Josh Marshall (TalkingPointsMemo) recently wrote an outstanding diary called Road Map detailing how the RepubliCons will use/are using racism to try to win the presidential campaign.

Marshall’s diary is a must-read for anyone who wants to see McSame lose in November. We need to learn how this works and how to fight it. The RepubliCons have been using racism to win votes for more than 40 years, and they are pros. In short, the core of the McCain strategy is to

drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we'll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point.

How can we fight back?

This diary is almost entirely composed of two comments I made to this diary on MyDD today.

On visceral responses to McCain:

McCain is Bush's 3rd Term:

...  I think earnestly getting the truth out about him (McCain) and speaking to people viscerally (photo of him with Bush, character issues, etc) will be essential.  We are going to have to earn this win.  And we should have to.

I also don't think McCain really helps McCain.  It will be interesting if that plays out during the rest of this campaign.  Some of this he can't help and some he can: his age, being Another White Male who mostly surrounds himself with more Another White Males (do most people these days see themselves in that image?), him being MOTS (More Of The Same), unenthused speeches,  tension oozing from his seams,  lobbyists, Bush 2.0, not the one to seek for Change, not inspiring.  Most important: I don't really think he speaks to people on much of an emotional level.  Whether we Democrats like it or not, that's the way the body is made.

New Jersey voters are set to decide whether or not they support state funded stem cell research.  With federal funding for stem cell research severely limited because of President Bush's veto, it is up to private industry and individual states to carry the torch of hope on this issue.  NJ is looking to follow in the footsteps of California, and become one of only a few states providing governmental funds for this groundbreaking research.  

The referendum is set for:
Tuesday, November 6, 2007.

more below the snip.

(206)  Those on the left also do themselves - and the earth - a disservice by continuing to trot out words such as environment and environmentalism in public discourse.  Not only are these tired workhouses emotionally bland, but they are also precisely the words Republicans have successfully branded as the domain of effete, tree-hugging, spotted owl-saving liberals.  Instead, we should be using more evocative, less abstract, more emotionally compelling, and hence less readily co-opted phrases.  We should be talking about protecting the land of our forefathers, the air we breathe, the water our children drink, the streams we fish, the game we hunt, the trails we climb with our children, the gracious majesty of our landscape, and God's earth.  These are evocative images, some for most Americans, and others for distinct emotional constituencies.  They say exactly the same thing as "the environment," but they speak the language of Georgia and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan rather than the language of Northeastern environmentalists.

Join the ACLU of Southern California as it hosts former Nixon White House counsel and bestselling author John Dean for a lively and interesting conference call tomorrow, October 4 from 4-5pm PST (7-8pm EST).

The essence of an attack ad is the linking of emotive content with factual arguments.  Moveon.org’s recent ad in the NYTimes was a good example of this technique, that for too long has been the exclusive territory of Republicans.  

However, MoveOn's ad had some weaknesses (which I'll discuss below).  I know of few good examples of what makes a good Democratic attack ad, so I created one.  Please cite me if you are going to produce it.  I’ve worked as a film and drama critic, worked in advertising, made a documentary, and have degrees in this line of work--so, this is my area of expertise.

David Brooks trashed Drew Westen’s, “The Political Brain:  The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation” in this week’s NYTimes.  Given that Brooks has been empirically wrong on almost everything, it’s worthy to see if there’s something to Westen’s arguments.  Ok, let me correct that understatement:  IT"S GOTTA BE GOOD IF BROOKS TRIED TO TRASH IT!!

Under the header "Stop Making Sense", Our Mister Brooks tackles Drew Westen's new book "THE POLITICAL BRAIN:The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation" in today's NYT here.  Now I haven't read Westen's book, so I withhold any judgement on its content, or for that matter Brooks' judgement of the book. What I can judge is Brooks' free-floating assumptions about American politics and his own comments that have little if anything to do with the book under review.

In The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, Dr. Drew Westen insists that Democrats should be passionate advocates of their principles:

According to Dr. Westen, the dispassionate view of the mind which has guided Democratic thinking for 40 years is deeply flawed.  What decides elections are people’s emotional reactions, even if they don’t know it.

Karl Rove has understood this for years and has ruthlessly exploited it.  Republicans have been masters of emotional manipulation, especially since 9/11.  Democrats have not had a clue how to respond effectively.  

The consequences have been brutal.

The significance of Bush’s smirk. Gore’s The Assault on Reason. How work in inner city Atlanta informs his advice to Democrats on campaign strategy.

All this and more can be found below the fold in an interview with clinical psychologist and political strategist Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

Some highlights:

"We hide our values in the fine print of our policies and we never explain carefully why we care about poverty."

**

"If both sides are able to coin phrases that capture people’s imagination, then there’s probably going to be more of a battle of ideas that actually may at times be determinative."

**

"I think this election in particular is going to be like the election of 1976 in that we’ll have just gone through a period of eight years of tremendous dishonesty where people now recognize the dishonesty and they just want a president who won’t lie to them anymore."

**

"We’re a party that talks like technocrats when people are asking us questions about the meaning of life."

Let the interview begin:

The Political Brain
The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
By Drew Westen
Public Affairs
New York, 2007

When reason and emotion become disconnected, the result is often disaster. Sometimes that disaster may take the form of a neurology patient who, like those described by Damasio, can’t use emotion to stay out of harm’s way. Sometimes it takes the form of a psychopath, a person who experiences little or no remorse, empathy, or concern for others, who may know he is breaking laws or causing others pain, but doesn’t care.

At other times, that disaster may take the form of a Democratic political campaign.

Ouch.

In his handling of the Swift Boat affair, what Kerry effectively told the American people was what he would do if America were attacked: he would wait an inordinate amount of time until he had gathered enough evidence to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law, use polls and focus groups to see what kind of response Americans preferred, and then write our enemies a letter imploring them to stop their terrorist acts immediately.

Sometimes, the meta-message is the message.

Double pointed ouch.

... the left has no brand, no counterbrand, no master narrative, no counternarrative. It has no shared terms or "talking points" for its leaders to repeat until they are part of our political lexicon. Instead, every Democrat who runs for office, every Democrat who offers commentaries on television or radio, every Democrat who even talks with friends at the water cooler, has to reinvent what it means to be a Democrat, using his or her own words and concepts, as if the party had no history.

If this is how Coke marketed itself, we would all be drinking Pepsi.

I know that many, many others here have weighed in on the Democrats’ compromise capitulation on the supplemental funding of Bush’s war, but I wanted to go on record with my pair of pennies, and, if anyone has somehow missed this elsewhere, urge everyone to call their representatives in Congress.

Thank you in advance for reading.

This is a watershed moment for Democrats. At first blush, it might not feel that wet—the partisan Republicans packing the executive and judiciary branches are, after all, strong bulwarks against a progressive tide—or it might only feel that certain kind of wet one might get in a pissing match (a frame the establishment media is all too eager to put around the conflict between the new majority party in Congress and the dead-enders in the White House). But, this is not a pissing match, nor is it a time to tread water—how the congressional Democrats behave during the remainder of this session will define this generation of politicians for scores of Americans and set the tone for the ’08 election cycle.