GOP future: It’s not the “messaging”

This is an insightful analysis by a semi-insider of the Romney campaign.

Gabriel Schoenfeld: A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign

In my e-book, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign, I try to account for a long chain of mistakes that led the campaign to misfire in the middle of the national-security crisis that erupted in Cairo and Benghazi on September 11, 2012. As I attempt to show, the errors made in that episode did not happen in a vacuum. Rather, they were one of the consequences of a vision of American politics embraced by Romney and his top strategists. The problem before them in the quest for the presidency was, at its core, conceived of as an advertising and marketing challenge.

That vision of politics failed and the consultants Romney hiredif not political consultants as a classare now fighting for their livelihoods, if not their lives. “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?” was the title of a panel discussion held at a recent conservative conclave. As that blunt question makes plain, at least some Republicans comprehend that turning politics into nothing more than a subsidiary of the advertising and marketing business, as the Romney campaign attempted to do, is the path to repeated failure.

Yet so strong is the Republican death wish that the RNC’s blueprint for the future is more of the same.

But the trouble is that the consultants are deeply entrenched in the Republican Party. And they are using their entrenched position to fight to retain their grip on resources and power. Evidence of their struggle can be found in the Republican National Committee’s Growth & Opportunity Project, the official Republican autopsy on the Romney campaign.

The RNC postmortem does not beat around the bush. Politics, in its vision, is the art of best matching a candidate’s positions to the preferences of voters as those preferences are revealed in polls and focus groups. To this end, great weight is placed in the report on the urgency of gathering ever more information about the electorate. In particular, explains the report, “we need to know what language is most likely to motivate a donor or a voter and convert them into a vote for Republican candidates.” To discover exactly the right collection of wordsthe magical incantation for getting votes, the “use of data and measurement is critical.”

Yes, indeed. Let’s have more of the stuff that did not work last time.

But wait, this time it will be different because… BIG DATA!!!

To implement this technocratic vision, the RNC recommends that the Republican Party become a “data-driven” party. To accomplish this, a high priority must be that “voter and volunteer data, fundraising and donor data, digital data, consumer data, and media habits” all be integrated, analyzed, and made accessible to candidates by means of “application programming interfaces (APIs).” These APIs in turn can be used to “facilitate more user interfaces (UIs) to address all manner of campaign function and level of sophistication including file selections, modeling and analysis, and the feedback of touch-point and response to marketing initiatives.”

Such technobabble continues for pages of the report.

The RNC’s “vision’ is not just bad, unprincipled politics; it is also short-sighted, ignorant marketing.

Our country’s greatest presidents, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, did not need to bend to the whims of the electorate. By dint of their principled statesmanship, they bent the electorate to their will. They educated it. They persuaded it. They brought it along. They certainly did not need application programming interfaces to get elected and to accomplish what they accomplished. Nor did Abraham Lincoln need to hire a “messaging professional” to write the Gettysburg Address.

Advertising great Bill Bernbach would agree whole-heartedly:

We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.

If we are going to talk about politics and marketing, Bernbach has couple of lessons the GOP might want to ponder.

I think the most important element in success in ad writing is the product itself. And I can’t say that often enough. Or emphasize it enough. Because I think a great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.

Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.

Mary Wells Lawrence, another legend of advertising and marketing agrees:

Great advertising, the kind that works, almost always comes out of the product you are going to advertise

It is no surprise that the RNC and its consultants want to ignore these fundamental insights. They cast a bad light on the GOP consultant-pundit class and the campaign they ran in 2012.

For instance, you don’t need to crunch through terabytes of data to know that President Obama’s greatest vulnerability was the economy and jobs. The Romney campaign made this issue #1.

The fatal flaw in this strategy was simple: Mitt Romney was the worst possible candidate to raise that issue. His ties with Bain Capital and the off-shoring jobs was a tremendous negative and made him less than credible as a tribune for the American worker. His frequent gaffes (“I like to fire people”) made the problem worse.

