The
Republican Party is not going to be saved by
Dick Cheney or
Rush Limbaugh or
Colin Powell or
Sarah Palin. It is going to be saved by…
Frank Luntz!
Who?
Frank Luntz is a junk-food-cramming Republican man-boy in chinos and flapping shirt tails who has been haunting the corridors of the GOP and of Fox News for…well…his weird agelessness makes it impossible to tell for how long. He believes that how you use language is the key to politics. While that is undoubtedly true about language, Luntz, who the
New York Times has dubbed (facetiously, I think), The Wordsmith, is himself given to manically tangled sentences, convoluted locutions, and pathological verbosity.
His book,
Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear, of which I own at least six copies, all given to me by Luntz—oh, yes, he calls himself Dr. Luntz—is a mixture of marketing bromides, self-help clichés, and junior high school thesis sentences (“This chapter seeks to examine the principles behind good communication…”).
Luntz, a relative moderate who fell out with the last administration, is now back in the news because of a memo he wrote called, “The Language of Health Care,” which he sent to Republicans in Congress and then leaked to the press. His point, theoretically supported by polling and focus groups (what he calls “Instant Response dial sessions”), goes something like this: People want health care reform; the Democrats are going to win the health care debate because they are on the side of reform; so Republicans, even if they don’t want reform, should call their desire to keep the status quo "reform." Sort of reforming the reform. (“You simply MUST be vocally and passionately on the side of reform,” says Luntz, even if, he implies, you are not.)
(Getty Images)
Luntz speaks to a particular liberal fear that Republicans understand the language of demonization (undoubtedly because they are evil) and oversimplification, while Democrats are wonky flat-foots, caught in endless circular explanations (“I was for it until I was against it…”). If the new administration lives or dies on the success of its health care proposal, which, by the very nature of health care, will be too complicated to explain, Republicans can kill the Obama dream with nothing more than malicious reductiveness masterminded by Dr. Luntz.
There are several reasons, I believe, why the Democrats, in this instance, have little to fear. First, they have a president—the first in long memory—whose specialty is talking. Compared to Barak Obama, Frank Luntz is Mrs. Malaprop. Second, the Republican Party is now the road-rage party. Cheney, Limbaugh, Palin are happily speaking (or fulminating) for the benefit of the core—they smartly don’t want to dilute the singularity of their own message with awful Luntz-style buzzword talk (Colin Powell, the non-raging Republican, is speaking only to the Democrats). And third, Luntz, who has a new book coming out, is a relentless self-promoter—on any television show that will have him—whose own efforts to explain how Republicans should explain health care are so dweeby and dopey (even the
Times upbraided him in an interview for talking about health care as a product to be bought and sold) that the country will come to understand precisely what they are hearing and fall over laughing.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com.
