This is Violence

Yo Dawg, I heard You Like Winning Elections… or What Democrats Could Learn from Xzibit

If you read nearly any paper, or watched any sort of T.V. news, or went to pretty much any news or political website in the last 36 hours, you probably read something like this from David Brooks:

“…I doubt the health care bill will survive in anything like its current form. It was and is tremendously unpopular. The Republicans ran on repeal. They got a clear mandate to repeal the thing.”

There has been a lot of talk about this election providing a mandate to Republicans and being a referendum on everything from “Big Government” to “the Stimulus” to “Obamacare” to “Taxes” to just about everything else under the sun.

But here is the thing - I don’t think any of that is true.

“Big Government”? What does that mean? Big where? Big how? “The Stimulus”? I have to wonder what percent of Americans could explain even the basic premise of what “the Stimulus” is. The same is true of “Obamacare.” If anything was made clear during the debate on the issue over the summer it was this: no one knew what it was, but people were pissed about it. And “taxes”? No one wants to pay them, but almost no one, including the newly elected legislators, can begin to put together any type of coherent plan of services to cut to pay for those tax cuts.

Instead, the only clear mandate to me seems to be this: memes work.

By way of example, I submit this:

Let’s say you want to convey the obsurdity of combined objects? Like say a sandwich with the meat is held in place with more meat. The “Yo Dawg” meme is what you’re looking for. While early renditions assumed the basic structure

yo dawg, I herd you like X, so I put an X in your Y so you can VERB while you VERB

and looked like this:

The meme became so ubiquitous that it now can be truncated to simply “yo dawg” and still have the point understood. Example:

So then - what’s the difference between 2010 and 2008 for Democrats? And what does Xzibit have to do with any of this? While I suppose it’s possible that all of a sudden Americans have become a lot more focused on the intricacies of macro economic policy and voted Democrats based on that, I suspect is has a lot more to do with this:

In 2008 artist Shepard Fairey created this poster which instantly became an icon not just of the Obama campaign, but all of his supporters. Like “Yo Dawg”, this image, along with Obama’s twin slogans of “Change” and “Yes We Can”, became shorthand for conveying what were relatively complex and often not completely understood concepts. Against the war? “Change.” Against the war in Iraq but maybe not the war in Afghanistan? “Change.” Upset with the corrupting influence of lobbyists on the legislative process? “Yes We Can.” It doesn’t really matter that the imagery or the slogans are imperfect in conveying their meaning, in fact, that ultimately adds to their effectiveness. It does this by allowing people to agree (or disagree) with basic premise of a given point while silently, often unconsciously, adding their own specifics to it to make it perfect for them.

At my company Fight, we call this “the 80% rule.” It goes like this: If you’re trying to convey a difficult to grasp thought or concept, you’re better off having your statement be eighty percent right and simple, than one-hundred percent right and complex. Put another way, Apple includes “Multitasking” as a key feature of iOS on their website but it was only at their developers conference that Job’s explained the concept of “fast app switching” or as John Gruber put it:

“Apps don’t run in windows, they run on the full screen. So when you leave one app and switch to another in iPhone OS 4, the GUI — the visual interface — is not going to continue updating in the background. What will happen, if the app is updated to support the new OS 4 APIs (which, I expect, all actively-maintained apps will be), is that the app will stay in memory but stop processing. Switch back and it’ll start processing again, right where it left off.”

Yo dawg, we heard you like multitasking.

Which takes us to 2010. Gone were the icons. Gone we’re the slogans. In their place were nuanced explanations of how healthcare reform actually works. Tortured reflections on the size and timing of the stimulus package. And Kerry-esque stump speeches about how candidates were for either before they were against both. (a meme in its own right)

Meanwhile Republicans were running tried and true platforms of “small government” and new ones like “end Obamacare”, all under the flag of the “Tea Party”, which clearly not so much a coherent group as much as it is a catch-all concept for generalized anger at Obama and Democrats.

Putting a fine point on the role of good campaigning as opposed to good legislating is that no one really likes Republicans either:

“Democrats have a 10-point favorability gap: 43 percent of voters have a positive opinion of the party, while 53 percent aren’t thrilled. The Republican Party also gets a thumbs-down from 53 percent of the nation’s voters, with just 41 percent saying they’re happy with the GOP.”

Of course, none of this is anything new. It’s a basic tenet of advertising, which I suppose is perhaps why it’s troubling to look our political process this way. We’d like to think that the goal of any democracy is an educated voter base making rational choices based on a full set of data. But just as the idea of the “rational consumer” was thrown out the window a long time ago, so too should the “rational voter”. We’re irrational beings by nature, and the situation is compounded by an increasingly complex and global world. It would seem these days that true understanding of any issue is more often than not the purview of specialists within an administration rather than by anyone we see on T.V. Given this, how we can we expect someone with a day job to fully grasp the implications of reforming something as complex as the American health system.

Instead, if Democrats (or any party) want a chance to govern, they should learn from 2008. We call them “campaigns” for a reason, and as intellectually objectionable as it may seem, they’re about selling a concept not the intricate process. They’re about taking what are incredibly complex ideas and reducing them down to a meaning that people can “get”.

Bernbach said it like this:

“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.”