CHAPTER 2
What’s Holding Us Back?

Here is a quiz. Actually, it’s part of the questionnaire I used to gather research for this book. Think for a second:

 

1. What is the difference (if any) between a progressive and a liberal?

2. Why has the label liberal become unpopular? What negative ideas pop into voters’ heads when they think of a liberal?

3. What do progressives stand for? I’m not asking for a laundry list of issue positions—what are our principles? What is our philosophy of government?

4. A related question: What is the proper role of government? What should government do for Americans, and what are the limits of government?

5. What’s the difference between progressives and conservatives? What’s wrong with the conservative philosophy?

 

Time’s up. There are no correct answers, because we don’t have a clear definition of liberal or progressive, we can’t easily explain the proper role of government, and therefore, we can’t distinguish ourselves in a fundamental way from conservatives.

That’s what’s holding us back.

Progressive thinkers are fairly unanimous on this point. Strategists John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira conclude that “the underlying problem driving progressives’ ongoing woes nationally [is that] a majority of Americans do not believe progressives or Democrats stand for anything.” Columnist E. J. Dionne writes that progressives have “a reluctance to make their case on the grounds of principle and philosophy. This in turn, weakens their moral position and cedes moral argument to the right.” Michael Tomasky, executive editor of The American Prospect, declares that what we “still don’t have is a philosophy.” Progressive writer Paul Waldman complains that progressives lack a “master narrative.” And Gary Hart remarks that “the best Democrats lack all convictions, or at least all courage to state what those convictions are.”

But the situation is even worse than that. Because we don’t have a recognizable philosophy, conservatives can employ negative stereotypes against us. And boy, have they! Sadly, 99 percent of the political insiders surveyed for this book believe the word liberal has been seriously discredited. Here are some of their comments:

 

●“The term liberal has increasingly been used to describe a group with fringe ideas.”

●“It has come to mean supporting lazy people with ‘my’ hard-earned dollars.”

●“Voters think of high taxes, bureaucratic excess, and outdated solutions.”

●“For older people it may mean a return to the 1960s—big government, busing, hippie culture, and Vietnam.”

●”Loose with taxes, hostile to business, soft on crime, supports a culture of dependency.”

●“The word makes people think of social issues where liberal positions are unpopular, instead of economic issues where liberal policies are quite popular.”

 

Because of these stereotypes, both candidates and causes labeled liberal begin with a disadvantage. (Chapter 8 will show that being labeled progressive is much less of a problem.) Lacking a basic, shared philosophy, each left-leaning campaign and organization has to independently build up a positive reputation that overpowers the negative stereotypes. We have to reinvent the wheel over and over again, and too often our reinventions fall flat.

Isn’t it perfectly reasonable for voters to want to understand our broad vision for the future? After all, we live in a republic, not a democracy. That means Americans have to rely on their representatives to make thousands of government decisions which are never covered by the six o’clock news. They need to feel confident that elected officials will make principled decisions, even when the cameras aren’t there. But how can voters trust progressives to make principled decisions, without principles?

A political movement is defined by its ideology, its worldview, its big ideas. There’s an environmental movement, a gun control movement, a pro-choice movement. But without a unifying philosophy, it’s hard to say that the organizations and individuals gathered under the progressive banner even constitute a movement.

We must remedy this gloomy situation. I’ve laid out an alternative. Now, how can we use it? In politics, principles come into play in three ways—to frame a philosophy, a campaign, or an issue. Let’s consider each in turn.

Framing a Philosophy

The conservatives have a frame. U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan told a reporter for the New York Times:

 

I can describe, and I’ve always been able to describe, what Republicans stand for in eight words, and the eight words are lower taxes, less government, strong defense and family values.… We Democrats, if you ask us about one piece of that, we can meander for 5 or 10 minutes in order to describe who we are and what we stand for. And frankly, it just doesn’t compete very well.

 

The generic conservative message is pretty much taken for granted. Paul Waldman calls “low taxes, small government, strong defense, and traditional values” the “Four Pillars of Conservatism.”

Perhaps we’re giving conservatives a little too much credit for consistency. After all, corporate conservatives think that religious conservatives have an irrational agenda. Small-government conservatives think the right-wingers in Congress have completely abandoned all principles of fiscal austerity. Libertarians think the Bush Administration has left our nation’s fundamental rights in tatters. And they’re all quite correct.

Yet, even as conservative officeholders make a mockery of their own governing philosophy, the generic conservative frame maintains a powerful hold on voters’ imaginations. That’s why progressives need a competing narrative.

When progressives champion freedom, opportunity, and security for all, we can rebut the Four Pillars of Conservatism.

Framing a Campaign

Progressive and Democratic candidates have framed campaigns and, obviously, many have won. For example, the 1992 Clinton campaign was framed quite successfully—it was “the economy, stupid.” Campaign Manager James Carville and company turned the general election into a referendum on the question of which candidate would be better to repair the nation’s economy. It’s the question that mattered. If, by voting, Americans were answering that question, then Bill Clinton was the obvious answer. If voters thought their ballots were answering the question “Who’s best on foreign policy,” Bush would have been the answer. So the Clinton campaign highlighted economic policies, not as a laundry list but as illustrations of its “the economy, stupid” theme.

Despite Carville’s persistent advice, progressive candidates typically do not frame campaigns this way. Instead, progressives look at the polls which show that Americans agree with us on policy—from the war in Iraq to globalization, from health care to environmental protection—and run their campaigns based on a list of issues. And often, the progressive laundry list—”I’m pro-choice, favor universal health coverage, support a higher minimum wage,” and so forth—is sufficient to win. But in close elections, progressives lose persuadable voters who are frustrated by our inability to articulate a vision for America’s future.

