So when you read about the alleged wisdom of this “dream team” it’s all fairly obvious. It’s marketing–techniques well known to corporations and such. The difference between the two campaigns is that the president’s men and women really used that knowledge to motivate the consumers or “voters” to really buy him as a product.
The old tension was between COMPETENCE and IDEOLOGY. Democratic competence vs. Republican ideology (remember Reagan!).
This time, in the minds of the social psychologists, it was between COMPETENCE and WARMTH. Romney’s economic competence as a successful business man had to be countered by the president’s warmth. Ideology recedes from view. So, of course, does another old distinction between COMPETENCE and CHARACTER, one that NIXON and CLINTON and GINGRICH (and now PETRAEUS) so clearly bring to our minds. That might be because compared to the men I just mentioned both Obama and Romney are men of character.
Listen to what the studies show:
For example, Dr. Fiske’s research has shown that when deciding on a candidate, people generally focus on two elements: competence and warmth. “A candidate wants to make sure to score high on both dimensions,” Dr. Fiske said in an interview. “You can’t just run on the idea that everyone wants to have a beer with you; some people care a whole lot about competence.”
Mr. Romney was recognized as a competent businessman, polling found. But he was often portrayed in opposition ads as distant, unable to relate to the problems of ordinary people.
Although I would guess that neither candidate ranks that high on the have-a-beer-with meter, Obama must score higher. He has been seen having beers with others. Not Romney. It might actually be a serious point that Romney never gave voters anything on the “I want to hang out with you” front. His relationship with ordinary people is “all business.”
So Romney didn’t convince enough people that he would use his competence FOR them–that is, for the 47%, for the middle class, for union members, to get you out of your student loans, etc.
But warmth or compassion really does imply IDEOLOGY. It implies a “public philosophy” about government and especially your president having your back, bailing you out when you need it, protecting your safety nets etc. Romney needed to be better on the having-your-back meter. He really did mean to be.
Romney thought that, in his case, that some combination of competence and character would inspire trust. But we don’t readily associate character with business success (especially since 2008). And Romney wasn’t all that “out there” on either the source of or content of his character.
The irony, of course, is that effective marketing is at the core of the competence of a successful businessman. The president and his dream team were excellent salesmen and saleswomen.
November 13th, 2012 | 10:33 am
Romney, presumably out of misplaced complacency or out of fear that he would offend someone, never responded to those very effective ads blaming him for outsourcing jobs. He could have responded with ads tying Obama’s policies to job destruction, but he never did.
Of course, this sort of cluelessness is what you would expect from a man who, in spite of spending six years of his life trying to become president, never once thought that having off-shore bank accounts might be a problem.
Romney was good at selling business ideas to other highly successful businessmen and investors. He had no clue about reaching the marginal, white, lower middle class or working class Republican voter. Stories about his parents and roses were not going to cut it, nor were recitations of platitudes about American exceptionalism.
November 13th, 2012 | 10:40 am
djf, exactly…
November 13th, 2012 | 10:58 am
Based on the candidates who have been nominated in the last several elections, it is clear that “competence” means nothing to either party, at least in terms of what someone needs to have on his resume.
November 13th, 2012 | 1:37 pm
“The irony, of course, is that effective marketing is at the core of the competence of a successful businessman.”
Effective marketing is at the core of a good salesman. The core competence of a successful businessman is producing a good product.
The country chose the salesman and not competence. What we have here is the Starbuck-ification of American politics. Experience trumps substance, so as long as everyone feels like there are enough goodies for them, who cares about incompetence on the geopolitical front or that we’re leveraging our future for the sake of not feeling the pain today.
At a certain point one has to say to the customer ‘you really don’t have a clue what you’re buying do you?’
November 13th, 2012 | 2:56 pm
[...] The President’s Social Psychologists – Peter Lawler, PoMoCon [...]
November 13th, 2012 | 3:00 pm
“At a certain point one has to say to the customer ‘you really don’t have a clue what you’re buying do you?’”