This is not Monday morning quarterbacking. Romney’s vulnerabilities on this point were apparent over a year before the election:

Numbers that should scare Mitt Romney and the tools at Fox News

These numbers also suggest that Romney could be terribly vulnerable to Obama in the general election. Big donors might like his resume, but voters might find it repellent. His personal connections to outsourcing, Wall Street, and management snake oil could prove fatal.

I think we might have seen a a preview of the problem here in Pennsylvania in 2010. At the end of the campaign, the Sestak campaign hit Pat Toomey hard on the "jobs to China" issue. It seemed to get traction. Toomey ran 3.5 percentage points behind Corbett (the Republican candidate for governor). He squeaked out a win (51%-49%) against an underfunded candidate in a profoundly Republican year.

So that makes it look like Pennsylvania is out of reach for Romney.

Even more scary for the GOP is the way that Toomey under-performed across the board. He trailed Corbett in blue-collar Democratic counties like Allegheny and Beaver. He also saw a similar drop-off in hard-core conservative areas like Adams and Armstrong counties.

That suggests to me that Romney might have a problem recapturing all the Bush states that flipped in 2008 (like Ohio).

The issue that fired up the conservative base was Obamacare. Here again, Romney could not take full advantage of this issue because he had signed Romneycare as governor of Massachusetts.

Despite these two enormous weaknesses, the “professionals” kept telling us that Romney was the most electable candidate in the primaries. This does not reflect well on the “professionals” professional competence.

Once again, not everyone was fooled by the emperor’s new clothes (see here.)

Is it unfair to mention that some of the professionals who are promoting the Big Data solution had a hand in this:

The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA

Orca aground: Romney’s high-tech ‘Get Out the Vote’ failure

Related:

Conservatives and messaging

Conquest's Law

If they can't rule the party, they will ruin it

Scary news indeed:

Bush vets back in action

Bush veterans are striking back.

Senior officials from former President George W. Bush's administration are wading into the fight over the Republican Party's direction and future.

In conversations with The Hill, many White House alumni said they're increasingly alarmed by the party's libertarian drift on foreign policy and frustrated by the collapse of immigration reform legislation. In 2014, they're worried the party might continue to nominate flawed candidates, and many aren't staying quiet any longer.

Previously:

Conservative Messaging I

The 2012 campaign was not just Obama vs. catoon-Romney. It was also Obama vs. the ghost of George Bush.

Leaving ideology aside (as swing and low-information voters do), the Bush legacy is an anchor around the neck of the right.

Conservative Messaging II

The issue that fired up the conservative base was Obamacare. Here again, Romney could not take full advantage of this issue because he had signed Romneycare as governor of Massachusetts.

Despite these two enormous weaknesses, the "professionals" kept telling us that Romney was the most electable candidate in the primaries. This does not reflect well on the "professionals" professional competence.

What ails the GOP

Karl Rove is part of the problem, not the solution.

The Republican party needs to steal learn from one of their greatest presidents and "ruthlessly" replace failures like the Bush Dynasty sycophants who have failed repeatedly.

To quote Leo Amery:

This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go"

Yes, the stupid party

Why It's Called "The Stupid Party": GOP Turns Fight Against The Horrors Of ObamaCare Into A Process Story

You know why the GOP loses a lot? Because it deserves to.

Yesterday a bunch of Republican Senators went around to the various Sunday shows and instead of talking about why it's imperative ObamaCare be repealed because of the damage it's doing, they decided to make it about how much they hate Ted Cruz. Some Republicans went as far as to offer Fox News Sunday Host Chris Wallace what he termed, "opposition research" on Cruz.

I think DrewM is right on two key points. First, too many of the Republicans in Congress talk of legislative minutia that is of interest only to insiders. As a result, they miss their chance to convince voters to support them.

Then there is the cowardice factor:

You know why Cruz is so popular? Because he's actually fighting. Maybe it's a losing fight, maybe it's a fight to raise money (though let's not pretend he's the only one doing that) or to raise his popularity (the sight of professional politicians accusing anyone of self-aggrandizement is too precious) but at least he's fighting.

The same thing happened when Rand Paul filibustered over the issue of Presidential authority to order drone strikes anywhere against anyone. Even non-libertarians had to admire his willingness to take on a tough issue.
That said, I think "fighting" conservatives are still fighting the last war in the effort to defund Obamacare. Their opposition is couched in ideological language and American's are not very ideological. Plus, our ideology does not enjoy the support it once did.

