Thursday, September 02, 2004
 

Deception and razzle-dazzle

I've been complaining all over the place (my most recent rant is here, but there's earlier stuff here and here) about the polling coming from Strategic Vision, the very Republican polling firm run by the GOP stalwart (Honorary Chairman for the National Republican Congressional Committee's Business Advisory Council) and spokesman for arch-conservative Larry Klayman, David E. Johnson. SV came out of nowhere to provide convenient (extremely convenient) and timely (almost daily, it seems) polls of the most troublesome of the battleground states, and these polls find their way in to a lot of news stories and electoral vote status updates without being labelled as coming from a partisan firm.

Typically, polls coming from other partisan firms, both Republican and Democratic, are labelled as such, so that people can decide how much credence they wish to put in them, but Strategic Vision polls are presented alongside those from Gallup, Rasmussen, American Research Group, Zogby, Survey USA, Ipsos and other firms which, while they all have their faults and weaknesses, are basically non-partisan.

My suspicion (which I frankly admit could well be paranoia and tin-foil hat stuff) is that someone is footing the bill for all this Strategic Vision polling (which must be awfully expensive, given that each of them is of 801 likely voters, meaning they must have gone through many more prospects to get to that number), and that that someone is in some way intimately connected to the Republican party. Further, I've got the awful feeling that their polls could either be deliberately skewed in order to provide an "objective" basis for Republican storylines about Bush momenta in those critical states, or, less corruptly (but just as deviously), it could be that their polls all use a likely-voter model which itself skews results, many times in Bush's favor, for the same reason.

Looking at Strategic Vision's website, one sees very little to disabuse the casual visitor that the firm is anything but a non-partisan organization engaging in civic-minded polling for the edification of the public and the media, and certainly very little that explicitly lays out the firm's connections with the GOP. Contrast that with how America Coming Together presents their latest polling in the Upper Midwest: a bunch of press releases strung together, almost impossible to find on the website.

[Update: I crunch some numbers and take a more specific, and less rhetorical, look at Strategic Vision here.]

This disparity of presentation between Republicans and Democrats could well be taken as an object lesson in the gap between the parties in presenting their ideologies, policies and candidates to the public. The Democrats, comparatively speaking, provide a straightforward and honest, but boring and lackluster, presentation of the information they have to offer, while the Republicans take their dope and clean it up, dress it up, spruce it up and make it over into something it's not, all so that people will be taken in.

On Tapped Jeffrey Dubner observes the same disparity:

Watching an "America Can Do Better" Democratic press conference [...] I started to understand why the Democrats aren't getting the traction during the RNC that the Republicans had during the DNC. The press conference was full of substantive arguments and detailed indictments of Dick Cheney and Harvey Pitt; the Dems on display talked about Halliburton and the Small Business Administration and environmental destruction. Paired with the Republicans' "Extreme Makeover" press conference during the DNC that I wrote about at the time, it's an object lesson in how not to get your talking points into the media conversation. The Republicans went directly after the speeches and themes of the DNC; the Democrats were talking about policies and actions of the last four years that have gotten them steamed. The Republicans repeated talking point after aggressive talking point; the Democrats talked. Only New Jersey Representative Bob Menendez talked about the previous night, and his condemnation of Arnold Schwarzenegger was so detailed and specific that most reporters probably couldn't get the punchlines down. The whole thing might as well have never happened.

It's a strange paradox. Research shows that when presented objectively and without labelling, Americans agree with the ideas and policies espoused by the Democrats, so much so that the Republican have taken to dressing up their programs in quasi-Democratic costuming to hide their true nature. They know that, if presented objectively for what they are, their ideas would be rejected soundly by most Americans, which is why they need the glitz and glitter, the trompe l'oeil and sleight-of-hand, the smoke and mirrors, the deception and craftiness and guile. And because they're so damned good at it, and have the major media in their pocket, they control the size, shape and scope of political discourse in this country, so that we're all always dancing to their music, always responding to their initiatives and re-acting on their terms.

We think that frankness, honesty, principles, integrity and sound thinking is enough to carry it off, and we're suspicious of the devices and deviousness of the opposition, but the plain fact of the matter is that the truth is no match for deception and show biz values, which are likely to carry the day more often than not. It's not that I think that Democrats need to lie and deceive the public in order to win, but if we don't start to use at least a modicum of razzle-dazzle and entertainment value in the presentation of our ideas, without stooping to outright chicanery, we're never going to win consistently.


Addenda: George Lakoff on how the right controls the terms of the debate. [Via Follow Me Here]

Ed Fitzgerald | 9/02/2004 02:03:00 AM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE







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