The so termed Liberal media pundits, have to learn about the well practiced clarity and simplicity of messaging, the art that seems well mastered by so termed Conservative media pundits. It is not enough to describe the problems simply and clearly, but leave the desired punch-lines and the key points of the message in the ether of rationalization, vicious and sometimes comedic satire, and employing partial agreement to opposing views coupled with a muddled articulation of the facts. I do not believe the right wing messaging machine can be that much more inspired and sophisticated than their left wing counterparts. The conservative pundits, however, seem to pontificate the 'matter of fact' gesture with indignant pomposity and self assured justification for their points of view with no self censorship, no self doubt and definitely no messaging restraint.
Why do the liberals and progressive media pundits seem to do the work for their right wing counterparts. The liberals in their quest to be measured and fair to 'both sides', end up digging up skeletons of their own side and handing the opposition, irrefutable evidence to nullify their own messaging. Message discipline is not a virtue for progressives but is a cherished creed of conservatives, republicans and their media pundits.
I recently saw an MSNBC progressive commentators replay, at infinitum, a video clip showing Presidential candidate Obama exalting his base with the following: paraphrase: "I would put on my comfortable shoes and join the Unions on the picket line, to peacefully demonstrate with them for their collective bargaining rights". Well the right wing pundits used this video revelation to deride President Obama for not following through with his campaign promise, making it look important to them. This is an example where the liberal pundits and the associated movement voices did not evaluate the impact of up-staging the very deliberative and thoughtful, constitutional lawyer, President, who understands the timing required to be effective when private enterprise operatives attempt to usurp the labor rights of the citizenry, through the coercive utilization of the political power of money, to compel elected government representatives, in this case, the Governor of Wisconsin, to use the pretext of economic crisis and legal responsibility, to deprive the working middle class, and especially organized labor unions, of their legal and long established rights to collective bargaining by public employees. To deprive workers the right for collective bargaining is practically equivalent to depriving a community of having legal counsel in product liability or environmental health violations. We are all now familiar with the name Mr. Kenneth Feinberg, Esq., imagine after 9/11 the families of the victims had to fight individually for their rights without a collective bargaining representation during arbitration. Mr. Kenneth Feinberg, who has served as the Court-Appointed Special Settlement Master in cases like Agent Orange Product Liability, Asbestos Personal Injury Litigation, and arbitration of the Holocaust Slave Labor Litigation, remind us all of the perception of fairness in the situation of human rights and survival. Why is the liberal and progressive messaging machine not able to formulate simple and effective populous messages that are not self destructive?
Liberal pundits and their supporters should not forget their own inflexible posture during the debates leading to the 2010 Health Care Bill, and in particular the adamant stance on the so called Public Option provision, which made it impossible to become a ratified provision, which could have garnered the desired 60-vote threshold in the US Senate. The liberal and progressives coalitions, in concert with their media pundits went as far as threatening some of the Senators with re-election challenges. The negative effect was manifested when the left wing pundits publicized threats from the liberal and progressive wings of the democratic party towards Senator Joe Lieberman [ID-CT] on his flip-flop on the provision for expanding Medicaid for the un-insured, as the more viable alternative to the then contentious Public Option provision. The intransigence of Sen. Lieberman, a very proud conservative democrat, was a direct reaction and repudiation of the left wings' impractical and sometimes irrational demands against reality, and essentially almost helped to defeat the Health Bill, but by the strength of President Obama's persuasive and political acuity. Sometimes the rhetoric of 'all or nothing because we are right' approach in representative political government is not likely to ever succeed. After what seemed the most successful legislative achievement, the passage of a comprehensive Health Care Bill in the US ever, the left wing activists and their pundit allies set out on a vicious collision course with their own democratic party senators and congress members, who they labeled as not 'fighting hard enough' for the more radical left wing health bill, the Single Payer System and the modified compromise, the Public Option. Through these contentious in-fighting and un-disciplined negative public pronouncements, the self destructive liberal messaging was incessant and dominated the media, thus the negative components of the Health Care Bill, as was claimed by the opposing republicans, overtook the laudable provisions that were actually contained in the health care legislation, and became the message that permeated the country and ended up becoming the destructive message albatross around the necks of the congressional democrats and the President, which falsely portrayed them as the the bearers of bad and over bearing government, the negative perception that has ultimately come to define the historic health legislation to a good portion of the electorate. Most of these democratic Senators and Congress members were defeated in the November 2010 congressional elections, resulting in the minority status of the democratic party, and therefore, making sure almost all the agenda and policies the liberals had worked hard for, rendered useless at best, and certainly standing on the verge of roll-back of the gains championed by Nancy Pelosi and Mr. Obama. Senator Blanche Lincoln [D-AR] was defeated by the liberal and progressive campaigns against her in non-liberal state of Arkansas, thus shrinking the conservative democratic base in the US congress, is a sad example of the Self Destructive Messaging of the Liberal Punditry.
