President Obama May Finally Have Learned How to Communicate Meaningfully — the Art of the Loaded Synopsis

© 2011 Peter Free

 

14 April 2011

 

 

The problem, from the Democratic Party perspective

 

Republicans have been using the national budget deficit to justify two purposes dear to their plutocratic masters:

 

(i) gutting government (except insofar as it can be used as a tool to further enrich the plutocratic elite)

 

and

 

(ii) transferring yet more wealth from the struggling poor and middle classes to the already obscenely rich.

 

The Republican Party has been very effective in coming up with concise, uniformly mindless, but emotionally memorable statements to conceal or justify these orientations.

 

Republicans are good at talking to people who combine wishes for simplicity and certainty with an understandable ignorance about much of the world really works.  Republicans are the political equivalents of Madison Avenue’s advertising elite.

 

Democrats, on the other hand — continuing to be the historically undisciplined, chaotic mob of organizational incompetents they have historically been — have been clueless in effectively exposing Republicans’ democracy-destroying ploys.

 

Democrats are generally bad at talking to anybody who does not already agree with them.  Democrats, for the most part, are inept at manipulating (or leading) the public long enough, and in disciplined enough fashion, to get the nation to go anywhere useful.

 

 

“If you’re gonna talk down to folks, at least do it memorably”

 

President Obama may finally be learning how to use cogent juxtapositions to more effectively make his case in political opposition:

 

And worst of all, this is a [Republican Party] vision that says even though Americans can’t afford to invest in education at current levels, or clean energy, even though we can’t afford to maintain our commitment on Medicare and Medicaid, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.

 

Think about that.

 

In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined.  Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each.

 

That’s who needs to pay less taxes?

 

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs.

 

That’s not right.  And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.

 

© 2011 President Barack Obama, Remarks by the President on Fiscal Policy, White House (13 April 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

 

The art of a lawyer’s closing argument

 

The President’s speech links tax cuts for the rich directly to the poorer people, from whom the lost revenue is going to come from.

 

Juxtapositions like this are capable of grabbing people’s attention, especially when presented over and over again.

 

That’s a communicative story art that the Republican Party has traditionally stomped Democrats with.

 

(Cartoonist R. J. Matson’s cartoon about energy slogans illustrates this point brilliantly.  You can see it here.)

 

We’ll see if the President is up to the task of mud wrestling long enough, in memorable enough terms, to turn the deception tables on his Republican opponents.

 

 

A distinction without a meaning

 

Better verbal gamesmanship from the President does not mean that truth or democracy-preserving action will emerge.  The Democratic Party is just as indebted to the nation’s plutocrats as the Republican.

 

Increased "story" facility on the President’s part simply means that politically competent, reality-distorting sloganeering will become more equally distributed between the political parties.

 

If the nation wants to pursue a democracy-preserving course, it will have to (a) publicly finance elections and (b) create a third political party.