It's possible to appeal to logic and reason but also draw upon cognitive and emotional dimensions. FDR, JFK, MLK, and RFK all did so well.
Surprisingly, Biden is starting to really get it too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9...h?
v=955Y3NJTRIE
If you don't play to cultural narratives, metaphors, and frames, you're going to lose.
Human beings are NOT, at the end of the day, rational animals. None of us. Not one. This is one of those unpleasant facts that you had better get familiar with if you want to have the thinnest prayer of figuring out which way they'll jump.
Any good review of military history that takes into account the effects of stress on soldiers makes this absolutely pikestaff plain.
I'm surprised that you're surprised.
Not surprised.
never surprised.
that is why the narrative of extremist will work so well. The RNC has been scaring people with extremist rhetoric. Time to turn it on them.
Thank you, Stormcrow. Human beings, like other mammals, are primarily emotional animals. We can learn to reason, but that fact does not make us primarily rational animals, any more than the fact that we can learn to swim makes us primarily aquatic animals.
I'm not as dismissive of the rational aspect of ourselves as is Stormcrow. It's level of cynicism that can't be assigned to us, at least, not accurately.
Hitler had a layman's understanding of Jungian archetypes that served him well. And Germans bought into it. Contrary to what some people are saying, I don't think that could happen here. But the subtler forms of it have already happened, to some extent. And that's the cusp we're on in this election.
As we know, about 25%-30% of the country could be WATCHING bush and McCain taking turns molesting small children on the white house lawn, and they would praise them for finding time from their important duties, to run a day-care center.
But the rest of us, to varying degrees, would be speaking of it with accuracy and with revulsion.
And that is the rational side.
It's like the growing disillusionment with the quagmire in Iraq:
It trumps kneejerk patriotism.
It outweighs the kind of religious "god wants this!" shitspeak that Palin peddled in her sermon to the little robots in the Wasilla church.
And it will not permit McBush and his cute little religious neo-fascist to win this election, as long as we insist on the rationality of empirical truth about what the republicans have created in the past 7-plus years.
I believe in the truth, and in ability of americans to perceive it, if it's presented honestly and persistently, more than I believe in
the kind of 1934 Nurenburg patrio-bullshit that the republicans are so desperately trying to recreate.
Propelled by the events of 9-11, they were successful, to some extent, in doing it for the invasion, but the sustaining of it is proving impossible. And the increasing rejection of their "Gott mit Uns!" shtick, has more to do with rational thought and choices, than it does with some kind of countering emotional archetypes on OUR part.
They can't hide Palin for the most crucial two months in our history since the election of 1860.
They can't drag her out from under the porch to woof at Obama, and then hurriedly stick her back under, without people asking her if she still thinks that invading Iraq was "god's task".
Our own MSM is showing clear signs of understanding what it will mean if they tote the hod for another round of republican bullshit, by pretending they don't know which questions to ask.
bush and the republicans HAVE been able to string out the misery longer than I thought they could, but I don't believe there are enough americans willing to let it continue all the way to the voting booth.
IF Obama and Biden and the rest of the democrats have the spittle to speak the truth to the voters, they will know it, and they will respond to it...by making the right rational decision.
Sorry, tanbark, but there was nothing whatsoever of cynicism in what I wrote. If you read any there, well then, you misread it. Badly.
This is something that every single person who relies on his or her own judgment ABSOLUTELY MUST UNDERSTAND.
If you don't understand precisely how and why HUMANS ARE NOT RATIONAL ANIMALS, then when you rely on the work of your mind, what you're really doing is playing Russian Roulette, and you don't know it.
What is absolutely the first mental faculty you lose when you're under stress? Ever been hammered that badly? I'd venture to guess the answer to that one is "yes", with probability of at least three or four nines. If you do not expect and plan for the degradation of your own reason, then it has no mitigation whatsoever. Beyond the ability of your fellows to block or restrain you.
Why is it best practice for someone else to proofread a manuscript prior to publication?
Why on earth does a man with a planetary reputation in mathematics and physics go flying off his mental rails, spouting pure bullshit, without any consciousness that he's doing so, the minute he veers one centimeter off intellectual dead center? I watched this happen myself. That's not an indictment, which is part of the reason I'm not going to mention his name.
That's a cautionary tale.
If something like that can happen to a man like that, it can happen to anybody and everybody.
Why were 18'th century soldiers drilled and drilled and drilled, for far, far longer than just the time it took them to master their skills?
