Commonweal Institute Blog

A CNN poll this week shows that, as CNN worded it,

"...most Americans still agree with the bedrock conservative premise that, as the Gipper put it, "government is not the answer to our problems -- government is the problem."

"Queried about their views on the role of government, 54 percent of the 1,013 adults polled said they thought it was trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Only 37 percent said they thought the government should do more to solve the country's problems."

In a cleverly-titled October 24 post, “WITT, YOYOs, and Why Americans Don’t Go Green”, Joel Makower described the implications of market research about why it’s hard to get Americans to listen to talk about environmental problems, let alone to take appropriate action. Sponsored by ecoAmerica, a group which, from its minimal-information website, appears to comprise SRI International Business Intelligence, Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and Campus Climate Challenge, this

[…] extensive study of Americans' environmental attitudes…points up the serious obstacles faced by activists -- as well as green marketers in the private sector -- in getting Americans to align their actions with their innate desire to make the world a better place. […T]he big-picture takeaways are: • There is no common agreement on what environmental concern means or what to do about it. • Libertarian values are gaining over communal ones. • Environmental complexity is paralyzing. • Pocketbook environmentalism is powerful. […]The…research found that even the most environmentally sympathetic Americans have competing priorities; that environmentalism is hampered by anti-science and anti-intellectual attitudes; and that men and women have very different environmental concerns…. […]The millions of Security Moms and NASCAR Dads who haven't yet tuned into how climate change and fisheries loss might mess with their kids' future aren't about to be beaten into submission by the latest arguments or evidence. They're not about to make purchase decisions based on a maybe-someday rationale for stemming environmental problems. They want to know: what's in it for me, today? So, big news: Americans are shallow, misinformed, self-interested, and unsophisticated. But they're our neighbors, our colleagues, and our relatives. And they're likely your clients, customers, or constituents. If you want to move them toward greener behavior and actions, you'll need to deal -- carefully and creatively -- with all of these sobering realities.

Think of the environmental communication problem as the canary in the progressive coal mine. ecoAmerica's research shines a light on what is making the canary sick. ecoAmerica took the canary in for an MRI—market research investigation—and came up with a grave diagnosis. But they also got a better idea of what will be needed to cure the poor bird.

As we listen to the current flock of feebly chirping progressive politicos and spokespersons, we can tell that there’s something wrong. They sure don’t seem to be singing a coherent song that the public hums under its breath (despite current public revulsion against the conservatives in power).

The message here for progressives (and moderates, liberals, etc.) is: It’s about the marketing, stupid! Marketing is how everything is sold in America, from products to services to political ideas.

Marketing, based on underlying market research, is how the conservative movement has succeeded in developing support for their ideas and values. It’s how they prepare the ground for conservative candidates and policies. And it’s how they’ve been promoting the values—libertarian, pocketbook, anti-intellectual—that have been making it hard to have a broad-based, meaningful dialogue about America’s future.

To date, marketing capacity has been sadly lacking on the progressive side. Until moderates and progressives invest serious money in infrastructure functions like market research, language testing, narrative development, and strategic marketing services for the progressive movement as a whole, we’re not going to make progress.

Research is an essential ingredient of this mix—research to find out what matters to different sectors of the public, and how large sectors of the public can be persuaded to support progressive values and ideas. Linguistic analysis alone isn’t sufficient. Good policy ideas aren’t sufficient. Clever phrases or narratives aren’t sufficient. Single-issue efforts aren’t sufficient. Political polls about candidates and ballot measures aren’t sufficient. All of those things—language, ideas, phrases, narratives—should be tested to identify the ones that will work. Testing isn’t cheap, but it’s worth the investment if we want to be successful.

It’s time we deal -- carefully and creatively -- with these sobering realities.

Every time you turn on the radio or a cable news show you hear one form or another of the same old message, “conservatives and their ideas are good and liberals and their ideas are bad.” Think about how often you hear one or another variation of that theme.

But how often do you hear that liberals and progressives are good? How often do you hear that liberal/progressive ideas are better for people than a conservative approach? And if you are reading this you're looking for progressive ideas. So how often do you think the general public is hearing that progressives and their values and ideas are good?

