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November 14, 2004
Kristoff antidote
Without directly referencing Nicholas Kristoff, Joshua Micah Marshall's blog today offers an excellent counterargument. First Marshall limns the clear, simple, concise messages that rallied a majority of voters around the Republican flag:
I think I can tell you what the Republicans are for and without referencing hardly any policy specifics. They're for lowering taxes in exchange for giving up whatever it is the government pretends to do for us, (at a minimum) riding the brakes on the on-going transformation of American culture, and kicking ass abroad.
Having looped back to an article he wrote more than a decade ago, Marshall concludes his entry with an important point to remember in the post-debacle hubbub that has everyone left of Attila trying to answer the "what next?" question:
The Dems did not get 48% of the popular vote for nothing. They got it because of what they were clearly for and clearly against. 48% isn’t enough for the White House or enough to be the country’s majority party. But it’s nothing to sneeze at either. And many changes that would gain Democrats votes in the Red States would lose them votes or unity in the Blue ones.
This doesn’t mean Dems should just stand-pat or be satisfied with what they have. They shouldn’t; indeed, they can’t. It is only to say that there are real limits to how many positions and rhetorical styles Dems can ape to good effect. And it means having a little more respect for themselves, their voters and what they claim to believe in than to collapse into a puddle of self-doubt just because this election didn’t go their way.
As a member of the Network for Media Action in the Council of Writing Program Administrators, I'm keenly aware of how well conservatives--whether in the educational establishment or the federal goverment--have deployed public relations techniques to convey their messages. In Delaware last July, several dozen of us worked for a hilariously long time to come up with simple slogans to convey the WPA's perspectives on writing, slogans that might counteract the rhetorics of back-to-basics and standardized testing. The Democrats have a similar problem. Making one's message clear and simple does not mean destroying one's intellectual integrity. It means you've come to grips with who your audience is, and figured out how to capture their attention. And that, really, is the first job: agreeing on some central tenets and being willing to communicate them in extremely simple form.
Posted by senioritis at November 14, 2004 05:57 PM