Linkage

Well, don't expect one of those every day. They're a bitch to write, and I'm not frikkin' David Niewert or Phil Carter -- who, by the way, continues to rock the house down with Intel Dump. Go visit Phil every day, like taking your multivitamin.

A link to Frontier PAC, dedicated to electing progressive politicians in the West. Now, I don't usually link to straight political blogs, but one of the FP's main foci is energy independence and renewables. They're a great source for links to emergent technologies, and have a very market-savvy approach to getting their point across. We like.

On a related note, if I see you driving a Hummer or Esplanade and you have an "I Support the Troops" bumper sticker, I get to force you off the road in my Prius and crush your trachea with a crowbar. Fair warning.

A link to Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer on, well ... learning to say ain't. Just pointing out that I'm not alone in noticing there may be some issues that require addressing.

And on the lighter side thanks to Gizmodo -- cupcake sheaths!

Feedback & Criticism

A surprising number of humans are weighing in on "Learn to say 'ain't". The positive feedback is, well, positive and encouraging further explanation of these ideas. Wait'll we get to building memes like Legos(tm). The negative seems to be falling into two or three camps.

1.) "This is just another Kerry-bashing article! He was a great politician who was unfairly smeared by the media! He's a very charming guy! You should've seen him work the caucuses."

I am reminded of a section in The Sling and the Stone where Thomas Hammes discusses why the study of the how warfare evolves and transforms was largely ignored by the very militaries who should have been parsing it out. Military establishments considered self-criticizing analysis to have too great a negative impact on morale to engage in.

a.) I'm sure John Kerry is a fine, fine man. Certainly a better man than I. However, he was the last progressive presidential candidate, and he lost.

He lost, guys. Lost. I'm sorry that's not fair. I. Don't. Care. I believe we would all prefer to avoid this outcome in the future. Gore and Kerry lost counties that had been Democratic for six decades. Somebody fucked up.

What's more important -- having frank (even if occasionally incorrect) discussions about political tactics, or tiptoing around the feelings of this man's supporters? I'm not bashing Kerry -- I'm using elements of his campaign as part of the discussion. I may wind up being wrong about a lot of this. But let's pick the corpse clean for all it's worth. If there are no lessons to be learned there, fine. If we follow a false trail or two in analysis, at least we're doing the work. The only thing more useless than clinging emotionally to a failed campaign is the almost pathetic fetishism of Clinton. (Talking to you, Al Franken. Just ask him to the prom and get it over with)

b.) Yes, Kerry was smeared. Yes, the media is biased. Damn those Viet-Cong and their dirty jungle fighting! If only we could fight them on the open ground, we'd win.

We're in the jungle kids. Tell you what, you work on reforming the media, I'll work on trying to effectively manage message presentation within the current framework, and we'll meet in Utopia.

c.) I heard on the day how Kerry worked the Democratic caucuses (had a pal who was a Dean supporter). Spiffy. But you know what, this is exactly the blind spot I'm talking about. The broken way we choose nominees actually hides the flaws the candidate then has when presenting himself nationally. When given the choice between a candidate who wows his own party apparatchniks and the guy who can win the vaguely hostile swing voter, I'll take the road comic. The fact that he can get a farmer who's the state party rep and who's been one for thirty years ... does. not. matter.

2.) "This is just another one of those 'Democrats have to be DUMBER' arguments!"

No, and that's prejudice disguising itself as principle. I'm saying progressives need to make sure that they fall in the "us" camp rather than the "them" camp. If you interpret that to mean they "have to seem dumber", then you plainly feel that the majority of "us" is dumb.

Fuck you, elitist monkey.

One of the great shocks as a road comic is that every audience is as smart as you are. Yeah, that guy over there is an auto-mechanic. Can you fix a car? No. It's a really complex gig. That guy's a doctor. You a doctor? No. I once performed in Butte and had a young rancher explain the nuances of cattle economics to me -- trying to follow the discussion, I felt like a five year old with a head injury. That's why I loved the road. It renewed your faith in humanity's wondrous variety and intelligence.

