Romney blasts Priorities’ attack ad; spot still hasn’t had paid runs (cnn.com)
Romney wants his business record off-limits (maddowblog.msnbc.com)

I blogged recently about the use of narrative and personal stories in politics, and how it can be a very effective technique despite being fraught with controversy because stories tend to appeal more to emotions than to logic. It’s certainly not a technique that’s going to go away from American politics any time soon, and in the short time since I wrote that blog entry it’s been used to greater effect in both campaigns, most notably with Priorities USA Action‘s “Understands” spot (see below), and it will doubtlessly keep being used as we approach election day.

For as powerful as this ad is, its lure comes from a causality link between Joe Soptic losing his job because Bain Capital shut his plant down and his wife’s death from cancer, a link that is hardly perfect. A disinterested viewer may see this is a simple hard luck story, but because Soptic’s story is so powerful, and because Mitt Romney has been so effectively portrayed as a stereotypical CEO type (often by himself and his campaign’s many gaffes these past couple of months), the story still resonates. The ad doesn’t say, “Mitt Romney’s quest for profits killed this man’s wife,” but it presents a series of facts whose connections are, to be polite, disputable, and then appeals to viewers’ emotions, both through Soptic’s monologue and the same visual tricks political videographers have been using for decades, to make them want to fill in the missing pieces. (It doesn’t help that Soptic lost his job during the 1999-2002 period when Romney may or may not have been CEO of Bain Capital, another of those factoids that’s being disputed because of Romney’s refusal to release tax records. More on that later.)

This is one of those tactics that’s far too easy to push into utter tastelessness, but for Republicans to blanch over it when they’ve made such an art out of it in my lifetime is  hypocritical. Going back to the last presidential election, the reason we had so much press here in Toledo four years ago was because the McCain campaign tried to use its own personal story to lure voters, a guy named Samuel Wurzelbacher who tried to take Barack Obama to task over how Obama’s proposed tax policies would allegedly make it harder for small businesses to function. Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher became “Joe the Plumber,” and now he’s trying to get a seat in Congress in my old district, thanks in part to the celebrity the Republican Party bestowed onto him. (I haven’t seen any polling for Ohio’s Ninth yet, but popular wisdom after the primaries was that even in a strong Republican year Wurzelbacher didn’t stand much of a chance.)

Even looking at this election, Romney’s campaign has been televising the stories of small business owners who felt offended over President Obama channeling Elizabeth Warren’s famous monologue on debt and taxation. Granted, Obama goofed by handing the Romney campaign a juicy “You didn’t build that” soundbite that was all too easy to take out of context, but the fact remains that Romney’s campaign was using this “personal story” motif long before Priorities USA Action put out the “Understands” spot. (It also doesn’t help Romney’s campaign that some of the business owners featured in his spots actually applied for, and received, lots of government money, like Jack Gilchrist and Dennis Sollmann.)

It’s one of those things that’s telling about how the two dominant parties try to push their messages. Whereas Democrats use the stories of laid-off steel mill workers to try to gain sympathy, Republicans use business owners. Actually, with Republicans it might not be sympathy as much as fear, because there’s kind of an unspoken undercurrent to much of Republican messaging that implies that if CEOs don’t get their way then they’ll lay off even more people. Republican fear-mongering didn’t die with Osama bin Laden, just like it didn’t die with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and at this point it appears so indestructible that any day now someone will probably write an erotic fanfiction about it, change people’s names and then sell millions of books.