To wit:

The usual mantra of "No socialism, Free Enterprise!" just seems inadequate in the face of the current economic realities.

Key fact number one. As Obama moves toward "socialism", he does so at the behest of the "capitalists". It is not as if he is sending paramilitary gangs to take over successful, profitable businesses. Obama, like Bush before him, is compelled to act because the capitalists screwed the pooch, crapped the bed, and then muttered "maybe my bad" when their recklessness sent the financial system off a cliff.

The broad public knows this, and that makes it hard to win them over with cheap slogans about socialist bogeymen.

Related:

Conservatives and messaging

GOP future: It's not the "messaging"

What ails the GOP?

Part of a continuing series

In two words: Karl Rove.

That’s sounds simplistic but I plead the Gelernter Defense:

But if you allow carpers to shoo you away from every generalization before you have time to explore it, you have no hope of coming to grips with basic questions of modern America.

Rove wanted to be his generation’s Mark Hanna—a political operative who forged a new, dominant majority coalition.

He failed.

Rove can be seen as the sad result of the misinterpretation of the Reagan legacy discussed here…

Conservative anger and the Reagan legacy

The administration he helped elect demoralized the conservative base.

Why are conservatives mad at the GOP?

Five quick points about the conservative tantrum

… and left the conservatives and Republicans with a terrible burden in future election.

GOP future: It’s not the “messaging”

Conservatives and messaging

Conservatives and messaging

An interesting and important essay by Bookworm:

Conservatives need to create powerful, “sticky” messages that lead the electorate to a tipping point

(HT: Neo-neocon)

It contains a lot of good sense and hard-headed analysis. OTOH, there are some glaring weaknesses in current conservative thought/messaging that Bookworm ignores or glosses over.

This is a point that the Obama administration hopes we will ignore:

What Obama did do successfully was vilify his opponent (“not one of us“) and make narrow, often fear-based appeals to particular interest groups. His campaign also demonstrated a mastery of technology for identifying voters and coaxing them to the polls….

[and]

The cultural bias the Democrats have created against conservativism reached its tipping point in November 2012 when a president with a disastrous economic record rather handily got reelected. Relying on decades of indoctrination and sophisticated modern social networking, Democrats spread a message that stuck: Republicans are evil. Everything else, whether from the Left or the Right, was just chatter that people ignored.

If President Obama won any mandate at all, it was a negative mandate: the voters rejected the Romney caricature that the Obama campaign created.

Another good point:

The Law of the Few says that studies show that there are specific people in society who are information, idea, and style vectors. Whether they have a vast network of contacts, a reputation for sharing useful wisdom, or the innate gift of salesmanship, these few people exercise a disproportionate effect when it comes to dispersing ideas. When they talk, other people lots of other people listen.

Do we have anybody like that articulating conservative ideas? I’m not so sure. Gladwell’s point is that these people spread their ideas because of their ability to connect directly with other people. All of our conservative talking heads are just that talking heads on TV or the radio. Conservatives, perhaps true to their commitment to individualism, do not have networks of people on the ground (i) who are themselves networkers, (ii) who are viewed as reliable information sources, or (iii) who can sell anything to anybody.

One of the big problems with conservative talking heads is that they make their money playing to the base. That is a great strategy for radio or cable news, but it does not do much to win over the low-information, swing voters. A few years ago I noted:

There is no doubt that a sizable minority of the population is opposed to bigger government. This minority is large enough to boost the ratings of talk radio. It drives readership for rightwing blogs and raises money for some candidates. But is it it enough to win election?

40% is an enormous share in radio ratings. It is also the bad end of a landslide election.

Still another good point:

In a way, the internet has made things even worse for conservatives. While it’s increased information dissemination, it’s also increased information ghettoization. We don’t talk to our neighbors about politics anymore. Instead, we go to a like-minded blog and enjoy the feeling that we’re not alone. But by doing so, we delude ourselves into believing that there are more like-minded people out there than a walk in the community and a talk in the park would reveal.

