Message judo: A guide for candidates

L'état c'est moi.

Day Three of an experiment:  Politics without "You-know-who," the Sun King.  We are not going to write about him whining to the Coast Guard cadets that he is a sad victim, picked on unmercifully, getting attacked for nothing.  We are going to ignore him, the centerpiece of all political action.  The one who makes news, the one with tweets and gaffs and staff turmoil, the one generating calls for impeachment, the one whose light illuminates everything, dominating all political news and comment.   

For a week I am going to turn off the sun.



What to do when a candidate is criticized?   He or she will be criticized.

A clear sign that a novice candidate has no real stomach for any office is when they approach me, usually inquiring about money, and they say they want the job because they "will work hard" and "try to give a voice to the people."   This is a clear sign to me that they don't really want the job, only the imagined status of the office.  They know that everyone will approve of their working hard and being a representative.  They want everyone to like them.  Fat chance.

The question is how best for a candidate for an office if, in the person's past, they have actually done something other than smile to crowds.  Yesterday's post offers a real live case study.

Yesterday I posited that Sally Yates could be a candidate for President.  

She proved herself a persuasive political warrior, which is qualification Number One.   She looks good on TV and she talked with confidence and authority.  

Good First Impression

She made a good first impression standing up for integrity in government and in doing so confronting her future opponent, and besting in a joust Ted Cruz, a side character, qualification Number Two.  (Imagine this as a scripted drama, the Illiad from high culture or a movie like The Magnificent Seven in popular culture.  The hero attracts attention and proves himself ready for the showdown by defeating some sidekicks or allies of the main opponent.) 

She represented something by her very presence.  She is a woman, but she is about justice, not femininity.  She was a professional soldier (here wearing the clothes of a Justice Department senior lawyer, not a military uniform, but she represents honorable duty, not ambition.)  We elect people who have spent their adult lives in patriotic service.

I consider her electable--with one new qualification needed.   She would help if she were the top person running something, at least for a while.   The ideal would be a university in the American south, a university devoted to something manly.  Bad would be heading Brynn Mawr or some college that represents coastal feminine elitism; she needs to head Texas A & M--the ideal position from which to make speeches, then resign three months before the New Hampshire primary.   Georgia Tech would be an alternative.   A southern Christian college would be a different direction, and ok as a weak plan B.   She needs a top job doing something, something that reflects that she works well with men of practical affairs. 

OK, now that she is a potentially formidable candidate, where will she be attacked?   Yesterday's blog post drew a line of attack by frequent guest commenter Thad Guyer, her association with Obama's program of shortening long, long prison sentences for drug offenders.  He imagined her being taunted with the name "Set'em Free Sally":

Guyer:   "Sally Yates would be popular with some Democratic constituencies and a few criminal justice interest groups, but Trump and Republicans would have a field day renaming her "Set'em Free Sally".  She was brought to the Justice Department in 2015 by Obama in the end game of his presidency primarily to lead his controversial executive clemency program and failed attempt to lighten punishment for drug crimes."

How should candidate-for-president Sally Yates respond?

Don't make excuses.  Alas, it is the kind of thing Hillary Clinton did.  She denied and minimized and attempted to contextualize so that the point of criticism "wasn't really that bad."  The title of her book is a giveaway "tell", Hard Choices.   Her instinct was to admit it was bad, but not that bad, the best of a bad lot.    When criticized a candidate should not:

    ***Say they did it but didn't really want to--utter disaster.  (Bay of Pigs, Vietnam)

    ***Say they previously opposed doing it, then others made doing it less bad, so in light of the improvement, then they did it--utter disaster.  (John Kerry flip flop.)

Weak:  depends on definition of "is"

    ***Say they did it under the influence of others so they went along for the team--utter disaster.  (Rick Santorum tried this then lost Pennsylvania by double digits.)

    ***Say it was really Obama's idea, not hers, and he was the boss--utter disaster.  (It would destroy her brand for standing up to errors when she sees it.)

    ***Attempt some narrow definitional excuse, saying she only let out "dangerous" criminals, not "extremely dangerous" criminals--utter disaster. (Recall Bill Clinton's parsing that he only got oral sex, not intercourse, and that he wasn't actually doing it in the present tense, just the past tense, thus the difference between "is" and "was.")

    **Attempt to stonewall, delay, and hide with non-responses, citing legal points saying there was executive privilege or legal privilege or internal memoranda not subject to disclosure.  (Hillary tried this with the result that people thought her "crooked.")

Every instinct of a weak politician is to try one of these routes.  Don't.  By doing it, one validates the charge.  The candidate is accepting the premise that what they did was bad. Now the only question is whether the candidate is bad, really bad, disgustingly bad, or feloniously bad.

What to do?  Embrace the criticism.   Turn it from a negative to a positive.   Here is how Sally Yates was quoted by NPR"I’m a career prosecutor. I’m a law-and-order girl, and I believe that you need to send dangerous people to prison for a very long time,” said Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.    “But,” she added, “I think that we need to be smart about deciding who are those dangerous people.”

This is pretty good, but not ideal.   

What is good is that she said "you need to send dangerous people to prison for a very long time."  The problem is that her citing that she is a law-and-order girl sounds defensive, because it is defensive.  She was trying to assure people that she wouldn't do anything bad, thus accepting the premise that the releases were bad.   And saying we need to be smart sets her up to look foolish because surely, with hindsight and experience, one or more of those released will do something bad, thus setting her up to be challenged on how smart she was to have released that bad guy.

Steve McQueen knows:  "We deal in lead, friend."

If she is going to win she needs a different tone.  She needs to think differently.  Don't accept the premise of the criticism.  Attack the premise and the critic.

She needs to defend the policy for having done exactly what the critic--and common sense--demanded and then turn her defense into an accusation against the accuser.   She is a warrior, not an excuse-maker.  When attacked she needs to hits back with the verbal weapons of conflict.  She needs to show she knows what to do when someone starts a fight.  (Homework assignment:  watch "The Magnificent Seven.")

When criticized for lightening the sentences of lower-level criminals, primarily drug related, she might say something like this, uttered with conviction and intensity:   

"I want sentencing to send a clear message to dangerous criminals.  You go to prison for decades.  I put them there and am proud of it.  I want those guys dealing in drugs or armed robberies to know that the moment they pick up a gun their sentence doubles and they serve their time. The moment drug users go from messing up their own lives by getting high, to ruining other people's lives by dealing in heroin, that their sentences go up.  Sentencing like that sends a clear message, and that news gets around among criminals.  That makes our streets safer, and the cops on the street understand this even if my opponent is too busy admiring himself in the mirror to do his homework."