Republican criticism over the “Understands” spot, and pretty much all their criticism over the negativity of Democratic Party-affiliated PACs (and Democratic campaigns themselves), still strikes me as laughable coming from the ideologues who brought Willie Horton and “swiftboating” into the American mainstream. The problem with inventing a successful strategy, whether it’s a political device or a football offence, is that you cannot make yourself immune from the same strategy. You have an advantage of knowing what the tactic’s weaknesses may be ahead of time, but of course others will come along to tweak your strategy for use against you, and think of things you may never have thought of. Harry Reid’s “this one person I won’t name claimed Mitt Romney didn’t pay any taxes for ten years” gambit is hardly the pinnacle of intellectual honesty, but it’s straight out of the Republican playbook of sowing doubt into voters’ minds and trying to force the opposition to do something they don’t want to do in order to debunk what may be a highly specious claim. As long as Romney doesn’t release more of his tax returns, though, Democrats can play with that kernel of possibility, however small it is, that Romney’s returns contain evidence not just of Romney paying abhorrently low tax rates on his income, but of things far more damning both politically and personally.

That’s what really gets me about Romney’s claims of trying to run a “positive” campaign. First of all, ignoring the Romney campaign itself, there are enough right-wing PACs out there who are likely to outspend all Democratic candidates and PACs by themselves, so they don’t need to go dirty because they have a plethora of surrogates who can sling mud (and other things) from the deepest troughs of American pigsty politicking. More to the point, President Obama has been a nearly constant target of these same right-wingers for over four years now. Even the faux controversy about Obama’s country of birth is still being pushed by prominent right-wing figures like Donald Trump and Joe Arpaio. To claim to want a clean campaign now is like breaking someone’s legs and then saying it’s fair to challenge that person to an arm wrestling contest.

More to the point, Romney himself has been using the word “foreign” in reference to Obama’s ideas so often these past few weeks that it’s hard to believe it’s not a conscious strategy on his part, a none-too-subtle way of feeding small morsels of red meat to that part of the Republican base that desperately wants to believe Obama isn’t “really” president because he was born in Kenya, or because he flubbed the oath at his inauguration, or his immigration policies are grounds for impeachment, or what have you. We can debate the relative dirtiness of political campaigns, but the idea that Romney’s campaign has been as pure as the driven snow is absurd.

Even more laughable is this idea of putting Romney’s business record off limits, particularly when Romney’s business experience and ability to generate vast quantities of wealth for himself are kind of his primary selling point in an election that driven so much by the economy (and when Romney’s campaign has worked so hard to make that a central issue of the election). I understand the desire to not want to talk about episodes of your past that others might rightly take issue with — I understand that a little too well — but unless a family member gets you a job, you’re going to be asked at the very least about your employment history by your prospective employer, and probably other things as well, like your criminal record. Particularly for a job as important as the presidency, how you have acted in the past matters a lot. I still see right-wingers bringing up Bill Clinton’s past dalliances with marijuana, let alone Obama’s experimentation with cocaine and other drugs. How can the methods by which a candidate amassed such a huge personal fortune as Romney’s not be up for discussion compared to things like that?

Strategically it’s understandable why Romney would want a campaign run “only on the issues” because the past thirty-two years of Ronald Reagan and his disciples have conditioned a huge chunk of the voting public to think of any kind of government spending (outside of the military) and all taxes as downright evil. (You have to say it in your most dastardly voice to get the point across.) The problem with that is that we do not live in a world of abstractions and concepts; we live in a world of people, and that is why ultimately, even though it’s a tactic that can be abused so easily, we need to keep hearing the stories of how people have been affected, or will be affected, by political proposals and business practices and everything else that affects us. Particularly in an age when face-time is at a premium due to the combination of technological advancements, and ever-increasing personal and professional demands, we need to know when someone is adversely affected by public or private forces. All sides will have stories to tell — in a nation of over 300 million people it’s impossible to craft a plan that will benefit everyone, or at least benefit everyone equally — but if we are to cast informed votes, and conduct informed business, then these stories need to be told. We just need to be alert to the telltale signs of an exaggerated or false claim, and do what research we can to ensure that the stories we’re being told have some basis in reality.

Despite how Romney and his campaign might like to control the debate, some people have stories of how they were adversely affected by his past actions, and how they’d be adversely affected by the policies he proposes to put into place as president. Some of them are likely to be based on logical fallacies, but that’s up for us, the voters, to decide. The important thing is that we get to hear them.