Politics 101: Exploit Irony and Define the Debate

I recently helped with strategy and structure for a small political project. It has a fairly common, often underperforming, yet very much needed goal: reveal the wacky in politics for what it is so that it can be mitigated, and then hopefully a productive dialog can begin again.

A couple days after its soft launch all I can say is I lost a bet. In a good way. How I lost the bet, however, reminded me a lot of Mitt Romney… and so thusly I post. I post about marketing politicians and political issues in a way that stays true to the style and techniques of my high school debate days.

A dominant narrative of the 2012 election focuses on the Obama campaign jumping out early to define Mitt Romney, and that in doing so Romney became cornered. More importantly, however, they did so in a way that brought everything Mitt said under heightened scrutiny… the press was looking for him to do or say something that fell into the caricature cut out that the Obama campaign created. The process became so blurred that at times it was hard to tell who was operating Mitt Romney’s strings.

And that, indeed, is the point. To control the narrative. Control the debate. Corner Mitt Romney so that no matter what he tried, he fell into the picture frame that the Obama campaign defined. Tell the press a good story, and try as they might to avoid doing so, they’ll fall victim to projection just like the rest of us. We’re all human after all.

One’s ability to identify irony is inversely proportional to someone else’s ability to lure them into a cause, a movement, or a trap. If you’re someone who has trouble ID’ing the ironic, then chances are you’re easily manipulated and buy lots of things “as seen on TV.”

There’s no judgement implied about quality of character, goodness, or purpose – it just is what it is. Maybe the person isn’t cynical enough to be on the lookout, or possibly they’re so true of heart they simply trust everyone. Or maybe they’re just not too bright. The ability to spot potentially ironic situations is not a measure of one’s intelligence… but exploiting and creating those situations is. We don’t like to think that everyday people take advantage of that… but we’d be morons to believe otherwise. Facing the truth is always the first step in resolution.

The importance of exploiting and using irony boils down to the fact, once again, that we’re all humans who tend to make an awful lot of mistakes; most often motivated by emotions, attachments, or loyalties. Pride. Insecurity. We’re born bundled with so many motivations that it’s impossible to believe we wouldn’t have mishaps on a daily basis. About half of all businesses count on it.

As a young and argumentative child, my parents would lecture me about not letting people push my buttons. I’ve (pridefully, of course) augmented it to an image of poking someone hiding in a whole with a long stick. The more and more the Obama campaign poked Mitt Romney with the “out of touch rich guy” stick; the more they taunted him to prove that he wasn’t an iconic rich man out of touch with the realities of “everyday Americans”… the more Mitt proved that he was exactly that. The more a person tries to prove something, the higher the likelihood they’ll make a mistake in doing so (Todd Akin, anyone?).

The more we do anything, the more we increase our mistake potential (which, in politics and my opinion, should be a high-value metric when vetting candidates). This doesn’t mean the perfect candidate is one who doesn’t do anything at all. We have far too many of those in Washington. It means that the perfect candidate is one who acts, but who also knows when to remain still and let his/her opponent fall on their face on the banana peal of disproving a negative. Inside the craziness of a campaign, being patient is the hardest – and smartest – skill to have.

All the Obama campaign had to do was keep poking Mitt with a crooked stick… and time, and time again… Mitt kept swatting at the air like a 5-year old playing imaginary attack of the killer bees on the playground – tripping over his own feet and falling into holes dug by the Obama campaign months earlier. Not once (as far as I can tell) was Mitt able to take a step back and realize that he was being taunted into making those exact kinds of mistakes. Few of us do – probably none of us do – we’re human. Mistakes is what we do.

It’s odd, really, that one of the best and most effective actions a campaign can take is force the opponent to prove as many things as possible. The hard part is being patient enough to wait for their mistakes. Over and over again. Eventually, (like all of us), they’ll trip over their own feet in some way that would make Buster Keaton proud. If a campaign is able to take that skill one step further by controlling the criteria and the narrative, then there’s very little the opposition can do to escape from the box into which you place them. Fighting against it proves it.

They never quite escape the scrutiny, and they rarely can stop themselves from fighting… even though the harder they fight, the less they can see the holes into which they fall. We are all human after all.

Cynical and a bit mean? Yeah, probably. But so is politics.