[...] In his book "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation," Drew Westen convincingly argues that "people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the candidate who presents the best arguments." [...]
[...] In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Elections are decided in the marketplace of emotions, a marketplace filled with values, images, analogies, moral sentiments, and moving oratory, in which logic plays only a supporting role. Westen shows, through a whistle-stop journey through the evolution of the passionate brain and a bravura tour through fifty years of American presidential and national elections, why campaigns succeed and fail. The evidence is overwhelming that three things determine how people vote, in this order: their feelings toward the parties and their principles, their feelings toward the candidates, and, if they haven't decided by then, their feelings toward the candidates' policy positions.
Westen turns conventional political analyses on their head, suggesting that the question for Democratic politics isn't so much about moving to the right or the left but about moving the electorate. [...]
In the prologue to the second of his autobiographies, "The Audacity of Hope," Barack Obama said: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."
Stanford University professor Shelby Steele, who, like Mr. Obama, has a black father and a white mother, thinks the key to Mr. Obama's popularity in 2008 was his racial identity.
"Obama's special charisma ... always came much more from the racial idealism he embodied than from his political ideas," wrote Mr. Steele.
[...]
Being a "blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views" is a good way to be elected president ... especially when the incumbent is saddled with an unpopular war and the stock market melts down two months before the election. But after two years in office, that blank screen can look more like an empty suit.
"For a man who won office talking about change we can believe in, Barack Obama can be a strangely passive president," wrote Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus last week. She generally supports him but says "there are a startling number of occasions in which the president has been missing in action -- unwilling, reluctant or late to weigh in on the issue of the moment. He is, too often, more reactive than inspirational, more cautious than forceful. The dots connect to form an unsettling portrait of a 'Where's Waldo?' presidency." [...]
[...] Time and again, when the impressive thing would be to make a strong and timely decision — and to make a clear case for it — Obama hesitates, vacillates, equivocates, and ends up, as in the matter of gay marriage, making a muddle of things and riling up pretty much everybody; and instead of recognizing this habit as a weakness, Obama himself shows every sign of considering it a virtue, a mark of excellence, that distinguishes him from lesser — which is to say less cognitively inclined — beings.
...
Obama’s deep thinking is ultimately bogus. It’s as if he’s posing for Rodin, elbow on knee, chin on fist — all the while staring in a mirror, pleased by what he sees.
[...] Are liberals more "open-minded" than conservatives?One doesn't expect Democrats to like Republicans; that's just partisan politics, and completely understandable. But when they throw around the Evil Nazi rhetoric so frequently, they overstate their case, and I cease to take them seriously. They sound like children name-calling in a schoolyard; immature and emotional, incapable of serious critical thinking and analysis, and not to be treated like adults.
To find out, a biennial survey conducted by the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies uses a scale from 0 to 100 -- 0 meaning shoot-the-person-on-sight hatred, and 100 meaning find-a-place-for-him-on-Mount-Rushmore adoration. The 2004 survey then asked 1,200 adults to define themselves politically.
Using this 0-to-100 scale, the survey asked those who described themselves as "conservative" or "extremely conservative" to rate "liberals." Average score -- 39. "Liberals" and "extreme liberals" gave "conservatives" a similar score -- 38.
But the survey then asked respondents to apply the scale to specific people. How did "extreme conservatives," in 1998, rate then-President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore? "Extreme conservatives" gave them both an average reading of 45. Twenty-eight percent gave Clinton a 0, with 10 percent giving that score to Gore.
How did "extreme liberals" rate President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in 2004? That group gave Bush and Cheney an average temperature of 15 and 16, respectively. Sixty percent of these extreme liberals gave Messrs. Bush and Cheney a 0. In other words, six out of ten Americans on the far left found that no evil, heinous person in the world could be worthy of more hatred than Bush and Cheney. For a little perspective, the then-alive Saddam Hussein received an average score of 8 from all Americans.
Dick Morris, a former aide to Bill Clinton, described how Clinton berated his 1996 Republican opponent, former Sen. Bob Dole. President Clinton said, "Bob Dole is not a nice man. Bob Dole is evil . The things he wants to do to children are evil . The things he wants to do to poor people and old people and sick people are evil. Let's get that straight."
After Republicans took control of the House in the mid-'90s, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., compared the newly conservative-controlled House to "the Duma and the Reichstag." Dingell referred to the legislature set up by Czar Nicholas II of Russia and the parliament of the German Weimar Republic that brought Hitler to power. [...]
Columbia University has rightfully been under fire for inviting Iran's President to speak to its student body. Now Columbia's Dean is not only defending the decision, but says that Columbia would offer a platform for Hitler to come and speak if he were alive and in America.
So, there you have Dean John Coatsworth of Columbia University was on Fox News late last week telling the world that Hitler would be invited to speak at Columbia, were he available. Wonderful. But how do you square this against the decision by Columbia to un-invite the founder of the Minutemen? How do you square this with Columbia's refusal to allow the ROTC on campus? Hitler is OK, but a man who founded a group to monitor illegal activity along our borders is not? Hitler is fine, but young men training to be officers in our armed forces are not? [...]
When Hugh linked this post on the DailyKos where a Jewish lesbian, confessed having A Little Crush on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I quickly e-mailed Bruce, telling him that this was “beyond parody” and that I couldn’t find the words to express my stupefaction. Once again, I was rendered speechless by the far left. Yeah, the writer “sallykohn” does acknowledge that the anti-Semitic supporter of terrorism would “probably have [her] killed.” She even notes that there “are certainly many things about Ahmadinejad that I abhor.” All that notwithstanding, she gets “turned on” by this guy’s “frank rhetoric” because he’s “calling out the horrors of the Bush Administration and, for that matter, generations of US foreign policy preceding.“ [...]
[...] It looks like we have a high-powered brain scientist serving as the latest advisor to the Democratic party. Drew Westen conducted research which leads to his conclusion that politicians – liberal politicians -- should try and appeal to people's emotions, rather than bogging them down with data and facts.
Where did we first find out about this research? Why, at the ultra-left wing "Take Back America" convention, that's where. The study was presented by researcher, Drew Westen, a psychologist and brain researcher at Emory University in my hometown of Atlanta.
Here's the ironic part of his study. It sounds to me like Dr. Westen is basically telling democrats that their constituents are stupid. He is telling democrats to appeal to constituents' emotions because "it doesn't make sense to argue an issue using facts and figures ... or to count on voters to make choices based on sophisticated understandings of policy differences or procedures." And there you have it. Avoid the facts, just go right for the heart!
Dr. Westen is suggesting that manipulating a voter's emotions is better than boring them to tears with sophisticated understandings. "Sophisticated understandings? What's that? Sounds to me like just a phrase denoting basic worldly knowledge, or being an educated citizen. Mr. Westen says, "[The brain] prefers conclusions that are emotionally satisfying rather than conclusions that match the data."
Message to Democrats. Don't bore your constituents with facts. Just tell them whatever makes them comfortable, warm, happy and all fuzzy.
Hmmmmm .... Not boring constituents with facts. Does that sound at all like the global warming cultists? But, I digress [...]