There were, of course, exceptions. There are sections of Idaho, for example, that ought to be fenced off for everyone's good.

Anyway ... No, my argument is that progressives aren't not connecting on a primal level with great masses of people who should be in their camp; that because of this, no matter how smart either the audience is or progressive policies are, they won't be won over; and that this situation is at least analysable and perhaps manageable. And I'm basing this on years of winning over strangers. If you have a different way of winning over strangers based on a decade's practical experience, bang it out on your blog and I'll link to it. If it's better, we'll study your process.

3.) "Your argument's bogus, because you say that the audience can tell when somebody's lying. Well Bush is lying! He lies all the time! He's a Ivy-League millionaire who fools people into believing he's a rancher! HE'S THE LYINGEST BASTARD ON THE PLANET!! AAAAGGGHHHH!!!!!! WHY DOESN'T ANYBODY UNDERSTAND THIS?!!! AGAGAGAHAHAHGGAAAAAGGGHHHHAAAGG!"

No. (and that is roughly the emotional tenor of some of my friends on this subject)

He's not lying.

Man, a lot of you are going to hate this. But here goes.

He actually THINKS he's a good ol' boy. He hung out with southern fellas, banged stewardesses, drank too much Jack, and wears cowboy boots. When he found Jesus, I genuinely believe he found Jesus. He has no intellectual grasp of the contradiction between Christ's method and his policies, but that doesn't mitigate the fact he believes, and it comes through --

-- oh, and by the way, that's hardly rare. Most American Catholics, when it comes to abortion, nod sagely at the Vatican's pronouncement and declare themselves devout Catholics. But when it comes to divorce, pre-marital sex or especially contraception, they're all "WhoPopewiththewhatwiththewhonow? --

George Bush believes he's a good guy. Dad lived at Kennebunkport and went South when he had to. George, for all his faults, thinks he's a Texan. He's PROUD of his identity as a Texan, because it saved him the effort of actually constructing a personality of his own. If any of his businesses, oil or sports, had panned out, I'd take even money he never would've gone into politics. Karl Rove's genius in finding Bush was finding a guy who actually believed in his own bullshit image.

In the parlance of my business, he's the hack comic who kills every show, and has no idea he's a hack.

Why the hell do you think they never let him do press conferences? Precisely because he's such a shitty liar. When he's on the campaign trail and can talk in generalities, his job is to get you to like him. And, looking at his life, that's all he ever did or wanted: was to get people to like him. But when you put him on a podium, and he has to remember all the facts and figures and not to contradict himself because, well, lying is tricksy, he's crap.

Bush accentuates the "us" parts of his personality. That's different from "lying". That extension I was talking about works for both good and evil, folks. Progressives did a very, very bad job of sliding into "us", and did an absolute shit job of defining "them".

Underestimating your opponent's skill because you hate them is one of the primary errors of warfare. It's one of the reasons the US's war on terror is going so poorly. When the other guy's good at something, just acknowledge it and move on. Figure out how to beat it or neutralize it. Stop pretending it can't be true because you can't allow your opponent that level of skill or ability.

So, swing by every few days. It should be interesting.

Senate Quicksand

The Senate, of course, is a deathtrap for presidential ambition in the current atmosphere. It has tons of negatives -- you make a lot of enemies, you need to compromise so you can be flip-flopped, there are so many votes that one can always find some nasty piece of legislature to hang around your neck, it reeks of professional politician "them"-ness, and most importantly ... you never DO anything.

What? That's not true, Senators vote on a million bills, and introduce legislation, and back .. blah. blah. blah. What did YOU do, Senator? Did you get more armor for the troops? Did you revamp the educational system? Well, maybe you and nine other guys did that and now it's off for approval by the President, but saying you "voted for" something isn't the same as you "did" it. You take the heat for bad voters, and get no credit for victories in the public eye. You do a lot of ... government stuff. Committees. Wow.

