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Let's begin this Tuesday morning's Morning Feature special feature with a question. Ok, two questions. An easy one, and a hard one. First, the easy one:
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Remember, that's just the warmup.
When you're ready, here's the hard one:
Which comes first, the rational or the emotional?
If you were managing a political campaign, or choosing who to vote for as a result of one, that second question may have much greater consequences for your life than the first one.
Intro
I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!
- Tom Lehrer
As far as reasoning goes, the reason I claim that first one is easier and the second one harder is because the second one carries more meaningful consequences. The answer means something. You would have to try pretty hard to convince me there is a significant difference between the answers to the first question. But, if emotions are primary, and reason evolved as an adaptive response to environmental conditions, then we need to be paying much more attention to the emotional content of our political messages and strategies in order to elect more and better Democrats. If like many, if not most Democrats, you see the rational as primary and dominant in terms of politically persuasive messaging then you will be drawn to a certain, and very different, kind of debate, ad campaign, and candidate.
Drew Westen wrote a book titled "The Political Brain." In this book, he wrote on p. 62:
The capacity for rational judgment evolved to augment, not replace evolutionarily older motivational systems [emotions]...Freud analogized reason to a hapless rider on a horse, who does his best to channel and control the large beast, pulling it this way and tugging it that way, but ultimately the power resides in the horse, not the rider. The rider could always get off, but he wouldn't get very far on foot.
And so it is with reason and passion. Reason can prod, regulate, and offer direction, but on its own it is pedestrian.
The Argument
The Democratic Party has packaged and presented presidential candidates for the last 40 years using a paradigm of the rational. When Michael Dukakis was asked about the hypothetical rape of his wife in a presidential debate, he gave a rational, policy-rich, answer:
There are two primary threads of debate on this moment in American history:
- Dukakis should have given a more emotionally resonant answer, one that matched the tenor of the question, proving himself to be a candidate who could feel pain and loss and whether he could make a convincing case for holding true to his avowed principles and values even in the face of such a personal disaster. The question may be unfair, but is appropriate as it gave the candidate an opportunity to personally connect with the electorate.
- The question was biased against Dukakis, designed to unfairly trip him up and inject unnecessary and inappropriate emotion into a serious policy issue with wide ranging national consequences. The question is inappropriate as it is clearly a "gotcha" moment intended to expose Dukakis' weakness as a candidate rather than present the candidates with an opportunity to educate voters on their policy differences.
Dukakis dropped in national polls over the next 24 hours from a 49% approval rating to a 42% approval rating. After piling on the tank incident (insincere, out of character) and the Willie Horton ad (FEAR! FEAR! FEAR!) without any compelling emotional appeal coming from the Dukakis campaign, it is clear to Westen and his converted faithful that a reluctance, or far worse - inability - to be emotionally available to the voting public is what did him in.
Or, in Westen's words:
We are not moved by leaders with whom we do not feel an emotional resonance.
That includes moving to the polls. That is why I find the current criticisms of President Obama being too detached, cool, and aloof disturbing. Not that his emotional reaction to the police incident leading to the beer summit was particularly effective, either. But, in many ways, I feel like I'm seeing the playing out of yet another emotionally awkward Democratic leader when what I want is an emotional ninja-samurai.
I mean, consider this: Even if we all 100% agree with position #2 above, the question was unfair and inappropriate, we lose. The question was asked and had to be answered, and what then? How to answer? The election was not decided in the minds of the voters in terms of whether or not the questions were fair. It was decided based on emotional networks activated in response to answers given, and Dukakis' answers (throughout the campaign) activated the wrong ones. After all, presidents are expected to deal effectively and efficiently with global and domestic crises that are unfair and inappropriate. An unfair and inappropriate debate question, or swift-boat attack, or smear campaign shouldn't be a problem.
The Details
It could be argued that John Kerry, Al Gore, and every other Democratic presidential candidate (except Bill Clinton, and maybe Barack Obama, but the jury has not reached a verdict on him yet) met their demise because of this trap. The Democrat-as-wonky-cerebral-cool-aloof-master-of-many-numbers-and-policies-and-facts trap. We get angry, frustrated, and astonished that people respond to negative attack ads even after our polling tells us the last thing they want to see on tv is more negative attack ads! We have so much faith, and yes, emotional investment in the superiority of our policy positions and thoughtful approach that it nearly kills us that people who can't name prominent heads of state, tell the difference between Sunni and Shia, or read a newspaper got to be president or nearly-president.
But, Westen, lays it out with bullet point efficiency.
- Bounded Rationality - voters are busy people. Busy people do not have the time or resources to investigate, study, and share details of every candidate's position on every policy, or what the details are of every policy held and promoted by every candidate. Therefore, we take shortcuts. Those shortcuts are invariably emotional ones. Who we'd most like to have a beer with is maybe not a good way to govern, but it is a real emotional heuristic that influences many voting decisions. As is the "which of these candidates is going to fight hardest for what they believe in?" emotional heuristic. And who won those two debates in 2004? The swift-boaters, or the let's-be-silent-so-as-to-not-dignify-the-attacks-Shrum-wing of the Kerry campaign?