I think many people involved in politics see this as a feature, not a bug, of the electorate. That’s one possible explanation for why our government is so complex. Who out in normal America really understands what Obamacare is going to mean for them? How about Dodd-Frank? I try and keep up with these things and I’m not even sure I understand Dodd-Frank, and it’s difficult to argue for its merits or demerits when no one even knows what the law will do.
From the perspective of a politician like Obama, this is an excellent scenario. He may be a snake-oil salesman, but how do you convince people of that? He says he’s providing us health-care, and regulating Wall Street on our behalf, and to dispute that one would need to get so high in the policy weeds that the effect would be lost on the electorate. So the opacity of our laws works really well for the politician who is taking the “look what we are providing you” line, as Obama did.
What this election showed is that the “issues” are beyond enough voters that someone needed to out-market Obama, which would have been a high bar for any Republican candidate.
November 13th, 2012 | 5:07 pm
“Of course, this sort of cluelessness is what you would expect from a man who, in spite of spending six years of his life trying to become president, never once thought that having off-shore bank accounts might be a problem”.
This is interesting.
I looked at Barack & Michelle Obama’s publicly available federal tax return.
Available Here:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2012/04/obamas_2012_income_tax_return.html
Among other things, it asserted Total Income of $844,585
It also contained Form 1116 Foreign Tax Credit, which showed income from “other countries” of $269,710.
That’s right, the President of the United States derived 31.9% (60.0% of his non wage sources)
of his gross income from OTHER COUNTRIES, even though of that $844,585 394,821 was W-2 income.
So this isn’t Romney cluelessness, it’s popular selective indignation. If Mitt made a mistake it wasn’t hammering this home, because the media sure as heck wasn’t going to do it.
November 13th, 2012 | 6:59 pm
Mr. Gasper,
Isn’t most likely that the Obamas’ foreign income is from overseas sales of the president’s books? In any event, if Obama does have overseas bank accounts, wouldn’t the Romney people have been smart enough to raise that point when Romney was being attacked on this issue? One would think so, but maybe they weren’t. In either case, the Romney people were pretty clueless – par for the course among GOP politicians and operatives.
November 13th, 2012 | 7:58 pm
djf, or possibly the Romney campaign was operating on the absurd assumption that American voters would base their vote on something more serious than a contest over whose hiding more money than whom.
Clueless indeed. There are roughly 58 million American’s I can think of who deserve the gold medal in cluelessness before Romney and his staff. And that’s not even including William Kristol’s of the world.
November 14th, 2012 | 12:26 am
Pseudoplotinus,
It does seem rather absurd that, as appears from Romney’s reaction when the issue was brought up, that it had never occurred to him that putting his dough in overseas accounts could be used against him in the campaign.
Sorry, the electorate is not made up of readers Tocqueville, Strauss, Claremont Review, and National Affairs. If you want to win, you have to anticipate what is going to hurt you with your marginal voters and be ready to defend yourself, whether or not an informed, rational person would pay any attention to the matter in question. Romney seems to have thought he could just coast into the White House by pointing out that the economy’s still bad, repeating 30-year-old Reaganite platitudes, and convincing people that he’s not a robot. As a result, we are now stuck with Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. Great strategy.
November 14th, 2012 | 1:00 pm
djf, you’re certainly correct. However, my lament isn’t that the electorate lacks a graduate level understanding of polo sci, but a common sense understanding of what is relevant, and what are distractions from what is relevant. Granted, this was always an issue in democratic politics but it seems to me the country as a whole had better judgement when it was made up of farmers.
November 14th, 2012 | 3:24 pm
Romney was not a good business man. He was a very bad business man. Especially if you are an ordinary American worker. Hence Romeny’s problem with white voters outside of the South.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829
November 14th, 2012 | 4:31 pm
Dear Mr. Observer,
Thank you for the link. Unfortunately, however, it illustrates my previous post’s assertion about lack of common sense. To wit, when you come across an article that deploys this kind of contrained, dispassionate analysis:
“Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street’s greed revolution. He’s not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He’s not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He’s been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let’s-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let’s-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy.”