The liberal activists who mobilized for the democrats and Mr. Obama in 2006 and 2008, self destructed in the 2010 congressional elections, strictly based on their 'my way or the highway' posture. I believe they de-mobilized because they did not get their Public Option in the health care bill. One would have thought these liberals were the intelligent class of the citizenry, and would have calculated that their own unilateral ideological movement demobilization, would create the space for opposing political ideology to exploit. This is the space the igneous republicans and their activist pundits acquired, and ushered in the tea party republicans, as a movement for the demise of the liberal agenda. When liberals forget to follow their leader, in this case the practical minded, Mr. Obama, the President, and further decided to 'eat their young', helping to defeat their own allies, the outcome is what we are all experiencing today. Political malpractice is the charge I levy on the liberals and progressives, who seem not to understand the political system in operation in the USA. Our constitutionally framed political system requires constant vigilance and well reasoned strategies on the part of the ideological purist, the liberals form of weak non-committed teenage-like intermittent activism and panicky call to action, is non-sustainable in a dynamic political system like ours. I detest ideological purism, but I admire ideological consistency when it is carefully mitigated by thoughtful consideration of the dynamism of the prevailing natural evolution of our society and political existence. In short, politics in US requires a clear understanding of the workings of what a representative constitutional government entails.
Liberals are very fervent in their believe in political ideology as do conservative political operatives, but the messaging for their respective political ideologies is where the similarities end. The right wing conservatives excel far and away above the left wing liberals, in the art of message composition and message discipline. Liberals seem very uncomfortable and woefully convoluted in their logic for the passionate expression of their inherent patriotic nature of inclusion and universal acceptance of differences between people in general, a trait not easily claimed or cherished by the conservatives, and can be captured in a simple but effective message campaign, in contrast to the unnecessarily laborious modes of liberal self expression; furthermore, liberals seem not to exude the prerequisite of desired intensity of conviction of their ideas that merit public admiration, and therefore, seem to convey very timid and inarticulate ideas. Liberal ideas, I should confess, are mostly better for the society at large due to their expansive and inclusiveness of scope, compared to the limiting scope and marked rigidity of most conservative ideas. What is holding back the liberals from such simple but effective and believable messaging of self expression? As a friendly caveat, I want the reader to be reminded that the United States of America is the most Prized Product of liberalism and liberal ideas, noting that, if conservatism and conservative ideas of government and governing had prevailed in the exceptional evolution of the origins of USA within this contest, the USA would have remained a colony of the British Empire!! We should all be mindful of that fact! Why are the liberals, their progressive coalitions and media pundits, not able to craft a simple message to remind the electorate of this fact?