The public does not hear our side of the story very often – if ever.

Why is that? Maybe it’s because we aren’t telling people our side of the story!

There are literally hundreds of conservative organizations that primarily exist to persuade the public to support conservative ideas (and, therefore, conservative candidates.) The people you see on TV or hear on the radio or who write op-eds in newspapers are paid by, or at the very least draw upon resources provided by these organizations. You might or might not have heard of the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute or Americans for Tax Reform or the This Institute or the That Foundation or the Government-and-Taxes-Are-Bad Association – but there really is a network of well-funded conservative organizations marketing the conservatives-are-good-and-liberals-and-government-and-democracy-are-bad propaganda every hour of every day and they have been doing so for decades.

Click this link to visit a collection of links to articles, studies, reports and other resources for learning about the right-wing movement, its history, how it is funded and how it operates.

Now, can you think of any organizations that exist to tell the public that progressive values and ideas and policies and candidates are good? Do you know about any organized effort to persuade people to support progressive values and ideas?

A recentcomment on Dave Johnson's personal blog asserted that all the good things that have happened in this country have been done by liberals. We need to put that concept into action. For example, I heard Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) on NPR the other day talking about his new book. He indicated, as an aside, that liberals were being bashed and hinted that this being unfair or incorrect. This was a good first start. However, Dorgan didn't spend any time on that topic and did not give any specifics--he didn't follow through on his opportunity.

ALL progressive and liberal spokespeople should have a short, punchy list of the good things liberals are responsible for, that they can commit to memory and declare at a moment's notice. Let's start with Social Security, clean air, clean water, minimum wage, worker safety. Anyone want to add to that list? Repetition is one of the bedrocks of marketing--repeat, repeat, repeat, in multiple voice, through multiple channels: "Liberals are good, and here's why. Here are the good things liberals have done....."

"Conservatives and their ideas are good, liberals and their ideas are bad."

You hear the message repeated a thousand different ways, over and over, every day. It is a strategy, an organized marketing campaign to create demand for conservatives, their policies and their candidates. Over time and unanswered, it sinks into the brain.

The fact is, marketing creates demand. So after decades of this, people start to demand conservative policies and candidates and their politicians just ride that wave. In some areas conservative candidates can just point and shout, "liberal, liberal" and win elections. We see the results all around us - trillions of OUR dollars flow to the top. Our resources are "privatized" into the hands of corporations. We work longer hours for lower pay, losing our health insurance and pensions and rights... Our environment is polluted and our resources extracted.

Repeat: this is a strategic marketing campaign to get people to accept being ruled by wealthy corporatists. Marketing creates demand. Repetition drives a point home.

Today's example just came in the morning e-mail. (How much of an "advance" do you think this guy received to write this?) Read this and you'll see that it follows the same tired script: liberals and their ideas are bad, and conservatives and their ideas are good. Marketing creates demand, and this is marketing, promoting conservative values and ideas and candidates.

The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11

"Why do they hate us?" Some conservatives, following President Bush, believe that Muslim anti-Americanism stems from irrational hatred of our freedom and democracy. Others lay the blame on our foreign policy. Now comes bestselling conservative author Dinesh D'Souza to argue that both views, while they contain elements of truth, miss the larger reason. In The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, D'Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America's cultural left.

Paul Abrams picked up on Gary Trudeau’s clever verbiage in his Doonesbury cartoon:

Discussing the Bush Library's unprecedented budget, one Doonesbury character suggests that it will also be a "think tank", to which others respond that it will be a "belief tank", defined as a think-tank-without-the-doubt.

Goebbels' observation about the power of the "big lie" can, with modern technology, now trickle down even to small lies.
For 30 years the radical rightwing has funded its own institutions, such as Heritage Foundation, supposedly to "investigate" social and political issues and to publish the results of those "investigations". They rigorously screen the views of potential hires to ensure they are ideologically pure (to be an intern at the Heritage Foundation, students had to pass a litmus test to ensure not a whisper of free thinking remained), and their results, curiously, always seem to support the economic interests of their funders.

