WAS IT WHAT WE NEEDED?
I love and deeply admire Michelle, and I loved her speech. But I find myself wondering: Which Trump voters or undecided voters are now more likely to abandon Trump or vote for Biden because of it? All my Facebook friends were thrilled by it, of course, but we only get one vote apiece (hopefully!) and we had already decided to vote for Joe. Unquestionably, her speech was eloquent and brilliant. But was it speech effective? I fear that I am not convinced.
One of the most convincing post-mortems I read on the 2016 election appeared in Advertising Age; here is a link to it: https://www.siia.net/archive/neals/2017/filez/562460/562460_5Series_P004_AA_20161114.pdf
A particularly salient excerpt referenced “one of the Clinton camp’s most praised, and most heavily budgeted, ads, titled ‘Role Models,’ which showed innocent little children watching Trump say nasty things on TV, before serving a tagline: ‘Our children are watching. What example will we set for them?’…What the Clinton campaign seems to forget is that Donald Trump announced his candidacy a long time ago and said hundreds of outrageous things since, and we’re all used to it by now. We’re inoculated to it. Spending money to try to crank up the outrage machine over Outrageous Donald is probably not going to move the needle at this point. And, again,there’s a condescension factor at play (are you saying I’m a bad parent if I support Donald Trump?!).”
My fear is that Michelle fell into exactly the same trap; here is an excerpt from her speech last night: “And like so many of you, Barack and I have tried our best to instill in our girls a strong moral foundation to carry forward the values that our parents and grandparents poured into us. But right now, kids in this country are seeing what happens when we stop requiring empathy of one another. They’re looking around wondering if we’ve been lying to them this whole time about who we are and what we truly value.”
“Vote like I do or your parenting sucks” is not going to win a lot of converts, I’m afraid — even in this case, when a strong argument can be made that it happens to be true.
There is another issue too. What message do we want to hammer home that will not only win the election but get the country to unite behind an agenda that will actually get us out of this failed state morass we find ourselves in? If moral rectitude was the ticket, then Jimmy Carter would have been one of our most successful Presidents.
I think to win the election and to actually govern effectively after it, the Dems have to go after the central fallacy that Ronald Reagan convinced the country to accept as truth — “Government is the problem”. The Dems have never dared go after Saint Ronny, and maybe they don’t have to call him out by name.
But this pernicious fiction is literally killing us, and it is high time to attack it head on. If we accept that government sucks, if we don’t even challenge the premise, who cares how much Trump blundered? It isn’t like anybody else could have really made a difference, and at least Trump speaks to so many of our fellow citizens’ atavistic hatreds and fears.
I would frame the election in terms of patriotism. Show all the great stuff the government has done, lots of paeans to the “Greatest Generation” with footage of our factories creating the “Arsenal of Democracy”. Pictures of the Cuyahoga River burning in the 60s, and idyllic shots of nice families canoeing on it now. Pictures of polio sufferers in iron lungs, then footage of sweet little schoolkids lined up for their polio vaccines. And so on and so forth.
Everybody already knows Trump is an asshole. Not enough people seemed to care last time. And even if we win the election on that basis, we have done nothing to get the country to support the transformation our society must now undergo — or collapse.
