Cookie-cutter politics

Why does the American political scene seem so pre-fab, predictable,
and uninspired? Why are half the voters so bored with it all that they
would rather take a long lunch than go to the polls? Part of the reason
is the clamor for a nationally “unified” political message. This
strategy ends up turning every candidate into a clone of every other,
automatons reading scripts written by distant consultants rather than
people who think for themselves.

To hammer out a unified message, the GOP is dumping millions on
polling firms in hopes that pseudo-scientists will help the party
maintain a majority in the 2000 election. The unified message is to be
crafted by the shadowy Communications Working Group. The CWG has printed
up briefing books to be memorized by every candidate. It provides
coaching services, training House members 40 at a time to say only what
CWG deems to be politically viable.

Here’s what these geniuses have come up with so far: every GOP
candidate should promise to cut taxes, save Social Security, improve
education, and strengthen the military. Yawn. Not only is this package
dull beyond belief, it is intellectually incoherent. Are “save,”
“improve,” and “strengthen”
synonyms for spending more tax dollars? If so, you can’t cut taxes. Or
can you only save, improve, and strengthen through cutting? We can’t
know, which is precisely the point.

Ask your local Rep to give a fuller explanation and he’ll respond
like a CD player set on one-track playback. Expecting honesty and
frankness is apparently too much these days. After all, these phrases
supposedly pleased the focus groups. Everyone up for reelection must be
programmed to repeat them again and again, at rallies, on TV, in
debates, in speeches from the House floor. Why? The CWG says so, and the
CWG is endorsed by the top mucky-mucks in the party who pay the bills.

When queried by World Magazine,
Republicans claimed that the CWG doesn’t dictate the agenda. It only
provides help in the rhetoric. In fact, you can’t separate the two. If
you have promised only to “improve education” in your campaign and on
the floor of the House, you are not likely to suddenly propose to
abolish the Department of Education or even cut its budget. In any case,
if you did, the CWG would crack down on you. The rhetoric is the agenda,
no more and no less (if you can even imagine less).

The unified, necessarily watered-down, message is an insult to
voters. It presumes that they are automatons without a thought in their
heads; they react predictably to verbal stimulus like rats in a
Skinnerian behavioral model. Maybe these politicians really do believe
that most people are beyond
freedom and dignity, but certainly the activists who go to the polls
aren’t. If you don’t inspire people with some show of courage, they
won’t bother.

What’s more, unified messages don’t speak to the vital regional
reality of this country’s history. The continuing glory of America is
that it is made up of a wide range of local and state customs, symbols,
and political dispositions. The issues in the West (e.g., federal
control of lands) are different from those in the South (e.g., judicial
control of schools) and the North (e.g., HUD’s imperial overreach). The
really successful politicians in our time are those who perfectly speak
the language of the communities that gave them birth and address voters
in terms of issues that matter to them.

Clinton, for example, knows better than to abandon the rhetoric of
his Arkansas roots, while George W. has started playing up his Texas
origins. Meanwhile, disembodied politicos who have let the focus-group
determine their approach (Al Gore and Steve Forbes come to mind) are
suffering
unexpectedly.

From the CWG’s perspective, the ideal politician is Speaker Dennis
Hastert, R-CWG: dull, lifeless, void of colorful rhetoric or ideological
conviction. Is there any thinking man on the planet who would walk down
the block to hear him speak? Or even return his phone call? For all
their faults, Jesse Ventura and Pat Buchanan speak their minds and
address a real constituency instead of a focus group. Hence they inspire
some degree of public interest.

How did the GOP come to be so thoroughly hornswoggled by the
message-unifying wizards at Beltway polling firms? It all began with
Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America.” Recall that this document is
widely credited with the 1994 election. Ever since then, the Contract
experience of
“nationalizing” the message has been repeated, with ever less impressive
results.

Ready for a shock? There is no evidence that the Contract With
America had anything whatsoever to do with the Republican 1994 victory.
In 1994, the GOP party structure, still smarting from having lost the
executive branch, was weak and disorganized. The candidates who emerged
to run on the Republican ticket were mostly homegrown folks who despised
what Clinton was attempting to do to the country. They went into
politics to stop him and everything he represented. Speeches that year
were wild, wooly, and gloriously radical, and they inspired millions to
go to the polls.

The real purpose of the Contract With America was known only in
esoteric circles. It was actually cooked up by the elites in the party
as a last-minute tactic to achieve two goals if the Republicans regained
Congress: first, to permit the leadership to hog credit for what was
actually a consequence of passionate campaigning by individual
politicians and, second, to hamstring the radical freshmen once they got
in office.

Sadly, it worked on both fronts. To this day, the freshman class of
the 104th believes it owes its success to Gingrich, and still doesn’t
realize that it was the Contract — consisting mostly of meaningless
procedural reforms — that prevented the Congress from accomplishing
anything substantive.

Today, the political establishment desperately wants to repeat that
success (or failure, depending on whether you pay taxes or spend them).
That means a unified message from the party because it, along with the
entire power elite, fears the fracturing of the country into its natural
regional
identities.

The elites’ idea of the ultimate threat is something like the
Southern Party, a vigorous new political organization that calls for
Southern rights above all else. Ideally, there would be Western,
Heartland, and Yankee parties as well. The more fracturing that takes
place, the less the central state is able to control us all.

There is only one source of unanimity in this country, but the CWG is
not likely to discover it. We are unified in having a common enemy in
the Leviathan state that loots and pillages us, gets us into wars, and
ropes us into its orbit of command and control. Above all, the attempt
to unify the party’s electoral message is an attempt to keep that truth
under wraps.