There has already been some discussion about last week's Mark Penn profile in the New York Observer (the DailyKos iterations of which are by slinkerwink and DHinMI). But I felt I had to weigh in with a Political Psychology perspective, since that's my expertise and since it's so very, very obviously not Mark Penn's. This is the passage that really stuck in my craw:
[Penn] reserves a special disdain for a group he identifies as the "impressionable elites": people who can afford to pick candidates based on fuzzy feelings rather than on the impact the candidates’ policies will have on their lives.
Now then, let me first just say, HOLY CRAP. He said what?!?! In this diary, I'll show just how offensively ignorant and wrongheaded Penn's paraphrase in the Observer story was.
I always thought people this ignorant about the workings of the political mind were an urban myth, the kind of bogeyman mothers of Political Psychology scholars tell us about before bed. Now you're telling me someone in her right mind has actually let a person like this anywhere near her campaign?!
To see why this is so wrong, let's start with a recent quote from The Rockridge Institute that introduces the importance of emotion in political decision-making:
"There is a faulty view of voting behavior – widely held by political strategists on the left – that people already know what they want. All you have to do is conduct a poll to find out where they stand on the issues, then build a platform of positions that accords with the polls, and they will vote for you."
Although Joe Brewer and George Lakoff are doubtless prohibited from saying so because of Rockridge's tax status, Mark Penn is the indisputable poster child in this election for the problem Joe and George identify. Voters generally don't know what policies they want—they use their values as a sort of algorithm to plug policies (and candidate personalities) into to see if something they want is there. Emotions help them apply the algorithm correctly and efficiently, helping them to make an intelligent, relatively informed decision. Joe and George also make a somewhat obvious point that doesn't always get the recognition it deserves:
To be implemented, worthwhile policies must have political support. Whether they have such support depends on how the public understands them.
And let me just tell you, EMOTIONS HELP PEOPLE UNDERSTAND POLICIES.
But let's take Penn's flawed assumptions one by one: (1) people use cold, emotionless reason to decide on a particular candidate, (2) doing so yields a more honorable/authentic/serious outcome, and (3) people with more at stake (i.e., one is led to assume, working class people) are more likely to take that approach.
(1) News flash to Mark Penn: Sherlock Holmes was fictional. There is no such thing as a perfect reasoning machine, let alone one that doesn't use emotion. As Antonio Damasio has shown, we depend on emotional signals back and forth between our bodies and brains (although, he would say, such a body-brain duality is illusory to begin with) in order to make even the most basic of rational decisions.
Moreover, as the Affective Intelligence Model (AIM) shows, we depend on emotional signals to lift us out of our cognitive inertia when evaluating candidates and actually weigh their positions. Emotions are inextricably tied up with even the most hard-headed rational approaches to candidate evaluation.
(2) Since modern science has shown that emotions are NOT just something that gets in the way of reason, but are in fact integral to the very existence of reason, there can be nothing dishonorable or un-serious about using them to reach a decision.
A common trope in American politics, which Penn, or at least the reporter, seemed to be referencing in the excerpt above, is that reglar-ole-folks are more authentic and therefore better than other people. But, as I will explain in (3), there is no reason to think reglar-ole-folks are the ones who are most likely to use a purely rational cost-benefit approach.
(3) Political scientists like to talk about a certain cleavage in the electorate: high information voters and low information voters. High information voters might read DailyKos, or at least the newspaper or something. They may not have everything right, but they know who John Roberts and Nancy Pelosi are.
But low information voters might just catch a candidate's ad on Jeopardy! while they cook dinner. They're too busy living their lives, making their living, and raising their families to devote much cognitive energy to national affairs. These are the people who Mark Penn thinks have the most at stake, and yet time and effort constraints would make them, if anything, the most likely to depend on emotions in the (false) trade-off between emotions and reason.
There are several possible explanations for why Penn would say something so stunningly idiotic. Among them:
He is willfully distorting the science because he secretly doesn't care about the struggling people he implies will be most affected by the election. That's why he didn't run a campaign for Clinton that would have helped those people see the benefits in her candidacy.
When he talks about the people who will be most affected by the primary election, he is referring to his and Clinton's corporate cronies and DC insiders as the people who would be helped the most by Clinton's policies.
He is a dangerously ignorant individual who attained his elevated station through leveraging powerful connections and being in the right place at the right time. As the head of the world's biggest PR firm, this means he should probably be locked up on the grounds that he is a danger to himself and all his clients, both political and non-political.
In my personal opinion, the last of those three hypotheses fits the data the best. What do you think explains Mark Penn's apparent idiocy?
My name is Will Bunnett. I have an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, with a focus on Political Psychology and behavior. I briefly interned last fall at the Rockridge Institute. This spring, I'll be presenting a paper on the use of metaphor in political speech to the Midwest Political Science Association. Please email me if you'd like to participate in the research; it would be a huge help.