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.