What killed politics? We won’t be judged

It was 1991 — Democrat strategist James Carville called to give me a tongue-lashing for writing that his U.S. Senate candidate was “the first to go negative,’’ with a new TV ad.

“It wasn’t negative — it was comparative — it was comparative,’’ Carville told me about a dozen times over the course of the call in his unmistakable, unforgettable Ragin’ Cajun accent.

Twenty-three year later, campaigns rarely (if ever) stop going negative. As Election 2014 ends, Election 2016 is already underway. Being the first to “go negative” is no longer news — or anything a campaign manager and reporter would even think to debate.

Political spending has skyrocketed. Carville went from working for Bill Clinton to talking full-time for CNN and now Fox News. Political debates are available 24–7 on multiple channels. And yet, the once great sport of U.S. politics attracts far fewer active participants.

Today I help organizations — mostly businesses — brand and re-brand themselves, to explain why they offer something no one else can so they can stand out and grow. That’s achievable for companies and causes — and nations — but it’s much harder for most politicians.

Today’s political debates rarely even make news. Media outlets were calling 2014 the Seinfeld election “about nothing.’’ Most charges were over the top and silly. The major networks barely covered the campaigning until election week.

My former editors at the Myrtle Beach Sun News and the Harrisburg Patriot-News made me a political writer because I “ate, breathed and lived politics.’’ I’d gotten the political bug at age 5 when my dad asked me to take fliers door-to-door and it grew as I stood at the polls at age 8 asking strangers, “Please vote for my Grandpa.’’

Politics was such a passion because it had the thrill of sports but it also involved life-changing matters, the fate of the world. Who won races really made a difference. And it was fun, challenging and unpredictable.

Now, like most Americans, I tend to tune it all out most of the time.

Yes, I watched the election returns as the GOP re-took the U.S. Senate for the first time in eight years. But few Americans currently have much faith in most politicians to change many things — or to get much done.

How did America’s love for politics die?

How did America’s love for politics die? Americans hate being judged and as soon as we feel someone is judging us — or playing games or wasting our time — we bolt.

When conversations become unproductive, leading to no real change, why bother to continue?

Hired guns, rabid partisans and TV talking heads will keep fighting for the attention. But most of us just walk away toward something more satisfying to our emotions and intellects.

That’s probably why many of us recovering political junkies have shifted our focus to watching TV shows like “House of Cards’’ (where leaders actually know how to get things done) or to non-political moral leaders like Pope Francis.

Politics, like faith, draws people seeking that difficult-to-achieve balance between mercy and justice. Messages that spur action appeal to either our head, our heart or preferably both.

Why we need both: In our family, the kids have learned their mom is the ever-abundant source of mercy — pure love and support — while their dad is the main source of justice — the one they count on for discipline and strength, the one who fights for what’s right.

The Mom Party vs. the Dad Party

Chris Bravacos, who served as executive director the Pennsylvania Republicans in the 1990s, used to tell me Democrats were the “Mom Party’’ because “they give you stuff’’ while Republicans were “the Dad party” that went to war, enforced discipline and attacked the bad guys.

But this year, The Washington Post’s Dan Balz called 2014 “An election about rejection’’ since the vast majority of potential voters were digested by the whole process. Everything is politicized.

A record $3.6 billion was spent on the 2014 midterm elections. More than 1 million TV ads aired in U.S. Senate races alone. Yet most of today’s political marketing seems to largely be about nothing: over-the-top, ludicrous charges that amount to: Judging the other side.

And note, those campaign spending numbers are a fraction of the $6 billion Americans spend each year at Taco Bell or the $83 billion Americans spend annually on beer.

Yet the smaller amount of money spent on politics now annoys us so much because it’s grown largely meaningless. Like the boy who cried wolf.

Marketers ruin everything: Turning ideas into cliches

Through the Cycles of American history, Americans have almost always had two main parties, each winning new power when the other didn’t do enough or went too far. For decades, campaigns focused on winning over “undecided voters’’ and aimed messages at the middle.

But George W. Bush and Barack Obama discovered a new way: The iPodization of America had personalized — and targeted — the way we market and communicate to each other. The Bush and Obama campaigns found it more efficient to focus on appealing to — and bringing out — their core voters most likely to vote for them.

Both campaigns discovered The Big Sort, what Bill Bishop described as the way Americans had sorted themselves out by interest, clustering into like-minded neighborhoods.