This is why governors (and mayors) do so well in presidential politics. Governors can claim they ran their state. Was there a state legislature, etc? Sure, but ads for Governors can read "HE blanced the state budget", or "HE installed universal health care" or "HE got more money for schools and cops." This is why Eliot Spitzer's running roughshod over Pataki right now. His narrative is: "Spitzer puts rich fucks in jail." Christ, he's almost a superhero with that story, never mind a candidate. He's the class war equivalent of Batman. (Oh, and don't miss lecture 10 in the series: "Class war, class war, class war, it's all about the class war, that's why they squeal and accuse you of using it, because it's your most potent weapon, it's the class war, idiot, oh hey look at my shiny class war.")

2008, progressives should lean heavily on a governor or outsider. Just my opinion. But that's what the blog's for.

Next: Less political theory, and more on effective speechwriting. Or, "In the name of Christ, STOP TALKING."

Learn to say 'ain't' ...

Well, here we go, with me stepping way outside my pay grade on political thought. All of the essays on this subject will be rough. Many of them will contradict each other. Quite a bit of it will seem manipulative and morally bankrupt. Very work-in-progress. Only way to learn and grow, I guess.

I've been in conversation with some other bloggers, and was working on a longer series of articles, when Ezra Klein gave me the perfect in on the subject -- a link to Thomas Franks article in the New York Review of Books called What's the Matter with Liberals?

Franks discusses something that everyone EXCEPT those people in charge of electing Democratic presidents seemed to understand -- when your party has perceived weaknesses, don't run the guy who's the stereotype of that weakness. Or, as my friend Mark Waid said: "Why the fuck do we keep nominating Frazier Crane?"

My bigger point, leaving all the fancy policy stuff to the wonks who delight in them, is that the art of politics is convincing people to connect with you. When you have an idea, and the other guy has an idea -- if you don't connect in some primal way with the listeners your idea is never even going to get considered, no matter how much better it is on a rational level. In theory, "We're sending guys to fight in Iraq without body armor or properly equipped Humvees and then cutting taxes on rich folk" is literally the worst idea I could come up with to play in a mill town, unless that sentence ended with "... and then, your sons kiss each other." And yet the RR (Radical Right) gets a pass on this. Why? because as soon as guys like John Kerry (and God bless 'em, Al Franken and Janeane Garofolo) open their mouths, all the audience hears is "snobby snob snob think you're so smart!"

Now who the hell am I to even think I have something to contribute here? Well, let's say the candidate's job is to walk into a room of complete strangers and get them to like him. Connect with him. Wow, the few rare politicians who can do that, they're worth their weight in gold.

I did that for twelve years. So did hundreds of other people you've never heard of. We're stand-ups, and that's the ENTRY-LEVEL for the job.

A good stand-up can walk into a room, a bar with no stage and a shit mic, in the deep goddam South or Montana or Portland or Austin or Boston, and not only tell jokes with differing political opinions than the crowd, can get them to laugh. With all due respect to our brother performers in theater, etc., we can walk into a room of any size from 20 to 2000 complete strangers with no shared background and not just evoke emotion ... we can evoke a specific strong emotion every 15 seconds. For an HOUR. A good stand-up can make fun of your relationship with your wife, make fun of your job, make fun of your politics, all in front of a thousand strangers, and afterward that same person will go up and invite the stand-up to a barbecue.

In short -- every club audience is a swing state.

I think I speak for a lot of professional comics when I say there's nothing more frustrating than watching your candidate up on stage or on TV flail around without the basic rhetorical skills needed to score a 5 minute opening set at the Improv. Never mind the more advanced skills of the road comic. But because the vast amount of speaking a candidate does is either a.) to sedate, formal fundraising audiences or b.) rallies filled with the base, the flaws in presentation are hidden. The flaws in the greater theory of candidate communication are never exposed.

For starters, let's talk image. When I first started out on the road, I was a skinny guy with a big nose, a Boston accent and a Physics degree telling jokes in bars out West. I was hitting a wall of resistance in a lot of rooms. One night in Rawlins, Wyoming, the headliner -- a sweet road comic named "Boats" Johnson -- took me aside.

