Watch Obama Pour Cold Water on 'Defund the Police' Slogan:

[George II]

Watch Obama Pour Cold Water on ‘Defund the Police’ Slogan: ‘You Lose a Big Audience the Minute You Say It’

By Tommy Christopher Dec 2nd

Former President Barack Obama became the latest prominent Democrat to pour cold water on the “Defund the Police” slogan when he told an interviewer that the “snappy” mantra immediately loses large chunks of the electorate, and is an obstacle to the reforms it aims to enact.

The former two-term president appeared on Peter Hamby’s Good Luck America show on Snapchat, in an interview that aired Wednesday morning. During that interview, Hamby asked President Obama about the slogan that Democrats like House Majority Whip James Clyburn have identified as a reason for the party’s poor showing in congressional races.

“When you were a community organizer, a lot of the folks in the community you were dealing with really just kind of wanted modest change, they wanted to do better for their families,” Hamby said, and asked “If you’re a young activist today, and you believe really passionately in a slogan like ‘Defund the Police,’ what is your advice to that activist, also knowing that a lot of politicians won’t go near that phrase?”

President Obama offered a considered but clear rebuke of the phrase, but not the aims of the reform movement:

It’s interesting, we take for granted that if you want people to buy your sneakers, then you’re going to market it to an audience. If a musician drops a record, they’re going to try to reach certain audiences, speaking to folks where they are. It’s no different in terms of ideas.

If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased, and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund the Police,’ but you know you’ve lost a big audience the minute you say it. Which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.

But if you instead say ‘Let’s reform the police department so that everybody’s being treated fairly, divert young people from getting into crime, and if there’s a homeless guy, maybe we send a mental health worker there instead of an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy.’

Suddenly, a whole bunch of folks who might not otherwise listen to you are listening to you. So the key is deciding do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with? And if you want to get something done, in a democracy, in a country as big and diverse as ours, you’ve got to be able to meet people where they are, and play a game of addition and not subtraction.

(Note: The Excerpted segment is part of the "fourth paragraph" )

Video is on the mediaite site here:

https://www.mediaite.com/author/tommy-christopher/

[comradebillyboy]

1. The Squad responds from their D+30 enclaves.

https://www.mediaite.com/news/squad-members-clap-back-at-obamas-defund-the-police-clapback/

[George II]

2. Funny you posted that! I just posted that as an OP as a follow up to this article (same author)

[BannonsLiver]

11. Predictable bleating.

Just take the L.

[Pisces]

3. Demilitarize the Police, Reform the Police both better slogans than Defund. Why are we trying to die

On this hill. Those words should be shrugged off immediately and no Dem politician should utter them again!!!

[nykym]

4. Personally I thought the Defund the Police was

the most asinine slogan to use in an election period.
Reform the police would have been less divisive and may have actually helped us in the elections.

Frank Luntz the venerated republican slogan master said;
On the other side, whoever came up with “defund the police” is an idiot. “Hold the police accountable” is a far better message.

[Meadowoak]

18. I remember when the slogan "defund the police" was born,

It was about 2 minute that the Republicans had an ad with an old lady calling 911 to report a break in, only to get a recording saying they wouldn't be able to send an officer for 5 days. They are much better at messaging than we are.

[uponit7771]

5. Good on Obama NOT attributing a slogan to down ballot losses as so many other have been needlessly

... guessing at.

Needlessly because there would be polling ... DURING ... and ... NOW ... showing slogans and terms would've been the MAIN reason for unmeet expectations for dems down ballot.

Instead of guessing dem polling should've told us this waaaaaay before election day, we wouldn't need to guess at why down ballot performance didn't meet polling expectations.

Good on him

[Butterflylady]

6. I did not know what defunding the police meant.

Simple as that, so I googled the phrase to get the meaning. Found out what it meant and had a better understanding. Now, the majority of folks I'm sure didn't take the time to find out what defunding the police meant, but I'm a political junkie and I like to know what I'm talkin about. Most people do not, so what they took from those words were that they were going to abolish the police. Hey, when I first heard the phrase so did I.

So what Obama said makes complete sense to me.

[George II]

7. That's the big point - it gives the wrong connotation, and there are tens of millions of Americans..

....(especially in the South) who just take it on it's face and don't go that one extra step to find out what it really means.

[Ms. Toad]

13. This.

I've said all along that

(1) if you use a short phrase to capture a movement, the gist of what it means needs to be instantly clear from the phrase. If not - you've lost everyone who is turned off by a phrase (even though they might ultimately agree with what you mean by it).

(2) it needs to mean roughly the same thing to everyone who uses it. I've seen countless discussions in which one proponent says, "We dont' mean take all the money away from the police - or abolish the police - we mean redistribute money and prioritize funding appropriate non-police responses to problems where police are not the appropriate response" - to which someone else using the slogan responds, "No - we really do mean take all the money away from the police." That core disagreement by people who use the same slogan means the movement is going nowhere because as soon as it is pressed on what the goals are it falls apart into internal fighting.

[DinahMoeHum]

8. If you have to explain what "defund the police" means. . .

. . .you flunked in your messaging and marketing.

