Democrats Learn How to Talk Issues

July 6, 2007 — -- WASHINGTON — Both political parties are in a constant search for advisers who can make them winners. Many Democrats think they've found one this year in psychologist Drew Westen, author of a new book on passion and politics.

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, released last week, has catapulted the Emory University professor from the ivory tower to the political epicenter. And Democrats throughout the capital are listening to his prescriptions and adapting them for practical use.

Westen's essential point: "Passion is what drives us" in the voting booth, yet "the words we use on the left are emotionally barren." To stop losing winnable elections, he says, Democrats need to engage the parts of the brain that aren't activated by facts and figures.

Westen has met with union leaders, political donors and fundraisers, liberal and centrist groups, party committees, members of Congress and all major presidential campaigns. The Senate Democratic Policy Committee is working with him on a "messaging project." Last week Democratic senators each received a copy of The Political Brain.

The centrist Democratic Leadership Council heard Westen at its spring retreat and invited him back to address hundreds of elected officials this month in Nashville. Westen is also collaborating with Third Way, a progressive, non-partisan think tank, on a strategy memo.

The goal, says Third Way President Jon Cowan, is to get candidates of any party to focus on "the received impression" of their words — how people perceive what they're saying. That means learning that "reason and rationality … are not the most effective political weapons" in a campaign.

Republicans have been honing their language since the late 1980s, when Newt Gingrich began mailing training tapes to tens of thousands of conservative officeholders at all levels of government. They learned what issues to talk about — and how to talk about them — as they commuted to and from work.

Communications strategist Frank Luntz, who advised Gingrich and the GOP for years, in January released a book called Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. He says Democrats have passion, but they express it unappealingly or not at all.

"Al Gore should have won" in 2000, Luntz says. "He lost because Americans didn't want him in their living rooms every night. John Kerry did the same thing in 2004."

Kerry's primary ads were "filled with passionate emotional pleas for change," Luntz says, but his ads became "clinical and studio-oriented" when he switched consultants.

Around that time, Democrats were looking for rescue from linguist George Lakoff and his book, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. He said conservatives were dictating the terms of debate with phrases such as "death tax" — a Luntz version of estate tax. Lakoff's ideas for Democrats include calling the national debt "the baby tax."

Though framing is now part of Democratic thinking, Lakoff's practical suggestions have had limited application. Westen, the latest potential savior, has been on the horizon since last fall. That's when Robert Kuttner, editor of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, received a draft of the book. "It was the best explanation I've ever read for why Democrats keep blowing winnable elections," says Kuttner, who started introducing Westen to key Democrats.

Brain science and 25 years of work with patients underpin Westen's proposals. He says his research and studies by others show that "partisans think with their gut."

Parties need "a good brand," Westen says, because 80% of a person's vote is based on how that person feels about the parties.

The next most important basis for voting is gut-level feelings about candidates and their qualities, Westen says. Feelings about candidate policies are "a distant third."

Facts about candidates' policies are an even more distant fourth. And yet, Westen says, that's what Democrats usually focus on first and most. He suggests they stop offering "tired" phrases like "I'll fight for you," stop measuring success by how many statistics they can spew, and stop saying "let's get back to issues" when under personal attack.

Republican assertions that Democrats are untrustworthy or won't defend the country activate subconscious brain networks that "keep reverberating," Westen says, even if Democrats don't respond. So ignoring the attacks just cedes the argument to the other side.

For Democrats, the most painful part of Westen's presentation may be clips of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis' rote, abstract answer on the death penalty when asked during a debate about the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife, and Gore spouting numbers when asked about health care.

Much better, Westen says, is Gore in the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth saying "this is our only home" and wondering what "our children will think" if "we don't protect the Earth we are bequeathing them."

Westen jokes that his book is "the assault on The Assault on Reason," a reference to Gore's new book. In truth, he says candidates don't need to abandon all reason: "Just wedge … that data, into an emotional context that makes you care."