LIVE from Minneapolis: Drew Westen, Tate Linden discuss keys to effective messaging

Good morn­ing from Min­neapo­lis! Today is the first day of Net­roots Nation, and the NPI team’s first full day in the Twin Cities. I’m at a break­out ses­sion called Get the Mes­sage?, orga­nized by Dar­cy Burn­er and fea­tur­ing Drew West­en and Tate Lin­den. The ses­sion was adver­tised as a pan­el, but it’s real­ly been more like a pair of pre­sen­ta­tions (by Drew and Tate), emceed by Darcy.

The premise of the pre­sen­ta­tions is that Democ­rats and pro­gres­sives don’t do a good job telling their sto­ry, and that as a con­se­quence, Democ­rats do not enjoy the pop­u­lar sup­port that they should. To be more spe­cif­ic, the qual­i­ty and con­sis­ten­cy of our mes­sag­ing is poor, and if we want to reach vot­ers, we need to change the way we communciate.

One of the high­lights of Drew West­en’s talk was his slide on nar­ra­tives. Accord­ing to Drew, there are three nar­ra­tives that the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion should have pre­sent­ed to the Amer­i­can peo­ple after tak­ing office, but did­n’t. These are:

• Why the econ­o­my is a dis­as­ter and how the Repub­li­cans caused it.
• Why deficit spend­ing is nec­es­sary when the econ­o­my is spi­ral­ing downward
• An alter­na­tive nar­ra­tive on gov­ern­ment to Ronald Reagan’s, “gov­ern­ment is the prob­lem, not the solution”

Drew con­tends that if these nar­ra­tives had been pre­sent­ed, Demo­c­ra­t­ic loss­es in the 2010 midterms would not have been so great, because Repub­li­cans would not have been able to get away with por­tray­ing Democ­rats as out of touch and irre­spon­si­ble — which they did, even though their destruc­tive agen­da caused the Great Recession.

Drew believes, as we at NPI do, at pro­gres­sives need to work on mak­ing their ideas sticky, or mem­o­rable. Sticky ideas, as explained by Chip and Dan Heath, have sev­er­al com­mon traits that give them stay­ing pow­er. They are sim­ple, unex­pect­ed, con­crete, cred­i­ble, emo­tion­al, and expressed in the form of sto­ries (as opposed to facts and figures).

Many, if not most, pro­gres­sive ideas are nat­u­ral­ly sticky, because they are based on the log­ic of pro­gres­sive val­ues. But our ideas can’t stick when we don’t com­mu­ni­cate them prop­er­ly. Drew says it’s time for us to rethink the way we con­nect with peo­ple. That includes rethink­ing how we talk about our own ideas. For instance, Drew says that instead of talk­ing about uni­ver­al health­care (which is a more abstract con­cept that invokes neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions for some), pro­gres­sives should talk about favor­ing “a fam­i­ly doc­tor for every family.”

Drew’s pre­sen­ta­tion was fol­lowed by Tate Lin­den’s. Tate focused his remarks on align­ment — not elec­toral align­ment, but align­ment between speech, actions, and thought. “When our moti­va­tions are aligned with our words and deeds, we feel a def­i­nite sense of hap­pi­ness, and a sense of being com­fort­able with our own skin. This Gand­hi­an align­ment [Hap­pi­ness is when what you think, what you say, and what you are in har­mo­ny] is a crit­i­cal first step toward devel­op­ing a pow­er­ful iden­ti­ty with the poten­tial to cre­ate change.”

Up-and-com­ing pro­gres­sive lead­ers may be known only by what they say or do, Tate said. That makes them vul­ner­a­ble to right wing attacks. “Since their moti­va­tions haven’t been devel­oped or shared, it’s easy for the oppo­si­tion to slip in a sub­sti­tute moti­va­tion that serves their own purposes.”

And indeed, we have seen that hap­pen over and over again.

Per­cep­tion of intent mat­ters. We need to make our val­ues, prin­ci­ples, and moti­va­tion for being involved trans­par­ent, so that it’s dif­fi­cult to impos­si­ble for the right wing to ques­tion our inten­tions. If we can bet­ter estab­lish our own cred­i­bil­i­ty, we can add to the cred­i­bil­i­ty of our ideas, strength­en­ing how peo­ple per­ceive our vision for Amer­i­ca and allow­ing us to be much more effec­tive at imple­ment­ing pol­i­cy direc­tions that will make a real dif­fer­ence in peo­ple’s lives.