Between $300 and $400 MILLION per YEAR is spent on these radical rightwing institutions. Their corporate sponsors are accustomed to getting returns-on-investment ("ROI" in the biz), and cutting funding from operations that do not produce good ROI.

Belief tanks deliver for them. Starting with a pre-ordained conclusion, the "investigation" focuses on finding those facts that can be woven into a supporting fabric. Contrary facts are ignored; if they are too powerful to be ignored, the integrity of their sources are impugned.

Abrams advocates use of a sound marketing principle – repetition through multiple channels – to take advantage of this brilliant neologism:

Frank Luntz, the rightwing linguistic guru, taught them the words to use to demean facts so that they were, at best, on a par with belief, but his main lesson was: language counts. I am no longer going to refer to groups like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Discovery Institute, Americans United for Life, as think tanks, but rather as "belief tanks".

Will you join me?

How about using the netroots, and the blogging community, to spread Gary Trudeau's brilliant insight? In my writings, I will refer to such institutions, and the people from them, like this: "John Smith, from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Belief Tank, said....". And, how about training those who appear in the MSM alongside people from the Belief Tanks to call out their institutions as "Belief Tanks", and to do so over-and-over-and-over-and-over again, so it becomes part of the background?

What do people "know?" If you are reading this you are probably a hyper-informed citizen. But what about the rest of us? What information reaches the public?

Progressive blogs reach progressives. Right-wing blogs are part of a noise machine that is designed to reach and influence the general public.

Right-wing blogs are tied into the conservative movement's larger "noise machine" information apparatus. This is why we see very different results when the right launches an information campaign. They echo or are echoed through every channel through which the public receives information -- by Limbaugh, Fox News, Drudge, and funded outreach into other channels, and their politicians are part of the coordinated process. So their message gets out there and the public "knows" what they want them to know. A very good example is what happened to Dan Rather. The public "knows" that Dan Rather "tried to smear President Bush" with "forged documents." In fact the origin of the documents is still unknown, and forged or not, the underlying story was factual.

It would benefit us to keep in mind that progressive blogs have a limited reach and that we need to keep looking to extend that reach. There is no progressive noise machine. There is no coordination. There is no funded outreach to the general public. Non-right-wing politicians likely as not fear blogs and tend not to join in a coordinated messaging efforts. Yes, progressive blogs are read by media figures, informed opinion leaders and public officials, and that is very important. But we have very little effect on what the general public "knows." Only after shrill repetition for several days or weeks across the entire blogosphere does an important story even begin to reach into the traditional corporate media.

Current example - the prosecutor scandal. On the Heading Left Blog Talk Radio Show last week Nate mentioned that there was wide coverage of the scandal over firing US Attorneys who wouldn't play ball and drop investigations of Republican corruption or wouldn't falsely accuse Democrats of crimes. But in my own local paper there was only a short article on page 6, and it repeated verbatim White House talking points that the firings were "handled badly," that the President "has the right to hire and fire prosecutors," and that "Clinton fired all 93 prosecutors while Bush fired only 8."

Older example: What is the current percentage of Americans who think Iraq attacked us n 9/11? It's probably still very high - considering that Iraq didn't. What is the percentage who think we found the WMD?

"We're All In This Together"
A talk by Commonweal Institute Fellow David C. Johnson to supporters of public education, presented March 7, 2007.

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about how to start this talk, when I came across this video clip from the Sean Hannity show on Fox News:

Click to play video clip

[Clip of Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, with Neal Boortz saying that teachers unions are more dangerous to America than terrorists armed with nuclear weapons because a nuke could only wipe out 100,000 people but public schools are "destroying a generation."]

I’m showing you this because it illustrates something that we increasingly have to deal with. I’ll talk about how this uncivil hyperbole fits into the overall pattern of what we as supporters of public education are dealing with. Then I’ll talk about what we can do about it.

What you just saw was on the most-watched cable TV news network just two weeks ago.

At next week's Take Back America conference I will be doing a "self-organized" session, titled Reaching the Public.

Progressives need to promote the benefits of progressive values and ideas to the general public. This creates demand for progressive candidates and policy solutions.

The idea is simple - right-wingers are out there all day, every day, and through every possible channel, repeating various forms of the simple marketing message "Conservatives are good and liberals are bad." The conservatives get it: persuasion, marketing, talking to the public WORKS. Over time this has an effect.

