If the
Democratic campaign had not taken such a negative turn, McCain would arguably
be suffering from all the focus on the Democratic contest, which is clearly
grabbing the lion’s share of media attention. But the attention is no longer
positive, and as the story has turned from voter enthusiasm to acrimony, it’s
giving McCain the opportunity both to brand himself and to join the fray on the
other side of the aisle when the opportunity arises. McCain is defining himself
with little resistance (and an occasional assist from the Clinton campaign) as
the natural choice for commander-in-chief and as a straight-talker--a
particularly strong brand in an election that may turn out to be much like the
1976 election, when Jimmy Carter reassured a nation weary of the dishonesty of
the Nixon years, “I will never lie to you.”
He is also
taking the opportunity to help brand his potential rivals, amplifying the
perceived weaknesses of both Democratic contenders. Recently, for example, he
described his opponents as offering “platitudes instead of principles and
insults instead of ideas,” effectively joining with Hillary Clinton in her
attack on Barack Obama, while simultaneously turning her own relentless (and
effective) attacks on Obama into an attack on her. By referring to her campaign’s attacks as
insults (some of which were, in fact, insulting), McCain was reinforcing what he
and Republican strategists know is the greatest threat to her electability: her
high negatives, and the public perception, built up through a well-financed,
well-executed (if ill-intentioned) conservative branding campaign when she was
First Lady, that she is cold and ruthless.
It would
truly take talent for the Democrats to lose this election (although Democrats
have never hurt for talent). Seventy percent
of Americans tell pollsters that the country is on the “wrong track.” The
Republican president’s approval ratings have hovered around 30 percent for two
years. For the first time since 1992, the majority of Americans answer in the
negative to Ronald Reagan’s electoral litmus test (“Are you better off than you
were four years ago?”). In presidential match-ups, independents overwhelmingly
prefer generic Democrats to generic Republicans. And most voters trend strongly
Democratic on the vast majority of issues confronting the country, particularly
when offered messages designed to be compelling (as opposed to the more
“neutral” language of so much polling, which asks people to rate statements
such as “Global warming should be one of the government’s top priorities.”)
Independents’ attitudes tend to be far closer to Democrats’ than Republicans’
views on health care, the economy, energy independence, Iraq, and even
the Republicans’ most recent wedge issue, immigration. But with the circular
firing squad among Democrats beginning to take its toll, John McCain is now matching
up remarkably well in polls against his two potential rivals for November--and with
their nomination process in suspended animation, the Democrats are in danger of
employing the best strategy for losing in November: Waiting until the
Democratic primary contest is over to start a full-fledged branding campaign
against the presumptive Republican nominee.
The reason
that is a losing strategy is as much neurological as political. As explained in
greater length in my book, The Political
Brain: The Role of Emotion In Deciding the Fate of the Nation), much of
our brain consists of networks of associations--thoughts, images, ideas,
memories, and emotions--that become connected with each other over time, so
that activating one part of a network activates the rest (including the
gut-level feelings associated with a candidate that “summarize” voters’
judgments about the candidate and are among the best predictors in the voting
booth). The more times a network is activated, the harder it is to change, for
reasons both physiological and psychological.
Physiologically,
the more two neurons are activated together, the more likely one is to trigger
the other, as chemical changes in the cells themselves and the actual growth of
physical links between them bind them together. Pragmatically speaking, that
means that the more times voters hear John McCain described as a war hero and a
strong potential commander-in-chief—instead of, for example, a man with such
poor judgment on national security that he would support an endless
continuation of an ill-fated war much like the one he suffered through despite his own personal experience--the
harder it will be to deactivate that network and inhibit those neural links. Similarly,
from a psychological standpoint, the longer voters hear the story that McCain
is a “straight talker,” the more they will filter out and actively resist
disconfirming information, such as his involvement
in the Keating Five, his fall off the wagon of the Straight Talk Express when
it seemed expedient to wrap his arms around George W. Bush and Jerry Falwell,
his embrace of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy when he knew--and stated clearly
when he initially voted against them--that they were both fiscally unwise and
unfair to middle class Americans.
With their
clear understanding of marketing, Republicans may not know the biology, but
they understand the principles of branding in politics. Long before John Kerry
had even won the Democratic nomination in 2004--in fact, within forty-eight
hours of his victory in the New Hampshire primary that signaled that he, rather
than Howard Dean, would likely be the Democratic nominee (and a potentially
formidable one, given his own status as a war hero in an election the Bush
campaign intended to center around war and national security)--both the Bush campaign
and the conservative spin machine moved into action with an extraordinary
branding campaign. They sent out talking points and fanned out across talk
radio, Fox News, and other conservative media to disseminate one of the central
narratives that branded Kerry from the start and became a key interpretive
frame through which both voters and the media viewed everything he said
thereafter: that he was a flip-flopper, who had taken every side on every
issue. The branding campaign was so
successful that within weeks voters could purchase a new brand of shoes—John
Kerry Flip-Flops—which Fox News’ Chris Wallace displayed with the caption, “If
the Shoe Fits.”
There are glimmers
of light on the progressive side of the aisle.
This week the AFL-CIO launched an innovative Internet-based “briefing
book” called McCain Revealed, which
walks voters through McCain on the issues (and is worth viewing just for its
production value—like pages that flip back and forth with the glide of the
cursor), and the union has the ability to reach millions of potential readers
with direct mail. And other progressive
organizations reportedly have their guns cocked and ready to fire. But if Democrats want to win this election,
particularly when negative messages about both of their presidential candidates
are now filling the airwaves 24 hours a day and shaping the networks of
association that constitute public opinion, they’d better load their 527
automatics and come out with guns a’brandin’--not tomorrow, not in June, not
after a potentially contentious convention in August, but now.
Drew Westen is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University
and founder of Westen Strategies. He is the author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in
Deciding the Fate of the Nation.
By Drew Westen