"You're a good joke writer. I mean, damn, there's some smart stuff in there."
"Thanks. But, uh..."
"They don't like you much." Boats handed me a beer. "Second show. Longneck. Always a longneck. Bring it on stage. Sip from it every now and then."
"I don't really drink on stage --"
"Fine. Fill it with water. Don't bring attention to it, just sip from it."
I shrugged. "Anything else?"
"Yeah. Learn to say 'ain't'. Don't change the jokes. Just learn to say 'ain't' every now and then."

The shows went, much, much better after that. I told the same gun control jokes, the same pro-gay marriage bits, the same making-fun of the culture wars jokes. But now I was killing.

There are two lessons to be taken from "Learn to say 'ain't'." First, the fundamental dynamic in all crowd interaction is us vs. them. Period. It's sad. Oh well. Get over it and win.

Now, the fine line here is that, the audience also always knows when you're being dishonest. That's worth hitting again. When you are on stage, the audience's collective mind can tell when you're not being yourself. And even more importantly, they can tell when you're lying to be one of "us". (Like Kerry hunting, or Dukakis in the tank). Changing yourself to fit the audience would be the wrong lesson to take from "Learn to say 'ain't.'" No, the lesson Boats was teaching me was that there's no problem with relaxing a bit and showing that you're not one of "them." He was teaching me that connection is a half-way game -- just extend out a little, and the audience will come the rest of the way. They will extend the boundary of "us" if you advance toward it. That was the genius of "compassionate conservatism."

People will relax and trust you when you're not trying to dazzle them with brainpower. It's okay to be the smartest guy in the room, but that shouldn't be the point of it. This is a liberal weakness, because they often seem to operate on the dual fuels of statistics and sputtering. They foolishly believe that the smartest, most morally equitable, most well-reasoned argument is the right one.

Well, of course it's the right one. It's just not necessarily the one that's going to WIN. And when they point, justifiably, at their idea which is backed up by all the data, all the statistics, and say "But, but this is the only logical solution", the implication is "... by not arriving at this yourself, you are stupid." And once somebody thinks you called them stupid, you've lost them forever. "What's the matter with Kansas?" Nothing, you supercilious fuck, what's the matter with you? Guess who I'm voting for every time you lecture me that you're on my side, and I just have to see that? Yeah, the other guy. Bye now. (this is tied into another rule of stand-up -- "You can never convince anyone of anything", which we'll deal with later)

"Us" is a very amorphous concept. Look how the conservative factions hang together. Catholics and evangelicals? Whaaaaa? You can slide into "Us" without compromising your values or positions. But that means making sure you define "Them" a.) clearly and b.) outside your target audience.

Am I endorsing Clintonist "triangulation"? Hell no. The job here is not to find a moderate position everyone can agree on, because then, frankly, you'll smell like an opportunist and the audience will turn on you (and you'll lose your base). No, the trick (and the RR has done this very sweetly) is to triangulate the audience away from your opponent's position, and by default towards your own.

The second lesson coincides with an interesting study mentioned in Freakonomics. Levitt discovered that in political races where the same opponents ran against each other multiple times, but spent vastly different sums of money from race to race -- the money didn't matter. The races shifted, on average, maybe a percentage point in each direction. Once the electorate has determined your identity, and whether you're "us" or "them", that's it.

This leads to an even more interesting idea. As a comic, these people have never seen you before, and you can control their perception of you in the first five minutes of them meeting you -- which will be the sum total of their perception. But this means that in politics, there are people out there who have already been in the spotlight so long, or who have so well-determined their cultural identities, that no matter how qualified, no matter how sincere, no matter how goddam perfect for the job they are ... they just won't be President in the current cultural atmosphere. It doesn't matter how wildly unfair that is. They can never, ever slide into "us." Kerry was so, so far outside of "us" that, frankly it was a testimony to how badly Bush has screwed up that he even got THAT close. Oh, and sorry, Hilary, I'm talking to you. (oddly, if she weren't burdened with her First Lady Identity, her Senate Identity might pull it off.) On the other hand, I'm also talking to Frist and Santorum.

I feel a digression coming on. I'll split that off in another post called --

(NOTE: some feedback and comments also here)

(EDIT: 2/22/06 -- hey, seeing as this has recently warmed up, a small update post here.)