I could go on. At some length.
I could talk about grandmaster chess players. Physicists whose names are commonplace words every freshman engineering or science major learns without ever reading their bios. World renowned pioneers of technology whose names are used as common nouns rather than just proper names.
Every one of whom managed to go mad as hatters.
Logical and evidence-based thinking are at the very periphery, the outer envelope, of what our primitive brains can accomplish. In order to be any damned good at all with either, we have to work and work, practice decades, open our minds to ruthless criticism, submerge our own egos, discipline our minds like centurions.
And it can still all desert us, in an instant. Leaving us with nothing but our lizard brains. Without our even knowing it's absence, more often than not.
I agree: our rational mind are mostly a thin veneer. I think women tend to be more rational than men, because women are more practical than men. And that's really a generalization.
One thing: someone on another website said that autistic spectrum (Asbergers) people are more rational than normal. Is that true?
I can see doing one of those classic "out of the mainstream" ads about Palin.
Not sure if this works for democrats or not, but I agree you need to go for the lizard brain in politics. Now this is much easier to do with a straight face if reason, reality, and logic are on your side.
Some people need a good narrative and metaphor to wrap around events and what they already know before they're ready to go where most of the readers of this blog already are.
As an aside I'll note Rachel Maddow has started calling McCain and Palin liars. Direct blunt language works. Call things what they are. Euphemism is designed to obfuscate.
Worth noting:
Hillary Clinton's silence about Palin is now, officially, deafening.
I think she's afraid of her.
There's nothing wrong with aiming for the lizard brain if your payload is the truth.
A shopping list of failures by FEMA under Bush = meh.
Drowned houses stretching to the horizon = wow.
Describing how much harder it will to get birth control, let alone an abortion, under McCain = yawn.
Cops kicking down the door at a women's clinic after an anonymous tip = Yikes! (but I was just here for a pap smear!)
People tune out the drowned houses because it's just more TV news coverage of a disaster somewhere else, happening to somebody else.
Same thing with the cops and the women's clinic.
Things like this don't come home to most people until they're driven home with the business end of a steel-toed boot.
Bottom line, StormCrow: people have NOT tuned out the drowned houses, nor the drowned city; and it didn't take a steeltoed boot to drive it home.
The republicans were so worried about a repeat of the fallout from Katrina that it disrupted their convention. They were shitting green nickels, and they were doing it because they knew that a shitload of americans had used their rational thought processes, not their inner subconscious, to put most of the blame for the submerging of a major american city right where it belonged, on the heads of george bush and the republican party.
We don't need to be running visceral bullshit in this election. The truth will serve us just fine, thank you.
We need to run the truth, the facts, AND the "visceral bullshit". As Huxley said, "Nothing short of everything will really do."
But with the truth on our side, it makes the "visceral" less "bullshit" and more just needing to learn how to say it.
By the way, that "flip-flop" comment was out of line. When McCain was a POW, the prisoners had their shows taken away and then Viet Cong taunted them by flapping their flip flops at them. If you didn't hate the troops so much you'd know that.
The great thing about McCain being a POW is that he can use that to deflect *any* attack.
damn, tanbark, there must be a pony in that big pile of shit somewhere
first Obama votes that that FISA abomination and now he's talking about how well the Surge worked
why vote for a fake Republican when he vote for the real thing?
whoops, make that: why vote for a fake Republican when you can vote for the real thing?
We don't need to be running visceral bullshit in this election. The truth will serve us just fine, thank you.
The truth, by itself is NEVER enough.
I might be forgiven for thinking the last two presidential elections would have driven that point home with a 20 pound sledgehammer.
Dems are not, at the end of the day, all that much more "rational" than Repubs, when you come right down to it. If they were, the 2004 election would not have been nearly close enough to steal.
More on the subject of rational voters: since the election is often decided by the "undecided voter", read this interesting article about what "undecided voters" are really about.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/20...11/22/22252/
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Nice article, Kim C.
Here's a tagged link to the piece, which was published at dKos on Monday, November 22, 2004. Two weeks after Bush was re-elected for a catastrophic second term.
Crucial Reading: Lessons of Undecided Voters.
It's a copy of a piece Chris Hayes published a week earlier: Decision Makers.
Tanbark, if you haven't yet read this, I urge you to do so.
This is what we're up against. And underestimating the difficulty of a task is one of the surest routes to failure I know of.
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