Pants on Fire

Eric Alterman has a nice column at The Nation about When Presidents Lie. Included are some great insights on the voters, including the following, which affirms my conviction that the Left’s future depends on organizing an ideological infrastructure to rival the Right:

Voters react to the news through the lens of a personal history containing certain stereotypes, predispositions and emotional associations that determine their interpretations. We emphasize that which confirms our original beliefs and disregard or denigrate what might contradict them.

If the party’s leaders continue to see themselves as somehow fundamentally different from the members in the heartland, connecting to them through a shared personal history will be impossible. I’m not suggesting that a man like Kerry pretend he came from beginnings like Edwards, or that Edwards pretend that he lives the same life now as when he was a child, but surely we can borrow a page out of the Republicans’ playbook and stop trying to place the emphasis on how much alike we all are in terms of personal circumstances, and start trying to elucidate our shared goals and vision (emotional associations) as the most important personal histories to celebrate. Being the son of a millworker only matters if you can convey why that informed your belief system—and that’s it the same one as the son of a millworker who did not go on to become a multimillionaire.

Perhaps that seems obvious, but if we were communicating that message effectively, this election wouldn’t be a horserace.