You’re probably NOT getting a terribly edifying view of the nations state of affairs.
However, if you want to play dueling links I can recommend the following article by that conservative fire breathing
November 14th, 2012 | 4:40 pm
… outpost the Huffington Post in its discussion Mr. Suskind’s expose on the Obama Whitehouses complicity in representing the interests of the same Wall Street demons Rolling Stone claims Romney is shilling for.
But, if you’re interested in understanding the actual way the financial world works you could not do better than by starting here:
http://www.aei.org/article/economics/private-equity-is-a-force-for-good/
And if the scales fall from your eyes sufficiently and you might actually consider points of view untainted by the class based Xenophovia that is the flavor of the day, you may want to follow up by reading this:
http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352928920&sr=8-1&keywords=Basic+Economics
Or, instead of all of this link slinging maybe you might try posing a argument by yourself that might actually contribute to the otherwise very thoughtful exchanges that are the distinction of this particular website.
Personally I would prefer you do the latter.
November 14th, 2012 | 4:42 pm
PS. Here’s the link to the Huffpo article mentions above:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-froomkin/suskinds-confidence-men-r_b_1123660.html
Enjoy.
November 14th, 2012 | 8:55 pm
I asked a colleague at work why she voted for Obama. She said, because Mitt and his sons did not serve in the military.
I informed her that Barry didn’t serve either. To which she replied, that Mitt and his sons didn’t serve in the military.
Go figure?
I asked a retired dude why he voted for Barry and he said because Barry’s Obamacare meant free healthcare. I told him that Obamacare was going to cost at least 10% more right off the bat and then there were those nasty ‘death panels’, and a couple of dozen tax hikes, all of which is going to screw we fat and obnoxious ‘boomers.’ He reiterated that Obamacare was ‘free.’
This is why we have a social democracy- stupid, very stupid, Americans (and those that taught them).
Buy ammo!
November 14th, 2012 | 9:54 pm
@djf
“Mr. Gasper,
Isn’t most likely that the Obamas’ foreign income is from overseas sales of the president’s books?”
It is not indicated in the released portions, but I suspect based on the proportion of income that is the case. In any case, why is better to earn your income overseas but not store it there?
Otherwise, I agree. Romney ran the campaign like he was pitching a b-school case, calm and collected, Obama like he was pitching the OJ jury.
In any event, if Obama does have overseas bank accounts, wouldn’t the Romney people have been smart enough to raise that point when Romney was being attacked on this issue? One would think so, but maybe they weren’t. In either case, the Romney people were pretty clueless – par for the course among GOP politicians and operatives.
It does seem rather absurd that, as appears from Romney’s reaction when the issue was brought up, that it had never occurred to him that putting his dough in overseas accounts could be used against him in the campaign.
November 15th, 2012 | 2:37 pm
Mr. Gasper,
You write: “In any case, why is better to earn your income overseas but not store it there?”
Are you suggesting that Obama should not have taken royalties from his book sales overseas? Obama is accountable for many sins, but I do not blame him for earning income from overseas book sales, and taking a lawful deduction for the foreign taxes he paid thereon. (Of course, that is not a recommendation of Obama’s books.)
It would be another thing entirely for him to deposit his overseas earnings in foreign bank accounts so as to avoid paying US taxes on his future returns.
November 16th, 2012 | 4:12 pm
“It would be another thing entirely for him to deposit his overseas earnings in foreign bank accounts so as to avoid paying US taxes on his future returns.”
You do not avoid income taxes by depositing oversees (caveat, there are deductions from your U.S. tax liability for taxes paid to foreign governments, and for those LIVING abroad, but that’s not exactly avoid taxes).
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/U.S.-Citizens-and-Resident-Aliens-Abroad
Income to U.S. taxpayers is subject to tax, no matter where earned. People who use foreign accounts and don’t report the tax due on income are engaging in tax evasion (the illegal understatemement of a valid liability), not tax avoidance (the legal ordering of one’s affairs so as minimize tax liabilities)
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