Liberal pundits and activists are very 'liberal' with their messaging, or I should say, very careless and undisciplined in their message presentation. They mostly love to threaten the politicians and political operatives that agree with them even to the tune of more than 80+% of the time, and forget that they actually make the job for their common opposition easier, because the right wing media and opposing pundits just capture the vicious criticisms from the liberals and progressives of their own political allies, and highlight the negative implications, thereby, the liberals end up consuming all their valuable political capital to their own detriment, and the liberal focusing on the points of disagreement of their own caucuses, prolong the perceived negative connotation, which then translate to acute loss of message discipline within the political context. I contend that, the emergence of Tea Party Republicans, was made easier by the apathetic liberals and their weak but self-destructive messaging. Instead of the liberals and progressive coalitions banding strongly together to support their own political agenda and immense political and ideological gains as a result of the 2006 and 2008 elections, which at the time, were being successfully championed and exceptionally executed with precision by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Executive Branch, they instead, turned their attention to minor divisions within their own ranks based on what they perceived as 'not getting everything' they wanted in the many legislative bills passed by congress, and thus reverting to what I call the 'Liberal Winners Mind Set'.
The 'Liberal Winners Mind Set', is the condition where previously dis-enfranchised liberals and progressives find themselves in power with responsibility to lead and solve problems, but after a few seeming successes, begin what I call, 'the self congratulatory leg of the leadership marathon', the mode where they truly need to employ leadership and message discipline, but instead, they start working hard to knowingly or unknowingly, breakdown the alliances, bonds and coalitions that had helped them ascend to power, in the first place. When this happened in 2009 and 2010, the message gab was quickly filled with coalitions made up of the right wing republicans and tea party republicans, who were well disguised and carefully cloaked in fictitious outrage about the economic state of the country, the near demise of the US economy, which had been created by these same republicans. The dawning of the tea party republicans seems to have come as a surprise to the liberals and progressives, and they were not prepared with a counter movement or message, which at a minimum could have challenged the key operatives like Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey [R-TX] and other prominent opportunistic republicans, who could have been made the poster children of the economic state of the US, instead, the 'liberal winners mind set' crowd, just sat back and hoped the tea party republicans would be discredited based on their past performance in leadership, burn themselves out and go away! The subsequent out come of this colossal miscalculation on the part of the liberals and progressives, is now not in dispute! The simplistic reason or explanation is the self destructive messaging of the liberals and their media pundits, but that will be a fallacy that clearly underestimates the strengths of the coalition of the right wing republicans and their supportive media pundits.
Whilst I write this blog, the political melodrama of Wisconsin is playing out in the media, and the classic seat-of-the-pants tutorial of political education of the US electorate, the ultimate crash course for political maneuvering, is jarring the minds of the usually absent minded general public, liberals, conservatives and independents. The elected politicians who believe in corporatism and are working on behalf of private enterprises are being exposed as they work hard to usurp the public sector concept of fairness for the US middle class, and the social liberals are rapidly cultivating cast iron backbones necessary to withstand the onslaught from their own elected leaders, who they just found out, are beholding to and completely controlled by the power of money in politics. The message bearers from the liberals side of the ideological spectrum, are tightening up their loose talk, and their playground dares are favorably and fairly being vetted. Denoting the self destructive nature of the liberal messaging is an observation that seem to pan out regularly when political ideological debates and conflicts arise, because the self congratulatory liberals never fail to celebrate their perceived successes, prematurely! The the left wing, liberal and progressive strategists and their media pundits, profusely are complementary and conciliatory in their messaging, which does not help advance their conviction and believes to the society at large, but tend to impress and/or satisfy people who already believe in their argument, but carefully and meticulously ignore the true intended target of their message, which should be the right wing ideologues, the ones the liberal message should be intended to forcefully persuade, in an attempt to win some of them to the liberal side, or at a minimum, give the organized opposition, significant amount of work in formulating their non-plausible counter message. In other words, the liberal messaging machine has to learn not to destroy their own ideological campaigns before they have had a chance to take hold.
I am very sure a lot of liberals and ideological progressives will disagree with my characterization of the lack of effectiveness of their messaging, and may point to the not so distant but recent political successes, the democratic controlled Congress of Nancy Pelosi, but should not forget the non-sustainability of those memorable political gains, which I am attributing to their muddled messaging and ineffectual presentation of ideas, and therefore, highlight the Self Destructive Messaging of Liberal Punditry and their political operatives...