By definition, low-information voters aren’t reading Ace of Spades or Powerline. We can’t engage them if we don’t know them.

Plus, ghettoization isn’t healthy.


G.K. Chesterton:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell. [Heretics]

Now to my dissent.

I don’t think that the right has no “sticky” messages. Rather, part of the political problem is that a majority of the public views our sticky messages with suspicion.

For instance:

Key fact number one. As Obama moves toward "socialism", he does so at the behest of the "capitalists". It is not as if he is sending paramilitary gangs to take over successful, profitable businesses. Obama, like Bush before him, is compelled to act because the capitalists screwed the pooch, crapped the bed, and then muttered "maybe my bad" when their recklessness sent the financial system off a cliff.

The broad public knows this, and that makes it hard to win them over with cheap slogans about socialist bogeymen.

Let’s not forget the biggest, stickiest Republican/conservative message of all:

We {heart} W.

The 2012 campaign was not just Obama vs. catoon-Romney. It was also Obama vs. the ghost of George Bush.

Leaving ideology aside (as swing and low-information voters do), the Bush legacy is an anchor around the neck of the right. The short version goes something like this:

Tanked the economy (worse than LBJ)

Started two wars he could not win (worse than Carter)

Is that fair? Not entirely, but it is accurate.

Is the truth more complex than this stamp-sized report card? Sure, and there are plenty of right-wing pundits who are eager to explain why Bush deserves more credit than he gets.

Their explanations do more harm than good.

The first political professional I ever met had a ready answer when complex explanations were required:

If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Or as Lee Atwater might say “if you can’t spin it, change the subject.”

So quick, what’s the spin on that Bush record? Remember, it has to be sound-bite length and fit on a bumper sticker?

Even worse is all the talk about the “47%” and “makers and takers”. It reflects a vicious and simplistic worldview that equates income with virtue and reduces the value of a citizen to his effective tax rate. It is a worldview that elevates the hedge fund manager over a retired fireman or Mayor Mike Bloomberg over a disabled combat veteran.

No wonder it is not an electoral winner. Especially when the wealthy vote liberal despite their high taxes. It's hard to build a majority when you exclude nearly half the electorate out of "principle."

The Open Office and the Hive Mind

The Truth About Open Offices

This article is revelatory on two counts.

1.) The authors are quite candid on their view of workers; they are to be viewed as insects:

When employees do want to interact, they choose the channel: face-to-face, video conference, phone, social media, email, messaging, and so on. Someone initiating an exchange decides how long it should last and whether it should be synchronous (a meeting or a huddle) or asynchronous (a message or a post). The recipient of, say, an email, a Slack message, or a text decides whether to respond immediately, down the road, or never. These individual behaviors together make up an anatomy of collaboration similar to an anthill or a beehive. It is generated organically as people work and is shaped by the beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways of thinking that define the organization’s culture.

When managers think of their employees as insects, should we really be shocked that support for capitalism is falling and the appeal of socialism is growing?

For more on the Hive Mind and its sad, sordid history:

The birth of the hive mind

The Hive mind revisited

The continuing appeal of the hive mind

2.) They also admit that the primary motive behind many office redesigns is cost-cutting:

If keeping real estate costs in check is the priority, leaders should be honest about that with themselves and their employees. Most office redesigns aren’t undertaken to promote collaboration. They start with objectives like the one described by the head of real estate at a Fortune 50 company: “The leadership team has just given me a mandate to restack our headquarters to fit another 1,000 employees in here.” Tremendous progress has been made designing offices that can accommodate more people in a given space. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: Companies often reinvest the resulting savings in important ways.

During much of the 1990s, organizations hired employees faster than they expanded their offices. With layoffs in the early 2000s recession, and again in 2008, surviving workers regained some space, largely because companies held long-term leases and were loath to invest in office reconfigurations. But as hiring rebounded, leases came due, and redesign budgets recovered, organizations again began fitting their people into smaller and smaller spaces. If the aim really is to boost collaboration, you need to increase the right kinds of interactions and decrease ineffective ones. You’ll have to carefully choose your trade-offs. That means you need to understand current patterns of interaction and consider how you want to change them. Using sensors and digital data to track interactions at a large German bank, MIT researchers found that in cases where intrateam cohesion was more predictive of productivity and worker satisfaction than cross-team collisions were, increasing interactions between teams undermined performance. So they moved teams into separate rooms. And after using Humanyze technology to track interactions, a major energy company decided to increase communication between departments that had strong process dependencies and reduce communication between other departments by colocating some in a new building and moving others offsite.