Liberals and progressives are not responding by also talking to the general public and promoting the benefits of PROGRESSIVE values and issues. So after a few decades of this, the public has a negative view of liberals & progressives, and in surveys they say they are conservative - even though they line up with us on the facts and issues. All a conservative candidate has to do is point a finger and shout "liberal liberal" and this gives them a tremendous head start in a campaign.

Joining me will be Jeffery Feldman of Frameshop and Conor Kenny of SourceWatch.

If you are at Take Back America, please come to this session, at 4pm on Monday June 18.

The AFL-CIO, AFSCME, SEIU, MoveOn.org, Americans United for Change, USAction, and True Majority are going to spend millions of dollars running an ad against targeted Republicans urging them to override President Bush's veto of SCHIP, the child health coverage bill. The ad says the candidates are targeted because they support "Billions of Dollars for Iraq War, But Veto for Children's Health Care"

My problem with the ad is that it does not teach a larger lesson. This is "a teachable moment." People are upset that President Bush is vetoing this bill, but they do not understand the deeper ideological principals behind what is happening to them. This is an opportunity to teach people that conservatives believe in a you-are-on-your-own, dog-eat-dog philosophy and progressives believe we are all in this together for each other.

The ad says "George Bush and his backers would rather send half a trillion to Iraq than spend a fraction of that here to keep our kids healthy." Even by changing "and his backers" to "and the conservatives" they could have let people know that it isn't just Bush and it isn't about particular politicians, it's the conservative ideology that is hurting them. This issue is about differences in philosophy between conservatives and progressives.

But instead of teaching the public a lesson about what is happening to us all, this coalition will spend millions running this ad against individual politicians, and in the end the money will literally just go up in the air(waves) and nothing will remain behind.

Many progressive think the public already understands a lot of what progressives stand for. But this is not the case. This thinking comes from already being a progressive, and talking to lots of other progressives. But we need to understand that the public in general is not well educated about progressives, and that communicating needs to start with basics.

I learned this in business, when I was doing direct mail marketing: It's a core mistake to think that the audience you want to reach thinks the way you and I do as we spend time on blogs like this one. You have to learn NOT to trust your instincts and instead trust market testing and other scientific methods to get a read on what the target audience is thinking - and what they hear when you talk to them. The mass market out there is very different from the people who want to reach them, both in products and political ideas.

If you think about it for a minute, this has to be the case or you wouldn't be trying to reach them in the first place - they would already know what you want them to know. The people who make a product already know what it does, how it is used, etc... So they just can't relate to people who don't yet. There are things they take for granted, but the target audience has not yet been exposed to. So in products you wouldn't need to market your product if the customers out there already understood what it is and what it does for them. In our case here we wouldn't need to explain progressive ideas and policies if the public already understood why they want them. But they don't. If we want to persuade the public to share our values and support our ideas we have to explain to them the benefits THEY will get out of doing so. To do that we have to learn what THEY hear, and how they hear things, before we can reach them.

We have to realize that the people who already understand these concepts today are fundamentally different from the rest of the public. (Try to write a product manual telling an elderly person how to use your software and you will see what I mean.) We seek out the blogs, and read lots of news. Much of the public is almost the opposite of this. They don't read newspapers, they don't watch the NewsHour, and they are not scouring the internet and critically evaluating what they find. (NO ONE but us knows about the billions in cash that were shipped to Iraq and disappeared, for example, but it is part of the foundation of our understanding of what is happening to our country.) But the right does reach them. They have figured out how to trigger the word-of-mouth channels through which people come to know what they "know." How many people STILL believe that Iraq attacked us on 9/11?

In direct mail I learned that the stuff that makes me and probably you retch is the stuff that sells the most product. I have to tell you I learned it the very hardest way because I would not expose my customers to that crap. And then a third party company did a test mailing and the sales tripled. So I learned from that.

I don't mean to sound like I am lecturing. I'm trying to share some lessons I learned in some very hard ways - that you just have to trust scientific methods to learn what your target audience thinks, and understand the we are often unable to know that ourselves.