- Every Successful Political Appeal (Ad) Has Four Plot-Points:
A. First, be emotionally compelling. Your appeal can be to pride, hope, fear, terror, or patriotism, but make sure it is the first thing out of the gate.
B. Contrast between candidates. This is not about policy differences. All that phony-baloney about "real Americans?" Classic candidate-contrast at work. Remember, we're not talking about rationality or things that make sense, we are talking about establishing an emotional connection and motivation to action.
C. Present a solution to a problem. For example, Hillary answering that 3am phone with her strength of character, political and executive experience, for many people that was an emotionally strong solution as well as a rational one.
D. Close with an emotionally compelling moment. If you want people to remember the point of your ad, either to motivate them to vote for you, to not vote at all, or vote against your opponent; you have to close with something that makes them feel strongly enough to mull that over on some level rather than the emotionally compelling football game, House episode, or Jersey Shore rerun that immediately follows it (what politician would advertise on Jersey Shore?). You need to close strong, with an indelible emotional impression.
3)
The Evidence
Westen provides anecdotes, debate moments, speeches, and clinical research to support his thesis and back up his controversial-among-Democrats-but-accepted-wisdom-among-Republicans approach to campaigning.
Next week, we'll look at two case studies through this analytical lens, and the following week consider some examples from other authors and unrelated sources that happen to support (at least as I interpret them) Westen's thesis. First, though, Westen's own brain imaging work that indicates that political affiliation, loyalty, and bias are biologically based in emotional brain systems, physically dooming the rational to subservient status.
Last week, we looked at Jerome Kagan's case that there are different classes of evidence for defining an emotion. One of them was brain imaging, or brain activity. Westen did a study (he is first and foremost an academic research psychologist, having worked and taught at Michigan, Harvard, and Emory) in 2006 inquiring how political partisans (strongly affiliating with one or another party) brains' might react to challenging information about political candidates they either supported or opposed.
Westen and colleagues put these partisans through a brain scanner while showing them statements made by Bush and Kerry wherein each candidate contradicted himself. The Bushies forgave their man, rationalizing away the inconsistent remarks while jumping all over Kerry's "flip-flopping." Kerry-supporters, meanwhile did exactly the same thing. In this case, it's ok whatever political preference you may have, strong partisans reason away their own candidate's inconsistencies but attack those of their opponents.
This was not the surprising part of the study. This was the expected part.
The surprising part was that during the act of explaining away their own preferred candidate's contradictions, the executive function area of the prefrontal cortex was quiet. The area of the brain they expected to be active in formulating reasons for why it was acceptable for their "man" to get away with it while holding the other guy's feet to the fire was not the area they found most active. The emotional limbic system was most active when reasoning away the faults of their own candidates. And, the reward centers lit up once a resolution had been achieved.
Apparently, according to Westen's research, accepting our own candidate and rationalizing away their faults releases brain chemicals akin to chocolate, sex, and certain pharmaceuticals, chemicals that are most associated with emotional satisfaction, euphoria, and contentment.
While this is correlational research, we cannot say why these two events are related as strongly as they were found to be, we can say that political affiliation and disregard of contradiction is primarily an emotionally active brain state.
What does this mean for Obama? We're getting there...
Next week, two case studies and Westen's prescriptions for how to avoid sharing their fate in future campaigns. The week after, corollary evidence from non-Westen sources, and in the final segment, what does this mean for our guy?
TWLTW
- PBS Special series called "This Emotional Life" aired last week. Great website, with lots of detail about the very forms of evidence discussed in last week's diary (brain activity, verbal description, behaviors). One of the stories presented is of a person who before the age of 18 was arrested 24 times for arson, drug use, and vandalism then met a mentor and grew up to be a professor of thoracic surgery. The argument made is that the turning point was the quality of the social relationship with the mentor changed the man's emotional palate, enough to empower him to make other changes in his life. The Happinesspage alone is worth a look!
- A New Yorker article recommended by CDH in Brooklyn discusses the pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of human emotions to inanimate objects, in this case the American system of government.
- Drew Westen on Hardball last week. (Maybe not all writers are natural-born television talents?):
- 492,700 residents of Brooklyn received food stamps in 2008. 660,200 did in 2009.
- Of New York City's 100 highest paid chief executives, 4 are women.
- There are actually, many, many other interesting things I could add from this week, but honestly, two of them are clouding out the others as I write this. My daughter has floated between a 99.3 degree temperature and a 103.3 fever since Friday night, It is possible that I may have to run her to the pediatrician, and be unable to monitor this diary discussion as it happens. If it comes to that, I'll post a comment, beg your forgiveness, and do my best to respond to comments as quickly as I can. The other is that my mother is meeting with her cardiology team this morning to discuss treatment options for her two 100% blocked arteries (and 2 others between 65% and 75%). I had a great list of really interesting tidbits, but right now, these are the only two I can think about.
What Did You Learn This Week?
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