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One of the most interesting and fun things I do is teach. In addition to regular classes on rhetoric and language in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, and an upcoming gig as the local instructor for the new Emerson College program in DC, I am supervising a GW graduate student directed study in strategic communication.

As one might imagine most of the course work is focused on Big Issues – case studies of the environmental movement, the death penalty, and efforts against corporations doing work in nations with corrupt governments. Scholars and reporters tend to write about what interests them, which is often what interests the rest of us: big topics with broad impacts. But as my student and I talked last week it became clear that very few of these Big Issues with Big Campaigns and massive strategic efforts actually change a lot of laws. One scholarly piece argued that the ultimate changing of laws didn’t matter, it was whether or not groups were able impact the agenda. That, of course, is absurd. Agenda setting matters because it helps you win. Having a lot hearings on your bill and can advance an agenda, but the point of strategic communication efforts aimed at Congress is the changing policy.

Some efforts of course have some policy outcomes – the federal Innocence Protection Act, state death penalty reform and abolition, and US Supreme Court rulings limiting capital punishment are the result of an intentional agenda setting effort. But that such is worthy of a book length scholarly case study ( The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence) indicates how much of an outlier such outcomes are.

Most bills, most of the time, never make headlines. And most bills are full of tons of provisions that never make the story at all. That does not, however, mean that such provisions are unimportant or that they are not the result of strategic political efforts.

For example a provision in the Higher Education Reauthorization Act encouraging universities to help stop online copyright theft is tremendously important to the film, television and music industries. They worked hard with allies on the Hill to ensure the copyright protection language was put in, and stayed in, the legislation. A package of extensions to expiring tax provisions is stuck in the politics of the House and Senate as well as larger budget politics. Largely escaping public and press notice are the provisions themselves, including one to help counter foreign government efforts to lure film productions overseas. This extension is very important to the film industry, and a coalition of entertainment industry groups is working hard to keep it.

These efforts which fly below the radar screens of scholars and the popular press succeed or fail for the same reasons the Big Issues do – an ability to define goals, identify who has power over those goals, learn what they find persuasive from whom, and do that.

This comes from Michael Harris, a college classmate. Without prompting Michael also makes musical suggestions, to which I will add one -- the Michael Harris Band.

Hey Peter,

Here are my Summer Reading Suggestions and listening suggestions.

Fiction
The Tales of The Otori (Four Book Series) by Lian Hearn
This books has intrigue, fantasy, sword battles and love stories, all set in an era of Japan where Samurai and Assassins ruled the day. The books are compelling and once you start you will want to finish the entire series. The first book is "Across The Nightingale Floor". Enjoy!

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (note this is the second reccomendation for this work - pl)
This is not a peppy book by any means, but it will get you thinking about how you live your life, what's important; and what kind of human being would you be when the world essentially ends?

Music
Adele 19
If you haven't heard Adele then rush out immediately or log on and down load her CD "Adele 19" once you hear her voice you'll be hooked. The songwriting is superb and the arrangements are engaging and tight.

Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
Bon Iver delivers a series of songs that take you to another place, almost ethereal with a distinct voice that borders on a whisper about to explode into a yell. Great lyrics and a CD you can totally cool your heels with on a hot summer's night with cocktail and your favorite someone at your side.

Talk with you soon,
Cheers,
Michael

The cover story in last Sunday’s Parade Magazine asked “What is Patriotism?” and offered answers from Senators Obama and McCain. The essays were a reminder of the power of arguing for change from strength.

Advocates often argue from weakness – they behave not only like they are losing, but as if they will always lose. The deck is stacked against them, The Man is out to get them, progress is an illusion, they are beleaguered and often bedraggled, and anyone who thinks otherwise clearly hasn’t the slightest idea what’s going on. Happiness and success are dangerous lies. A lot of advocates end up sounding like the unpopular kids in high school making fun of the cool kids. The problem is that no one wants to hang out with the unpopular kids.

There is rhetorical power in arguing from strength. If you behave as if you are winning, or are about to win, or that winning is inevitable, or that it’s even a possibility, people are much more likely to support you.

Imagine two different canvassers knock on your door. Being a former canvasser (as all good advocates are – I could probably still do the raps from my MassPIRG, NYPIRG and CalPIRG days with an appropriate application of beer) you want to give, but you can only afford to support one. The first says, “the rivers that aren’t dry are poisoned, the remaining polar bear is dying and Texas has the bomb. Can I count on your support in the form of a $35 membership?” The second says, “people in this community are coming together to tackle some serious problems we all face like safe water, saving the polar bear and stopping Texas from nuking Massachusetts – we are already making progress and your $35 membership will help us win.” Easy choice.