For more on the open office see:

The con that destroyed the quality of work life for millions

Thinking about thinking, creativity and, innovation

Fad-surfing and corralled rebellion

Diseconomies of scale

But pop culture is interested in you

Welcome Instapundit readers. Why not take a minute to check out the archives (please?). BTW I'm on Twitter @leadandgold_cdh. Thanks for stopping by.

I respect people who do not watch TV. They are probably smarter, better read, and more disciplined than the rest of us.

They are also completely unqualified to offer advice about winning elections.

Powerline:

Tevi, author of What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted, sees Obama’s Mad Men reference as part of his “successful and continual use of pop culture as a political tool.” This tactic enables the president to connect to his audiences via cultural references. Obama, like most presidents at this stage of a presidency, has largely been tuned out by the public. But, as Tevi says, “people perk up when he’s talking about a TV show or a popular movie.”

Related:

Conservatives and messaging

Thomas Sowell says it best

It is not the messaging, it's the messengers.

Inarticulate Republicans

Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, epitomized what has been wrong with the Republicans for decades when he emerged from a White House meeting last Wednesday, went over to the assembled microphones, briefly expressed his disgust with the Democrats’ intransigence and walked on away.

We are in the midst of a national crisis, immediately affecting millions of Americans and potentially affecting the kind of country this will become if Obamacare goes into effect — and yet, with multiple television network cameras focused on Speaker Boehner as he emerged from the White House, he couldn’t be bothered to prepare a statement that would help clarify a confused situation, full of fallacies and lies.

Boehner was not unique in having a blind spot when it comes to recognizing the importance of articulation and the need to put some serious time and effort into presenting your case in a way that people outside the Beltway would understand. On the contrary, he has been all too typical of Republican leaders in recent decades.

The GOP spends millions on consultants to help them with "communication strategies", "messenging", and "social media optimization". Yet, Dr. Sowell just gave them the playbook and gameplan for free.

Thank you Mr. Moran

The world owes a great, unrecognized debt to the undistinguished scribblers of long-forgotten works. Much of G. K. Chesterton's best work was dashed off in response to some book or article that caught his attention and triggered a thought. Does anyone read the fiction of Mrs. Craigie or Miss Fowler? Yet without these two fine ladies, we might not have Cahpter 15 of Heretics.

I'm beginning to think that Rick Moran is the blogosphere's Miss Fowler. What he writes is of little intrinsic importance and will be forgotten. But every now and then he provokes Robert Stacy McCain into writing something like this:

'Kooks,' Blue-State Republicans, Rick Moran, and the Messaging Problem

After you read it, ask yourself this question: Why did National Review hire the awful David Frum instead of Robert Stacy McCain? Why don't they hire him today?

NR could give him a column like the old "Gimlet Eye" of D. Keith Mano. My guess is that McCain could single-handedly make them interesting again.

An idea too smart for the stupid party

Instapundit:

THE HILL: Republican leader rips the media for ‘shoving us in the corner.’ “House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) ripped the media in a speech Tuesday to the Ripon Society, arguing press coverage is partly responsible for the GOP’s messaging woes.”

You want to punish ‘em? Mandate cable unbundling, which is the right thing to do anyway — and popular, to boot.

Conquest's Third Law in action

Conquest:

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Ace:

So, This isn't Even a Joke Anymore, People Are Seriously Agitating for Mitt 2016

Chicago Boyz:

Prediction: Romney 2016.

Reminder:

GOP future: It’s not the “messaging”

When all else fails, blame the people

A couple of good posts from Jim Geraghty and Ace:

Our Big Challenge: Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?

"Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?"

Related:

Conservatives and messaging

Five quick points about the conservative tantrum

Why are conservatives mad at the GOP?

GWB and his MBA