Westen: Stop sounding like Dukakis- make an enemy or two and tell a story

Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain,” is among those liberal supporters who are disappointed in President Obama’s performance in the health care debate. In an interview this week, Westen criticized the president for failing to use voters’ populist anger to promote support for health care reform and other planks of his domestic platform.

Westen cited Obama’s aversion to partisan combat as one of the reasons that his policies have lost popular appeal.

“In the context of the anxiety and anger people have had about the economy and losing their jobs and losing their homes, or worrying about those things, they were looking for some place to turn that anxiety and anger. And because the president has been so steadfast in his refusal to point fingers at anyone, the Republicans have jumped into the breach and said, ‘if you are not going to mobilize that anger, we are.’

“It’s remarkable that a new president gets elected with super-majorities, that the president wouldn’t use people’s legitimate anger as a tool for change, when he ran on change,” Westen said.

One of Westen’s specialties is political communications; the subtitle of “Political Brain” is “The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.” In the introduction, Westen wrote:

The political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures and policies to make a reasoned decision. The partisans in our study were, on average, bright, educated and politically aware. And yet they thought with their guts.

Westen figures a politician as bright and canny as Obama should know that and shouldn’t shy away from using emotions to connect with voters.

“When people are anxious and angry, they look to their leaders for a way to channel that anger that is productive. That is part of what leadership is. (But) this president and his leadership team believe that leadership is channeling hope, and even touching anybody’s anger and anxiety is off limits. It’s the politics of Dukakis,” Westen said.

“What I think the White House hasn’t gotten is that if the public is angry and anxious and you don’t talk about that anger, and it doesn’t look like you feel it, you start to look like George H.W. Bush in the recession (of the early 1990s). Out of touch,” Westen said.

Bush 41 notwithstanding, Westen noted that Republicans are usually much better at playing to emotions than Democrats are. They know how to tell a story.

“What story have conservatives told about health care? It’s a government takeover, it’s socialized medicine. There’s a story that has existed with conservatives for 30 years (government is bad). So once you have this pre-existing story, its not hard to hook crazy stuff onto it,” such as lies about death panels and unplugging Grandma.

Obama, Westen says, needs to tell a compelling story, too, one that has antagonists. “Reagan galvanized people not just for something, against something, tax-and-spend Democrats,” Westen noted. Obama’s story, he says, will have to name bad guys, something the president has largely avoided.

More: http://blogs.ajc.com/cynthia-tucker/2009/09/02/political-brain-author-obama-sounds-like-dukakis/?cxntfid=blogs_cynthia_tucker