When progressive candidates don’t define themselves, their conservative opponents get to define them. And that’s the bottom-line reason why John Kerry lost to George Bush.

The theme of the 2004 Bush campaign was strength. Karl Rove knew that Americans were deeply affected by 9/11; their sense of security had been shaken. He also knew that George Bush was perceived as a strong leader, someone who was supremely confident of his direction (even when all evidence pointed the opposite way). So Rove set out to frame the election as a referendum on which candidate was stronger. While Bush played the macho cowboy, his campaign pulled out all the stops to portray John Kerry—who won a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts for his service in Vietnam—as a weakling.

The book Take It Back, by Carville and Paul Begala, includes a heartbreaking account of behind-the-scenes decision making in the Kerry campaign. Kerry focused on a laundry list called J-HOS, which stood for Jobs, Health Care, Oil, Security. As Carville and Begala lament, “That, of course, is a litany, not a narrative. Calling ‘J-HOS’ a message is like calling a supermarket full of food a gourmet meal.” Despite impassioned pleas by both authors, Kerry would not adopt a frame. Carville and Begala explain that this played right into the Bush strategy of defining John Kerry as “weak, waffling, and weird.” The Bush attack worked—Kerry was painted as a cartoon image of a liberal—because voters didn’t know what Kerry stood for, really. Moreover, they believed he didn’t know himself.

Don’t your ears still turn red just thinking about 2004? What a nightmare! But didn’t we fix the problem in the 2006 election? Absolutely not. Then House minority leader Nancy Pelosi tried to unite Democrats around a plan called “New Directions for America,” but candidates essentially ignored it. As Democratic pollster Doug Schoen noted just before Election Day in 2006, “Unfortunately, the Democrats have simply not done a credible job defining who they are or what they stand for.”

Democrats didn’t really win in 2006; Republicans lost. They lost because everything went wrong for them. And they lost because their actions dramatically contradicted their well-known generic philosophy. Gigantic budget deficits, warrantless searches, and pork-barrel Bridge-to-Nowhere projects contradicted the conservative promise of small government. The conduct of the war in Iraq, pointlessly undermining personnel and pushing equipment to the breaking point, contradicted the conservative promise of a strong military. And the last straw was the Mark Foley sex-with-pages cover-up scandal, which contradicted the conservative promise of family values.

So, no, the problem isn’t fixed. But when progressives adopt freedom, opportunity, and security for all, campaigns will have the framing tools they need. For example, our candidates could have reassured the persuadable “security moms” who abandoned progressives in 2002 and 2004, if only they had clearly, vocally, and proudly stood for the principle of security.

Framing an Issue

It has been well established by academics (George Lakoff, Geoffrey Nunberg) and commentators (E. J. Dionne, Arianna Huffington) that there is, in fact, a vast right-wing conspiracy to redefine political language and craft message frames that sell conservative policy products. The chief right-wing spinmeister is Frank Luntz, who won broad influence among conservatives by acting as pollster for Newt Gingrich, helping to frame the 1994 Republican Contract with America.

Luntz’s specialty is deploying words and phrases that help conservatives and hurt progressives. For example, he tells conservatives: Don’t say government, say Washington. Don’t say privatization, say personalization. Don’t say globalization, say free market economy. Don’t say undocumented workers, say illegal aliens. Don’t say trial lawyer, say personal injury lawyer. Don’t say drilling for oil, say exploring for energy.

We have to hold our noses and pay attention to Frank Luntz’s advice. Over the past dozen years, corporations and conservative ideologues have paid Luntz tens of millions of dollars to craft their messages, and his research has included “hundreds of thousands of telephone interviews, hundreds of dial sessions and focus groups, and literally a million research hours.” So understand and accept some bad news—Luntz knows what he’s talking about.

Although much of his advice is confidential, for the eyes of his business and political clients only, we have access to a good deal of Luntz’s thinking because several of his confidential memos have been leaked to bloggers who have posted them on the Internet. Even better, he wrote a book. Does anyone remember the scene in the movie Patton when, after allied forces defeat a German advance, General Patton (played by George C. Scott) roars: “Rommel, you magnificent bastard. I read your book!” OK, nobody remembers. But the point is, the good guys beat the bad guys because General Patton knew what his opponent knew.

If you want to know what the conservatives know, read Luntz’s book, Words That Work. The book’s subtitle is the Luntz mantra: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear. He means: “You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and preexisting beliefs.”

Suffice it to say, conservatives know the right words. And just as important, they have a well-oiled mechanism for distributing their polled and focus-grouped language top-down, through the White House, the Republican infrastructure, and right-wing think tanks, and also bottom-up, through Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Gordon Liddy, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the right-wing noise machine.

In contrast, progressives aren’t keen on taking orders from a central authority—and we don’t! Progressive candidates and organizations are, by and large, independently motivated and funded. Democratic pollsters create talking points for one candidate or organization, but that poll-tested messaging advice never gets to 90 percent of Democratic officeholders. And progressive activists remain almost entirely in the dark.

So there you have it. We all know that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The political process is a chain—policy development is one link; grassroots organizing is another link; candidate recruitment and training is another. What’s our weakest link? Progressives don’t lack proposals; we don’t lack activists; we don’t lack money. We lack effective language to frame the future.

But, you may wonder, is freedom, opportunity, and security effective language? Does it persuade the persuadables? Good question—and one that can only be answered with a nationwide poll. Fortunately, we’ve got one.