Dilbert as Pundit

Some of the freshest commentary on the 2016 Presidential election has been coming from Dilbert creator Scott Adams. Adams has endorsed Clinton, as he says, “for my own personal safety,” but he has also stated that he doesn’t vote. He wants to maintain objective distance from the fray, and analyze the rhetorical strategies, successes, and failures of each candidate.

On July 24, for instance, he examined Clinton’s successful use of “dark” to describe Trump: “‘Dark’ is a linguistic kill shot from the left. I assume all the TV pundits on Clinton’s team got the message to use the word ‘dark’ right out of the gate. I confess that at first I didn’t recognize how good it is. It’s designed, Trump-style, and it didn’t come from an amateur. The Clinton team is playing some serious 3D chess now.”

He explains what makes this such an effective label:

“1. It’s unique. That’s a Trump trick. You haven’t heard ‘dark’ used before in a political context. That makes it memorable and sticky. And it brings no baggage with it to this domain because no other politician has been so labelled.

“2. Dark makes you think of black, and black makes you think of racism (in the political season anyway), and that makes you reflexively pair Trump with racism even though it makes no sense.

“3. Dark can describe anything scary. It invites the listener to fill in the nightmare with whatever scares them the most about Trump. That’s a hypnosis trick. Leave out the details and let people fill in the story that persuades them the most.

“4. Repetition. Dark is the kind of word that pundits can work into almost any answer when talking about Trump. That means you’ll hear it a lot.”

(Thanks to my son Woelke for pointing me to Adams’s blog.)