Winning The Public Relations Wars

The biggest problem Republicans (and conservatives) have is getting their message across. For as long as I can remember, Republicans have been poor at explaining what they believe, why their beliefs work, and defending themselves against the Democrats. They’ve been particularly bad at the media wars. How do we fix this?

1. Learn To Advocate: It amazes me that a group of people whose careers are based on communicating are so poor at communication. I suspect this is the result of two problems coming together. First, most Republicans don’t know or understand their own beliefs. They are faking it on an issue by issue basis. Thus, they don’t know how to explain what they "believe." Secondly, they don’t grasp the nature of politics. Republicans seem to think politics is about policy, when politics really is about sales. It doesn’t matter how great your ideas are if you can’t sell them.

To solve the first problem, Republicans need to learn what they believe. The key to explaining something is understanding it. It is clear to me that too many Republicans, e.g. John McCain, don’t understand why free markets work, why tax increases hurt jobs and productivity, why rule of law trumps “fairness,” etc. How can people like that be expected to explain or defend those beliefs? This means establishing schools to explain conservatism to Republicans and requiring attendance.

Secondly, the Republicans need to realize that the public has the attention span of a bumbersticker. The public does not read political blogs, does not study economics, and does not want to hear some dude in a suit droning on. The Republicans need to learn to turn their beliefs into meaningful slogans. They need to learn to use hyperbole. They need to learn the value of useful analogy, i.e. analogy based on things everyone already understands. And they need to learn the importance of imagery: visceral feeling will trump logic every time in politics.

To solve the second problem, Republicans need to grasp that politics is not what they think it is. Too many Republicans think of politics as a high school debate, where each side gets equal turns at presenting carefully thought out arguments. That’s false. Politics is a verbal blood-sport. Politics has no rules. Republicans need to stop assuming good faith on the part of the Democrats and the media, and they need to learn to attack the people on the left as well as their ideas. If a journalist is a leftist, boycott them or call them on it. If they are married to a Democrat, call them on it. If they give money to leftist causes, call them on it. Republicans need to learn they can never relax or assume that the public will see through the other side’s attacks, and they need to start pointing out the other side's bias.

2. Get Ahead of the Curve: The Republicans almost always respond to events, they never lead the agenda. It’s time to start planning ahead. They need to come up with their goals for the next 2-5 years and then lay the groundwork by developing talking points, commissioning research that will be needed, and starting “a buzz” long before introducing the legislation. Not only will this let them set the terms of the debate, but it will let them decide what will be debated.

3. Fight The Digital Wars: It’s time for Republicans to grasp that everything is political these days and it’s important to fight on all fronts. Consider Roger Ebert. Ebert is a leftist hack, yet the Republicans would never think of countering his influence. Thus, he is free to slander movies like Atlas Shrugged for purely political reasons and to criticize Republican policies in the process without consequences. Republicans need to start flooding his comment streams with criticisms, pointing out each of his flaws and making fun of him, i.e. they need to learn the art of the digital shoutdown, even if that means paying people to cruise the net and engage in this kind of information warfare. Even more importantly, Republicans need to learn to label these people as leftists every time they are mentioned. They need do the same with every other leftist actor, journalist or company: label them, stop praising them, attack their views, and slap them at every opportunity. These people are the opposition and Republicans need to stop letting them spout their views unchallenged and without the public thinking they are unbiased or apolitical.

4. Media Wars: A couple weeks back, there was an interesting article about the state of conservative media. The article pointed out that even though a lot of money has been invested, conservatives have little to show for their efforts. I think the problem is (1) these efforts are too unfocused to be useful, (2) these groups do little to generate information, i.e. they only collect it, and (3) these groups are openly political and thus their releases are easy to dismiss.

A better model would be the creation of a “Memory Alpha” (for our Trek fans out there) of conservatism. This would be a single institution whose role would be to (1) act as a repository of conservative knowledge/information, and (2) coordinate groups who are generating conservative information.

In terms of collecting information, I’m talking about creating a massive database of quotes by Democrats (video and written), collecting evidence of their hypocrisies, arrest records, complete resumes, voting records, lists of contributors, comparisons of Democratic voting records against their contributors, connections to leftwing think tanks and other organizations, and what lobbyists they employ and/or are related/married to. I would also like to see candidates provide their opposition research on Democrats once elections are done. The idea is to keep them from hiding their true affiliations and to keep them from escaping their pasts.

The same information would be kept on journalists and talking heads who are married to Democrats or notable leftists or who belong to leftist political organizations so they can no longer hide their political affiliations and pretend to be “unbiased journalists.”

This institution also would be a place to put policy papers, talking points, studies, polls, etc., anything that explains, outlines or defends conservatism, or anything that debunks liberalism. In terms of research, this organization would commission research and polls, would act as a coordinating organization for legal foundations (sort of a conservative ACLU) where these groups could share briefs and coordinate their efforts, offer journalist and researcher training, etc. They should even do things like coordinate the creation of documentaries, like we were talking about the other day with an Is It Real debunking liberalism.

Finally, their role would be strictly limited to gathering and sourcing this information, not advocacy; exploiting it would be left to other organizations. That avoids the problems of groups like Media Research Center who release their own information and are seen as lacking credibility because they are clearly political. This Conservative Memory Alpha would be essentially a behind-the-scenes nonprofit, whose purpose would be to feed information to other sources, so they could do the fighting. This is a similar model used by the left, which allows them to present groups like Media Matters as "a nonprofit research organization."

This is what it would take for conservatives to start winning the information war. Thoughts?