Posted on 04/26/2014 8:39:07 AM PDT by Kaslin
This is an excerpt from the new book Rules for Patriots: How Conservatives Can Win Again
How many times have you watched the presidential debates in the post-Reagan years with your hands half-covering your eyes, just dreading that moment when that gotcha question comes “our guy’s” way?
You can almost sense it coming too, can’t you? Just when “our guy” seems to have the momentum and a head of steam, you know the liberal media member pretending to be an impartial moderator is going to drop the proverbial hammer right on our heads.
Come on, I can’t be the only grassroots conservative out there who has experienced this level of angst watching these things? Be honest with me now. Don’t leave me hanging. That’s what I thought.
I mean, heaven forbid our Republican “champion” actually has the worldview and shrewd communication skills to turn the question to his advantage. I mean, we’re only running for the highest offices in the land here, so it’s not like we should expect the best of the best to represent us or anything.
We’ve already written about not accepting the premise of your opponent, but the next step to winning requires borrowing a technique from the martial arts—using your opponent’s strength against him. In political combat we do that by first rejecting your opponent’s premise, and then we reverse his premise and use it against him.
Or, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, to “hoist him from his own petard.”
Reagan was a Jedi Master of this technique, and here are just a couple of many famous examples.
During a 1984 presidential debate with Walter Mondale, Reagan responded to mounting criticism he was too old to be president by promising he would not “make his opponent’s youth and inexperience an issue in this campaign.”
That snarky retort even drew a laugh from Mondale himself.
At a press conference during his first term, ABC News’ Chief White House Correspondent Sam Donaldson asked Reagan if all the blame for the recession at the time rested with the Democrat-controlled Congress. “Mr. President, does any of the blame belong to you,” Donaldson asked Reagan.
Without skipping a beat, Reagan winsomely replied, “Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat.”
You cannot successfully reverse your opponent’s premise if you accept it, and unless you know why you believe what you believe you will accept your opponent’s premise more times than not. In the first Reagan example we just cited, notice he rejects the premise outright that he’s too old for the job. So instead of arguing his qualifications, he makes a crack undercutting the qualifications of his opponent.
“But Steve,” some of you will say, “aren’t we tired of politicians who won’t answer the question they were asked?”
Yes, but if the premise of the question is flawed you should never dignify it with an answer. Gotcha questions with no attempt to address anything substantive are the Left’s version of “did you beat your wife last night?” Once you start going down that rabbit trail, you end up chasing your own tail. Instead, you need to reverse the premise and put them on the defensive.
On the other hand, you also don’t want to come across as evasive, which is why reversing the premise and using it against them is so key. You’re turning the argument of your opponent around on them to demonstrate the total lack of substance and merit of their argument.
Let them know that it ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun.
That’s how Reagan respond strangled Donaldson with his premise in our second example. Essentially Reagan said, “Fine, Sam. You want me to accept blame for what big government does to stifle capitalism and free enterprise? Sure, I should probably accept some of that blame for all the years I used to be a big government Democrat advocating these same failed policies myself.”
That, my friends, is what the kids today refer to as a walk-off shot or a mic drop.
Since we communicate in such a quick-draw style nowadays, it is imperative that we are quick-on-the-draw in the arena of ideas. Whether it’s a grassroots patriot standing up to speak at a local Tea Party rally, one of our elected officials or candidates on a national stage, or just a conversation about politics between you and your neighbor, if you can’t instantly grab people’s attention and make your case they just move on.
Furthermore, the other side of the debate has already boiled down their positions to emotion-driven clichés that are easy to embed into the subconscious of our fellow Americans (e.g. marriage equality, a woman’s right to choose, government investment, income equality, fairness, diversity, standing up for the middle class, etc.) It’s easier to communicate emotion in a pithy fashion than it is logic and reason, which is often what we base our positions on, so we’re already at a disadvantage. That’s why we need to be intentional about equipping one another to communicate in a way that resonates with how most of our fellow Americans receive and distribute information.
One of the most effective methods of doing just that is to master the art of reversing the premise of our opponent’s argument and using it against them. Let me provide an example from my own experience.
During a nationally-televised interview I did during the 2012 presidential primary. I was challenged by the interviewer with how I, as a Christian, could talk about grace and love while at the same time argue to end government programs to help the poor and needy?
Again, this is the sort of question that all too often the Mitt McCains and George McDoles face from the national media that produces a cringe-inducing response. But if you have a solid worldview, it’s like sitting on a fastball with a 3-1 count.
“I think grace and love are measured in a culture not by how many people are in need of government assistance but by how many people no longer do,” I said. “What can be more loving than encouraging your fellow man created in the image of God that with the right training, tools, and opportunity they can rise above their circumstances and fulfill their God-given potential?”
There was no follow up question after that.
If the welfare state really meant compassion, then how come Democrats aren’t bragging about the fact there are currently more Americans on food stamps than the population of Spain? Shouldn’t they be thanking the taxpayers for all this “compassion?” Shouldn’t they be holding press junkets to boast their plan is working, and we’re the most compassionate society we’ve ever been?
Instead of screaming, swearing, and throwing things at the TV screen while Republicrats roll over and play dead for the liberal media, we’d be standing and applauding if more conservatives in the spotlight said things like that more often.
Reversing the premise of the Left’s arguments like this and using it against them is one of the most effective and devastating ways to make our point, but to pull it off we need to be confident of our principles and have the required courage of conviction.
Something that is sorely lacking in most of “our guys.”
Of course, if we ran principled people to begin with, rather than a bunch of compromised and undocumented democrats, gotcha questions wouldn’t be an issue to begin with.
