It came to me in a flash today why Obama won as I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room reading the only literature available, women's magazines…
What came to me in a flash as an aging white male is that there is a parallel universe out there populated by a species called women who read these magazines which are loaded with expensive glossy ads that tell me that very astute business "people" risk millions to earn millions selling cosmetics, fashion, health to women. The best story illustrating this world comes from Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon cosmetics who said while the company was prosperous:
In the factory we make cosmetics at the counter we sell hope.
If you do not talk to women in the language that appeals to them they will not listen to you and that goes for electing candidates no less than for selling lipstick. Romney attempted to sell women not by appealing to their emotions but by appealing to their logic and failed where it counted, among single women who read these magazines.
It is not an accident that this recommendation should come from Andrew Klavan who has made his bones in the hypercompetitive atmosphere of Hollywood and knows that the way to the brain is through the heart. Klayman has put this knowledge to work. Watch one of his brilliant "Klayman on the culture" monologues and see how an artist who knows his craft goes about hooking an audience, holding an audience, and getting the audience to his point of view before he even tells them what to think.
Nor is it an accident that Andrew Klavan signed up with Glenn Beck to present his monologues on Beck's network. For some reason Klavan withdrew from that relationship but it is interesting to understand that Klavan saw something in Glenn Beck that intrigued him. No one should start any such effort as recommended by Andrew Klavan in his article without studying Klavan himself and without studying Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck does not come without his warts, but he is undeniably one of the most important political showmen on the scene today. One needs to understand how he drove up his audience and how he earned the degree of commitment that he still gets from his audience as a conservative (or libertarian, or whatever).
If you do not like me talking about Glenn Beck, consider Oprah Winfrey. Now ask yourself who has more political influence, George will, Victor David Hanson, or Oprah Winfrey? The answer is self-evident. The people who read the books Oprah Winfrey recommends were also reading the women's magazines I encountered in the doctor's office.
Nor should anyone venture into this project without first reading Story by Robert McKee, a controversial man to be sure but nevertheless the most respected script doctor and screenwriting guru in America. McKee articulates the essential elements of storytelling whether it is by novel, stage play, or screenplay. He explains the role of conflict, striving, reversal, and resolution. These are not airy fairy notions but tools that a crafty salesperson-or propagandist-uses to engage the emotions of his audience. Without them no one listens.
Maybe we should ask Travis McGee when he thinks about this.
Let us have a look at Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh revolutionized not just a.m. talk radio but political discourse. He did it with a mixture of humor and passion but always with an upbeat atmosphere. Limbaugh knows something about how to communicate with people. Limbaugh is also worth looking at because of his business model. Limbaugh is ruthless in requiring that his presentations be profit-making. He has made this model work fabulously. So the first question one must ask, is do we want a profit-making model or do we want and eleemosynary model? Can we go both ways?
In considering this, we ought to consider all the ways that the left gets the rest of us to finance their propaganda. We have the obvious example of National Public Radio and Public Television but there are so many other examples. The entire University structure has now become dependent on federal grants (remember the old joke appearing in national review some years ago about Grants Scotch, "while you are up get me a federal grant"?). Our primary and secondary schools have become money laundering machines for the teachers unions who teach leftist propaganda at our expense, literally. The revolving door between the Democratic administrations in academia and the journalistic media has been well understood. David Horowitz has written the Bible on how all of this works. We conservatives ought to understand this model and then decide whether to accept it or reject it as part of our own.
I do not mean to recommend that we reduce conservative principles to tawdry and shallow bumper stickers to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I mean that we should fully understand how to touch the nobler emotions of the human heart in service of conservative truths. Something like how Lincoln did it when he appealed to, "the better angels of our nature."
