You Wouldn't Be Complaining About Speaker Jeffries

Or Chairman Raskin

A reader of yesterday’s column writes, with the subject line “Foul Air,”

Our party wrings their hands in mock surprise while they watch Mr. Trump do exactly what he said he was going to do. The leaders remain silent waiting for focus groups to tell them what to say and how to say it.

I'm out.

What, I asked, does he think Democrats should or can do in the minority? Hold hearings? Go on TV?

“It’s the focus groups,” he answered. “We don’t know what we believe without them. That’s the problem.”

This, I should add, is from a person who worked in the advertising industry and is well familiar with the intoxicating effects of market research.

I got started as a political consultant during a transition time when the industry was moving away from lionizing mysterious but talented “gurus” (see David Garth, Tony Schwartz, Stu Spencer) who, clients believed, knew the secrets to winning elections to insisting on quantifiable proof that those ideas would work, which they were happy to pay extra for. Hence focus groups.

Speaking of which—in an act of what friends called “career suicide,” I wrote this piece for The Washington Post 25 years ago (!) about why political consultants could be bad for democracy, and said,

Focus groups, for example, are a terrific way for consultants to justify their retainers and give their clients a fun-filled look at how "real" people react to their messages. Most of us just don't have the math skills to understand the nuances and subtle interpretations found in the back pages and cross-tabulations of modern opinion polls. Focus groups are a way for pollsters to say, "Never mind all that, let's put on a show." As anyone who's spent time on the dark side of the one-way mirror knows, nobody sets up a focus group with an open mind. Instead, consultants "go in to get their preconceived notions reinforced," says one advertising hotshot. "There's nothing more open to manipulation than focus group results."

My late father, who was a very successful public relations consultant, used to say that there wasn’t really a way to measure the success of public relations. “All you can do is count clips, and that doesn’t mean anything!” he’d complain, in an era when firms like his paid entities called “clipping services” to take newspapers and cut out…oh never mind.

Today, consultants who specialize in social media insist that “impressions” move mountains, but I haven’t seen much evidence of that. To misquote Andy Warhol, in a time when everyone and everything is famous for 15 seconds, what lasts long enough to do something big, like move an electorate, or reject racism?

It’s still elections—and their consequences. If Democrats can take back the House next year, which considering the present microscopic GOP majority seems quite doable, all those “shoulda coulda woulda” wiseguys will have less to complain about.

And if we manage to take back the White House, and pick up a few seats in the Senate, if not an actual majority, we can have things like better health care, a cleaner environment, racial justice and gender equity and all the other parts of the so-called “liberal agenda” that are guess what?—popular with bipartisan majorities, but unpopular with greedy donors and powerful special interests.

My reader is right to criticize the self-perpetuating, income generating market research and second-guessing cottage industry so beloved by Democrats. I think we were better off with the inscrutable gurus, but in the meantime, to those who are still venting over what Democrats should be doing, I’ll advise two courses of action.

First, you can do like Pete Seeger, and chip away, bit by bit, at causes you care about.

I’ll repeat the story I told here about a day I spent with Pete Seeger at the house he built along the river in Beacon, NY.

Pete had briefly taught at a music and arts summer program in the Berkshires called Indian Hill that was run by a couple who were surrogate parents to my father and surrogate grandparents to me, Mordecai and Irma Bauman. My cousin Tom, who is an accomplished cinematographer and documentary producer, thought it would be a nice idea to make a film about them, and Pete Seeger generously agreed to let us interview him for the reel we wanted to put together to help raise money for the project.

I asked Pete questions while Tom filmed, and it was an honor to spend that kind of time with someone I’ve admired since I was in single digits. As we were packing up, I asked Pete if after all these years of activism he ever got discouraged.

“No, I don’t,” he said.

“I know that all over, every day, people are doing things to make a difference.”

He looked out his big picture window overlooking the Hudson. “They’re cleaning up the river. They’re doing things all over the country. Things that matter and that other people see them doing. No, I don’t feel discouraged. I feel encouraged every day.”

So whether it’s saving a river, a local library, or engaging in any other “acts of courage and belief,” go to it—but don’t forget the second course of action I’d recommend.

The best way to feel better about what Democrats are doing is to get them the power they need to really do things. Otherwise, complaining about their messaging is just another conversation we’re having with ourselves.

It’s easy to find fault with the Democrats when they have no power to show what they’re made of.

Put Hakeem Jeffries in the Speaker’s Chair and give Jamie Raskin and other dynamic Democrats the power to set a new agenda and see what real leaders can do. In the meantime, watch them bring an alternative, powerful message that gives people who are turned off by politics something to vote for.

I think they can, and they will.

Maybe that’s the way to solve that “dog food problem” I’ve been talking about.