The "Squad" should STFU for once, 'cause they still have a lot to learn from an old grizzled community organizer like Obama.

[redstatebluegirl]

9. You bet!

[Qutzupalotl]

14. Yep: "If you're explaining, you're losing."

I heard that a lot during the 90s and 00s.

Democrats gravitate toward policy solutions that are complicated to describe, which don’t often lend themselves to reduction to a snappy slogan. When we try, as in this case, we let our anger dictate a slogan that sounds more extreme than what it really means. “Reform the police” is closer to what we want, but we have now poisoned our own well; the other side will reflexively go to “You mean defund?” — and not hear anything else we say.

We can’t just play to our base any more than we can govern half a country. We’ve seen what that looks like for the last four years.

So we need to approach this as though we’re speaking to someone from the other side, and try to appeal to their sense of justice and fair play, as Obama is saying here.

[Arthur_Frain]

10. Where you been?

8 years of presidency is a lot to ask of any man, but what do we have to do to get this man actively coordinating and directing the democratic platforms? We need his measured decency to answer trumps knee jerk chaos. God I miss this man. He’s going to wing up being THE statesman of my generation.

[MineralMan]

12. Slogans work and don't work for the same reasons.

They aren't written to make people think about what they mean. They are written to have an immediate emotional impact.

What that means is that people see or hear a slogan and it registers on them, based on what they already believe. It doesn't encourage them to analyze the words and think about what they mean, logically.

That's why "Defund the Police" caused so many people to react negatively. Emotionally, "Defund" means "Shut Down," since things cost money. That registers immediately. So, people react to that slogan, depending on how they see the police. Do they see it as a force that maintains the peace and enforces the laws, or do they see the police as a force that harms them directly?

It's a poor slogan because of that.

Reorganize the Police. Reform the Police. Fix the Police. All of those say the same thing meant by "Defund the Police," but do not generate the same level of negative emotions in large groups of people you need on your side.

Slogans stimulate the emotions. They don't explain anything about what they mean. If sloganeers think people will think about their slogans, they are incorrect. They will only react to them, based on what they already think.

President Obama knows that. He's a very smart man.

[BannonsLiver]

15. As usual Obama has it right

The squad is just plain wrong. Get outside a D+30 district once in a while. Come see us in the hinterlands.

[Jamesyu]

19. Also the squad underperformed Biden in those districts

Omar being the top one, so being pure in a very blue district doesn't always help.

[bearsfootball516]

16. Rose Twitter is blowing him up, saying he's basically a republican

No comprehension of what it’s like to try to win in anything less than a D+35 district.

[Gothmog]

17. Obama Says 'Defund The Police' Alienates Voters, Drawing Sharp Rebuke From The Left

I trust President Obama on this issue

Link to tweet

Former President Barack Obama drew criticism from progressive Democrats this week for suggesting that “snappy” slogans like “defund the police” are alienating voters and making it harder from a political standpoint to enact “changes you want done.”

In an interview with Peter Hamby, who hosts the Snapchat political show “Good Luck America,” Obama said “you [lose] a big audience the minute” a slogan like “defund the police” is used, making “it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.”

“Defund the police” refers to the reallocation or redirection of government funding from police departments to social services for minority communities. As Rashawn Ray of the Brookings Institution noted, defunding does not mean the abolishment of police departments but instead “highlights fiscal responsibility” and “advocates for a market-driven approach to taxpayer money.”....

Obama ― echoing other centrist Democrats who’ve similarly taken issue with “defund the police” and what they’ve decried as radical messaging ― told Hamby that Democrats could benefit from adopting softer rhetoric when talking about police reform.

“If you instead say, ‘Hey, you know what? Let’s reform the police department so that everybody’s being treated fairly. And not just in policing, but in sentencing, how can we divert young people from getting into crime?’” he said.

[cbdo2007]

20. He's saying what many of us have been saying/thinking for the past 5 months.

The first time I had to explain to someone what it ACTUALLY meant on Facebook, you could see that it was a disaster.

[aidbo]

21. Too bad it's not our slogan to change.

[Sugarcoated]

22. 100%

Why are the progressives clinging to this phrase?

[Bettie]

23. Well then, find a way to get activists to use your own personally approved

phrases on their signage.

[George II]

24. People tend to forget that Obama got his start as an activist and community organizer....

I think he knows a little bit about what works and what doesn't work.

[Bettie]

25. The point is

you can't stop a person at a protest for putting something on a sign.

Nor can you realistically stop right wingers from using anything as a weapon.

The fact is these assholes could turn "I like Kittens" into some kind of deep, evil conspiracy and then we'd hear over and over about how "I Like Kittens" lost us the election for dogcatcher in Mid-Rural Somewhere.

[George II]

26. But you CAN expect the organizers of a protest to be more sensible about their theme.

[Bettie]

27. I've never been to a protest where someone said

"nope, not that sign". Never.

[George II]

28. Neither have I, but when the sponsor/organizer uses that slogan....

....that's what Obama is primarily talking about. He's not talking about a random sign here and there.

We even had at least one Congressperson talk about that on the floor of the House a while back.

Bottom line, I trust Obama's instincts and opinions.