GOP pollster Frank Luntz has been advising conservative Republicans for years on how to exploit language to smear Dems and win elections. It was Luntz, for example, who teamed up with Newt Gingrich to shape the Contract with America in 1994.
And now, Luntz has taken to the pages of the Huffington Post to offer the left some advice: be nice and don’t act like his Republican clients.
I am not in the habit of offering partisan linguistic advice to Democrats. But in the genuine spirit of bipartisanship – seriously – I thought this is the perfect time to convey a simple point to the still-euphoric faces of Democrat activists: Don’t twist the knife. […]
The Republicans are a party in peril, but all is not milk and cookies in Democrat land. The Democrats – flush with majority status – have a crucial choice right now. They can use their newly-won mandate to settle some old scores…or they can get responsibly and move ahead. They would be wise to opt for the latter.
Democracy is at its best when its practioners use language to unite and explain rather than divide and attack…. We need an intelligent debate, not a sound-bite contest.
We do? Why, that’s great news! The leading Republican consultant who, for years, has convinced powerful lawmakers to use carefully-crafted, poll-tested soundbites to divide and attack, now, as soon as his friends are out of power, wants us to use language to unite and explain. What remarkable timing Luntz has. The more cynical among us might suspect that Luntz wants politicians in Washington to play nice — right up until his GOP clients are in the majority again.
Luntz characterizes his advice as sincere and “serious,” but you’ll forgive me if I’m a little skeptical.
For one thing, if Luntz were either sincere or serious, he wouldn’t repeat silly far-right myths.
Senator Barbara Boxer can’t really believe that a single woman without children is totally incapable of feeling emotional loss just because she hasn’t had any children in combat, can she? Yet that’s exactly what she said to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Boxer could have been a constructive opponent. Instead, she chose to poke Rice straight in the eye with a stick sharpened by a crude personal attack. It was a cheap shot that made even the most hardened Washington insiders cringe.
Nonsense. Either Luntz didn’t hear what Boxer actually said, or he’s intentionally mischaracterizing the Boxer-Rice exchange. Either way, it’s hard to accept advice if it’s premised on bogus, discredited conservative memes.
For another, there’s no delicate way to put this, but we’re talking about Frank Luntz. The man who orchestrated a ridiculous smear against Tom Daschle, who told the GOP in ’98 to run a campaign based almost exclusively on the Lewinsky scandal, who urged Republican lawmakers to plant seeds of doubt with the public about climate change, just when we needed them to take the crisis seriously?
The man who literally wrote the book on exploiting 9/11 for partisan gain?
In his memo on how to manipulate American perception on the economy, right-wing spinmeister Frank Luntz advises conservatives to “resist the temptation’ to use facts and figures about the economy. (You know, all those pesky statistics about lower wages, unemployment, skyrocketing deficits, etc.) Instead, he advises, you can’t go wrong if you continuosly remind people about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “This is the context that explains and justifies why we have $500 billion deficits, why the stock market tanked, why unemployment climbed to 6%.”
Oh, yes, he advises preying on the emotions tied to the terrorist attacks to distract Americans from the truth about the economy, writing, “Much of the public anger can be immediately pacified if they are reminded that we would not be in this situation today if 9/11 had not happened.” It’s also an easy way to get President Bush off the hook: Luntz points out that convincing people that the struggling economy is a consequence of 9/11 (as opposed to, say, Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy) will convince people “it is unfair to blame the current political leadership”
Finally, Luntz advises, 9/11 is the perfect way to dodge responsibility for sinking the country in red ink. In a section headed “Without the context of 9-11, you will be blamed for the deficit,” he points out “supporters are inherently turned off to the idea of fiscal irresponsibility.” The best way to counter that fact? “The trick then is to contextualize the deficit inside of 9/11.”
Yes, this Frank Luntz wants Dems to forget about being labeled weak terrorist sympathizers for the last several years, and play nice with the GOP.
Unfortunately, his Huffington Post piece didn’t come with a shovel.