. Republican rhetoric

Hello folks, I'm back. Folks interested in the study of political rhetoric might want to take a gander at this post by tristero on Hullabaloo. It's a theme that's been sounded before: Wingers are better at the soundbite than the Dems, and this gives them power disproportionate to their actual numbers and competence. The tristero post examines two quotes, both expressing concerns about the ridiculous amount of power the Bush administration thinks it should have: The wingnut quote (from Norquist):

These are all the powers that you don't want Hillary Clinton to have.

is concise and well-framed, and furthers a Republican political agenda even while attacking Bush. On the other hand the Democrat quote (from Feinstein):

I think it's very dangerous because other presidents will come along and this sets a precedent for them. [Therefore] it's very important that Congress grapple with and make decisions about what our policies should be on torture, rendition, detainees, and wiretapping lest Bush's claimed right to set the policies, or his policies themselves, become a precedent for future presidents.

is cumbersome, boring, poorly framed, etc, even though she's absolutely correct in the substance of what she's saying. Could she not have instead said something like, "No President can violate the Constitution, especially one as out of touch as Bush." or "Giving Bush the power to torture people is un-American."

 

Many of us loathe the simplification and clarification that the sound-bite war requires. It seems like "dumming down" our message. But I think Democrats need to be fighting in the world that people actually inhabit. And that means being on Television and figuring out how to get our message across in that medium. The right wingers have think tanks for when they want to talk to intellectuals, TV pundits for when they want to connect to an average American, lobbyists for talking to Congress, etc. The left is only now beginning to develop this "broad spectrum" response ability. Too often, it seems like the Dems are sending in the professors when they really should be sending in the talk show warriors or comics. Now people like John Stewart and Michael Moore are doing a good job of popularizing the left's message (which of course makes them hated by right wingers), but the Democratic politicians seem less able to shift into populist "TeeVee" dialect (as tristero dubs it) when it is necessary and appropriate to do so.

 

This has always been a difficult issue for me, because in many ways I'm exactly what Joe America hates about Liberal America: fond of polysyllabic words, Ivy League-educated, willing to equivocate, highly distrustful of jingoism, ready to criticize the United States, contemptuous of much of mainstream culture, thoroughly secular, etc. So am I just supposed to shut up so the Dems have a better chance with NASCAR dads? No, it just means don't put me on television to connect with people who are going to be turned off by me. Use me to connect with people I can connect with. There's a place for nuanced intellectual debate, but TV and the one-line quote aren't such places. TV and the soundbite are for scoring  zingers and spreading memes and getting simple notions into the public mindspace. Let's start taking that seriously, because I want us to win the idea war.