"Why are Democrats so bad at messaging? Because we don’t care —and don’t try! And oh yes, one other thing: We have contempt for much of the public—for the people at whom such messaging aims, the people who get to vote.
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman didn’t call the public crazy. They didn’t refer to their lizard brains when they could instead refer to their “hearts” and their “souls”—and to their “ideals.” (Emotional speech connects with ideals.) Quite famously, Roosevelt spoke to masses of people with great respect, through their radios. He remains famous for the fact that he spoke to the average “man.”
Today, our liberal leaders often prefer to sneer and display their contempt for such people. (They aren’t as smart and as moral as we are!) Why are we so bad at messaging? In part, because, as a point of pride, we refuse to speak to the unwashed masses to whom such messages would appeal."
http://www.dailyhowler.com/I think Somerby nails it here in many respects.
"Frankly, it’s too late for Obama to make such appeals in any serious manner. Narratives develop over stretches of time; you can’t ask Obama to show up in the year 2009 and magically make up for decades of Democratic and liberal lethargy. The other side has been aggressively building its messaging—its frameworks—over the past forty-five years. People have heard these claims again and again, and many more times after that:
Big government never did anything right.
Liberal elites think they’re better than you are.
You can’t expect Obama to compensate for the lack of a strong, well-established counter-narrative. But if we ever do build such a narrative, it would probably turn on these points:
First, it would turn on some well-crafted statement of an obvious fact: Big Moneyed Interests will try to loot you. They’ll do it every time—till they’re stopped.
Second, it might turn on a second obvious fact: Big Moneyed Interests will send tribunes out to deceive you. They will lie in your faces—till they’re stopped."
I suggest another pushback to the Republican "Big Government never does anything right" meme, and it is one I used in a recent LTTE - list some things that Big Government has done right.
"I am not sure what socialized medicine is supposed to be, but it does seem clear that places like Canada and Switzerland have systems that cover everybody and that cost much less than our system and provide just as good results. Those are basic facts we rarely hear. But we are not going to get a system like the one that works in Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan because we are afraid of national programs like the Post Office and the interstate highway system and NASA. They clearly never work. We can put a man on the moon, but we can't have national health care."
The trouble is that our main way of pushing back is to insult the voters. This plays into the Republican message "liberal elites think they are better than you." We say to people, and about people - you are idiots, bigots, racists, and fools (and by the way, vote for our guy). "We hate you (or people a lot like you) with every fiber of our being, but please join with us to make this a better country."
Some of them, of course, hate US with every fiber of their being and are not shy about saying so. I think it is better to cry foul about that then to strike back. First, because you don't defeat hate with hate. Second, because striking back can look bad. It's like in football. Often a player will get punched or otherwise roughed up and get angry and strike back. Then the person hitting back gets caught and penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct. Sure, their reaction was justified and understandable, but an undisciplined reaction just hurts the team. Third, the hatred often spills over into the team. We not only hate the people on the other team, we hate the people on our own team who disagree with us on issues. We certainly saw plenty of that during the primary wars in both recent elections.
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