In 1976, Bishop found less than a quarter of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a “landslide’’ (where a county was carried by a candidate by more than 20 percentage points).

But by 2004, Bishop found, nearly half of all Americans lived in “landslide counties’’ that went either overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic, Red counties vs. Blue Counties.

Four changes that made politics splinter us into camps

1. Micro-segments and micro-targeting: The Bush campaigns in 2000 and 2004 found that if you watch Fox News and attend church regularly, you were likely to vote Republican. Want to understand the majority in your zip code fairly accurately? There’s now a website dedicated to that.

Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns focused on unmarried women. Messages like “the war on women’’ were aimed at getting their women voters to vote.

2. Burning bridges. As the Blue State/Red State mentality grew, the two sides became less and less likely to work together. Perpetual campaigns began, focused more on making the other side look bad rather than accomplishing much.

We get robocalls and emails plus see ads and get postcards every day until we hate them all.

Conservatives fire up gun lovers and people of faith with ads claiming we are going to be attacked or lose our rights. Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns focused on unmarried women and minorities. Both sides tried to demonize the other and rile up their base, scaring rather than inspiring.

3. Bias toward outsiders and newcomers. When politics turned more negative and anti-incumbent, both parties looked for new candidates with no baggage. That translated into candidates with little to no experience winning top jobs.

The result: Barack Obama won the White House just two years after leaving the Illinois State Senate. The same year John McCain chose a running mate who had gone from Alaskan mayor to governor in the same two year period.

Compare that to the seven nights we watched “The Roosevelts’’ on PBS this fall. We aren’t seeing any Theodore, Eleanor or Franklin Roosevelts out there right now.

4. Overspecializing resulting in cookie cutter campaigns and no new ideas. The Blue State/Red State divisions resulted in consultants and campaigns who now wind up running the same, predictable cookie cutter campaigns, again and again until most of us quit listening.

For two straight years, Democrats told us Republicans (including Republican women candidates) were running a “war on women.’’ Republicans, meanwhile, argued an ineffective president was somehow powerful enough to threaten everything.

How many times can you say “the sky is falling’’ before people quit paying attention?

Too many politicians are like the cable news channels: talkers from two sides each throw out a point of view, they spar a bit then nothing is agreed to, nothing advances and little changes.

The problem both sides face: modern Pharisees

Both parties are mostly ideologically driven, more concerned with defending (but not really advancing) their case than the truth and afraid of changing too much (threatening established special interests who fund both sides).

They are mostly judging — and blaming — each other like modern-day Pharisees.

Political parties aren’t the only organizations facing these challenges. Churches, businesses and even families face the same obstacles, the same inclination to talk but not listen, to blame rather than achieve.

If people feel they are being judged or lectured to, they flee to a place where they feel more love.

But we also want to be challenged. We want to be moved to become something more than ourselves. And we want to invest in people, organizations and movements who move us forward.

Most of my career has been spent telling stories: either reporting news or building brands.

The one politician who inspired me to actually jump the fence and go to work for government was Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a moderate Republican who wasn’t afraid to do big things like fixing Detroit and solving Michigan’s structural deficits.

In both 2010 and 2014, Snyder tried to focus on big agenda items while his opponents ran tiny campaigns talking about small things.

Major and controversial things Snyder did in his first term were barely debated this year because his opponents were too stuck in the weeds of irrelevant talking points few paid attention to or cared about.

Snyder won office four years ago after eight straight years where Michigan suffered from a record recession known as “the winter that never ends.’’ For years, little was accomplished politically. That began to change four years ago.

“The answer is to be positive and solve problems — to move forward — and it’s been working,’’ Gov. Snyder said after winning his second term Tuesday night. “We have been reinventing Michigan by showing that fighting and blame are not the answer.’’

Republicans went into Election 2014 controlling most governorships and were expected to see those majorities narrow. Instead, they wound up growing their majority by winning Democratic strongholds like Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts.

Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton and Pope St. John Paul II are all examples of bridge builders who stirred up their base but also worked with their foes and got things done, inspired the world and accomplished much.

Each also showed mercy as well as justice. Each made strong arguments for their sides, each opened their hearts and each reached out, trying to win other sides over.

Each told stories and built brands and ways of thinking that people could believe in and be inspired by.

Forget about the boring ads and speeches. Instead, remember the great speeches and ads of the past (examples are below), the kinds of narrative that will hopefully soon make a comeback.

Below: Political Ads and addresses that moved people and changed history

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.