But I’m sure if we just keep running fool after fool and pray to the Blue Fairy hard enough, one will win ‘this time’...
No, he did not.
Let it work; For 'tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard: and 't shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines,
A petard is a bomb. One can be hoisted with or by a petard, basically meaning blown up by your own bomb.
But it's difficult to be hoisted from a petard, which implies the petard is some kind of hook or lift mechanism.
Possibly a nit.
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The only Republican in the last election who routinely handled these questions well was Newt.
Who unfortunately has massive other problems as a candidate. But the guy sure can talk.
I am coming to the conclusion there is no such thing as a “principled” politician. No real, authentic, principled human being would want to be one.
To expand on what the author suggests, I think what conservatives lack is a Lee Atwater type. Atwater worked with both Reagan and Bush Sr. He was one of the few Republicans who used the left's own Alinsky tactics against them. He was most famous for the 'Willie Horton' ad, which revealed Dukakis as soft on crime. Imagine what an Atwater would do with ammo like Jeremiah Wright and Benghazi.
Newt for vp?
Reagan was the last republican who could think on his feet. And to think he’d made his living speaking words written by others.
The democrats’ way to respond is to hammer the podium act indignant.
If this is the KEY, then Cruz is our guy.
For instance, accepting your opponents premise implicitly by calling yourself a "Compassionate Conservative", implying that, yeah, conservatism sucks, but I'm not really one of them.
Absolutely true.
When I was selling {over five different decades} I knew, that while I had the facts and figures and all logical reasons on my side that buying was an emotion driven event, and in order to succeed, needed to keep that as a major part of my sales strategy.
Facts and logic worked for him, but if you want to persuade people...
You have no mastery of this technique or this strategy, or successes to point to in your own life, so you are left with nothing more to say other than your sophomoronic cliché's about "Blue Fairies."
You make no effort to speak of any strategic successes you have ever had that could build upon the strategy in order to edify the continuing conversation, or to provide insights which might improve upon the model. No. You sit there, play with the lint in your navel and just grouse as though anyone really cares to listen to it.
This is a winning argumentative technique, without which one merely exudes their aimless lack of focus, and inclination toward argumentative distraction, buttressed at best by platitudinous self-righteousness and unconvincing, misplaced hubris as one occupies the moral high ground without the competence necessary to defend that field advantage.
The problem isn't just "... a bunch of compromised and undocumented democrats..." but witless, conversationally challenged, glibly unprepared personalities that our ascendant Tea Party side have put forth in the last 2 Senate contest cycles like Sharon Angle, Christine O'Donnell, Todd Aiken and, Richard Murdock.
While by every other measure they were inherently head and shoulders above their challengers, still they couldn't seem to get the message across without becoming befuddled cartoons of themselves by "gotchya" questions that a guy like Ted Cruz could have and would have reverse-skewered his interrogators with.
Your shallow, depressive commentary adds nothing to this thread. Running "principled people" is not enough. If they aren't trained and equipped for battle and mastering the argumentative technique necessary for getting their point across, they too will be left on a back bench somewhere with no more influence on building a winning electoral strategy and consensus than any other depressive blogger like yourself might be, as they post to a thread like this.
The first person to mention the MA "catch and release on weekends" convict program, was demonRAT, algore in a televised 1988 debate with dukaka.
The pubbies picked up on it after dukaka won the primary.
What really "killed" dukaka was his on camera admission that he would not seek the death penalty, even if his wife and daughter were the victims...end of his sad story.
All that said, dukaka, would still have been better than the one is today.
Thank you.
Bump and bump. Newt was and, I guess, still is a leader. I wanted him to at least finish second in his run for the candidacy. Baggage or not, he fights! He actually goes on the offensive. That seems to be sorely lacking on the Right.
Lots of words that boil down to “I love the status quo”.
Get a new hobby.
Here's a couple of graphics to show the difference -- the one involving an explosive is the correct one, the one involving a gallows is the all-too-common misinterpretation.
If you find those terms in direct opposition to what you believe, and antithetical to the generally accepted usage of the word or term, you must from the outset complain, and complain loudly, that what your opponent is proposing you accept has in fact nothing to do with reality, and will not be the way you envision it.
Leftists, as a general rule, lie to themselves as least as much as they lie to the rest of us, and must be called on it every time.
Every time!
CA....
“Reversing the premise of the Left’s arguments like this and using it against them is one of the most effective and devastating ways to make our point, but to pull it off we need to be confident of our principles and have the required courage of conviction.”
I believe Romney lost the election in the debate when Candy Crowley and Barack Obama double teamed him on Benghazi. He came across as extremely weak. Ronald Reagan would have turned the event around by looking at the camera and saying something like - “I didn’t realize this was a 2 on one debate” or “Which one of you am I supposed to be debating?”. He then would have immediately started into a statement where he completely eviscerated Obama’s actions the day of Benghazi and the policy of alignment with the terrorists.
Romney was stunned speechless by the obviously staged double slam for which he was clearly unprepared. Romney failed to project leadership and confidence under fire. In addition he demonstrated he was unable to recover and react quickly on his feet. After watching him fumble I wondered how he could stand up to Putin if he couldn’t handle a street thug like Obama.
One reason GOP candidates can’t respond to the kamikaze attack when it comes is they have no deeply held core beliefs. Most are actors, coached by professional political consults in how to win elections. When something hits them that isn’t in the script, or wasn’t covered in rehearsal, they can’t respond because they are not grounded. No matter the circumstances, Reagan could fall back on articulating his core beliefs.
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