Alright, here is the third and final part of my treatise on what Obama’s camp gets wrong regarding messaging strategy. This one that has me most perplexed, given that Obama seemed to really understand this early on. The rule is this. People do not vote on issues. They vote on values and personality.
Liberals have always eschewed talking values. They mistakenly believe that logic and reason will lead everyone to make the right decisions. Maybe it would, but people do not think that way. People make decisions largely by emotion, intuition, and abstract notions like values and morals, not with dry logic and reason.
This is most especially true in politics. People do not know the pros and cons of health care, nor do they care to. What they do know is how to judge people’s character. And as such, that is how they make political decisions. Is the person trustworthy? Can they do the job? Do I think they make good decisions?
When you talk about an issue like health care, you are not selling your policy; you are selling yourself. Ask any good sales person. People buy the sales person, not the item. If you turn people off, they will not buy from you. They will go buy from someone else.
Liberals have not understood this, and as such have not been able to make the sale. Even worse, conservatives were able to define liberals negatively. So people who agreed with Democrats and liberals on the issues voted against them since they felt liberals had bad values.
Everything Obama did up until the Sarah Palin VP pick showed he understood this. Progressives over the last few years have talked about the need to address matters of faith and values in order to show the public that progressive policies have a basis in common sense, Christian values. But while John Edwards blazed this trail in 2004, Obama paved it. No one in the history of progressive/liberal thought has communicated the value of progressivism better than Barack Obama. No one.
But he forgot which date brought him to the dance. Obama has recently started talking policy wonk stuff in his speeches and getting lost in a tit for tat with the Republicans over nonsense like lipstick on pigs. What are they thinking?!
Obama is not a policy wonk, nor does he need to be. He needs to connect to people emotionally. His charisma trumps John McCain’s. People ‘feel’ Obama much more than they ‘feel’ McCain. But that connection now gets lost.
Why has Sarah Palin jazzed up the Republicans and even middle of the road voters? (more…)