Communication Problems among the Democrats

A common explanation given by Democrats for their big loss last Tuesday is that for some reason Obama and the other Democrats found it hard to communicate what they had succeeded in doing. We’ve heard this sort of explanation before. After the 1994 election, there was similar talk among the Democrats.

The Democrats do have a communication problem, but it’s not the one they think they have. People heard them loud and clear on what they had accomplished. Instead, a persistent problem the Democrats have had for many years is that they inadvertently communicate messages antagonistic to their main messages.

Probably the easiest example in which to see this is that of those environmentalists who want gas to go to $5/gallon. This tells the poor, “We don’t care about you.”

Another example comes from Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit guy, who has said on many occasions that he will start taking global warming seriously when the politicians who promote it (generally Democrats) reduce their carbon footprint by giving up their huge mansions and using videoconferencing instead of actually flying to their many global conferences. In other words, the message they are inadvertently sending is: “We don’t really care about this stuff,” or even worse “Those rules are for the little people.”

For Obama, one of the first inadvertent messages was his choice for Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who as it turned out hadn’t paid some of his taxes. The message, as Reynolds often puts it, is “Taxes are for little people.”

Then there’s the passage of health-care reform, which most people didn’t want: “We don’t care what you want.”

In addition, there’s the message sent about jobs, which had less of a priority than health-care reform and about which they seemed to have no interest: “We don’t care if you’re losing your job.”

Another message, one sent for many years but which apparently had no effect on the election of 2008, was the message sent when the Democrats nominated yet another graduate of an elite school (something they didn’t do very much when I was young). The message sent, one which contradicted the explicit message that they are of the people, was: “We’re elitists.”

Many other messages from the Democrats are longstanding messages, and it is no doubt true that some people more or less in the center, who had tired of the Republicans by 2008 and voted for the Democrats, quickly had buyer’s remorse when they saw the way the Democrats operated. Suddenly, they remembered why they had been voting Republican.

Most people don’t pay any attention to academia, which is a shame since it is filled with inadvertent messages that liberals and leftists are sending. The unemployment situation, which they don’t care about, plus their sucking up to schools for the rich and their denigrating the schools that poor people typically attend, send messages that are diametrically opposed to the messages they usually send. And their staunch support of peer review in connection with global warming says that they don’t care about the opinions of those of us at the bottom.

Do others send inadvertent messages? Of course. But Democrats like to think that they are smarter than everyone else, so the message sent given that they aren’t aware of all these inadvertent messages is: “We’re not as bright as we think we are.”

Comments

[DirtCrashr]

It's like they are demonstrating - literally acting out - the Dunning–Kruger effect, the whole script of of the 1999 Cornell study "Unskilled and Unaware" - and that's similarly reflected in their use of Orwell's 1984 as a playbook to be duplicated rather than a cautionary tale to be avoided.

[John Pepple]

Thanks for the comment. The Dunning-Kruger effect, yes.