This from the Daily Kos – sad but true – we Democrats win on graphs, facts, spreadsheets, etc. but lose to the Luntzian-inspired Republican propaganda machine:
I used to have a stump-speech critique of the Democratic Party that went something like this:
Republicans sell their policies with appeals to emotion. They hit you in the gut. Democrats sell their policies with charts and graphs and spreadsheets, in other words, appeals to the intellect. There's no question which has been more effective. Just take a look at how Coke, Pepsi, and Apple sell their products. This is why "framers" like Frank Luntz exist in the first place.
There's a reason so many economically disadvantaged whites and tea party suckers are propping up Wall Street Republicans at the expense of their own self-interest. The Democratic desire, no, (pathological) need to win the debate on intellectual terms is oftentimes the cause of our undoing. (Another example? Liberals argue for gun control by citing gun deaths statistics. Conservatives have built an entire warm-and-fuzzy culture around gun ownership that will always trump those stats.)
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