The latter is the approach that Senators McCain and Obama take in Parade. Both talk about the power of a unifying vision and the assumption of good outcomes. The pull-quote for Obama is “The greatness of our country is the liberty to pursue our dreams” and for McCain it is “This blessed country remains a place of limitless horizons.” It would be easy for either to say, “this is a huge mess and we all know it – Iraq is a disaster, the budget deficit is out of control, the education system is awful and getting worse, and gas costs so much some people can’t afford to drive to work. Vote for me.” Instead they argue from strength, saying “there may be problems, but we’re Americans and there is nothing we can’t do. Vote for me.”

Winning, like cool, is an attitude that often drives its own outcome.

A couple of folks have emailed their summer reading suggestions -

Friend of Milo Public Affairs and fellow Emerson College alum Iris Burnett pitches her new book, So You Think You Can Be President?, "It's great summer reading. I have been on MSNBC-- Morning Joe and Hardball and they all love it."

Steve Livingston, a professor in both the School of Media and Public Affairs and the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University writes, "Cormac Macarthy, The Road is about as dark as it gets, but a glorious read. The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby should [not] be missed if for no other reason than it points the reader to Richard Hofstadter and his classic treatment of the same phenomenon, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Of the plethora of books about the war in Iraq, Jon Steele's Defeat is the best I've read to date, though I myself am working on another book about Iraq to add to the growing list. Another honorable mention is When the Press Fails." Steve co-authored this last suggestion, and it is definately worth a read - Peter

When visitors from Phoenix complain about the heat, it's time to head to the beach (or in my case to the kiddy-pool in the back yard) with some good reading. I humbly offer two suggestions - the first is American Farmland Trust's analysis of the Farm Bill. Milo Public Affairs worked with AFT on its efforts to promote agriculture policy that better reflects budget realities, environmental concerns, and the needs of America's farmers and ranchers. The second is a report from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights on the troubles with the transition to digital television that we wrote with Heathcote Strategies.
You can read about the report in The New York Times, Broadcasting & Cable and elsewhere.

Below are more summer reading recommendations from friends of Milo Public Affairs.

Mark Agrast
Senior Fellow, The Center for American Progress
Non-Fiction
Counselor by Ted Sorensen
Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen
Fiction & Poetry
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
Poems, Prose and Letters by Elizabeth Bishop

Mike McCusker
Oscar-nominated film editor
Non-Fiction
A People's History of The United States by Howard Zinn
Fiction
Blood Meridian by Cormac Macarthy
Here's what Mike had to say about this selection: "You'd love this one it's beautifully gruesome - one of the most gruesome
things I've ever read but based on factual accounts of mercenary scalp hunters in the southwest and Mexico circa 1850. I find myself re-reading passages over and over again because the writing is so incredible. This is the tome where a character named The Judge explains humanity's fascination with war by stating that 'War is God'."

Not sure how I feel about Mike saying I'd love that.

Prof. Janis Anderson
Dean of the School of Communication at Emerson College
writes, "The best book I have read lately is Suite Francaisse [by Irene Nemirovsky]…. A world war story of the German occupation of France."

Jen Mraz
Federal Policy Director, National Abortion Federation
writes, "Cloud Atlas [by] David Mitchell - I recently read it and it was great!"

Josh Knauer
Radio Journalist, Westwood One
offers this, "Great Summer Reading- When You Are Engulfed In Flames - David Sedaris!"

Peter Loge
Principal, Milo Public Affairs LLC (it's my blog, I get to offer recommendations)
Doctor Faustus - The life of the great German composer Adrian Leverkuhn as told by a friend by Thomas Mann is the fiction on my bedside table, and the non-fiction is The Greek Sophists translated by John Dillon and Tania Gergel.

But the book that matters, and that is always on my nightstand, is The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.

Share your summer readings by posting here or emailing them to me (and I'll post them).

Last Friday night my wife took me to see This Beautiful City a play based on interviews with those in and around the Evangelical movement in Colorado Springs, at the Studio Theatre. Parts of the performance reminded me of some of my work with progressive activists.

In one scene three US Air Force cadets are at a table explaining their faith and denying that they inappropriately evangelize on campus. One says they do not preach at folks by saying “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Rather they “show people the truth” and let them come to their own conclusions (or something to that effect – the quotes are probably wrong but the spirit of the thing is right). The cadets say they simply show the truth, and once seen it cannot be denied.

This sounds a lot like a lot of activists I’ve known over the years. Most folks reading this have a list of issues about which they cannot understand disagreement - most at some point say, “if they only knew what was really going on they would agree with me.”

Most of us think of ourselves as mostly reasonable most of the time. We tend to make decisions for what we think are pretty good reasons. Almost no one has a conversion based on the simple revelation of new information. This is especially true of issues that involve values, judgments, and other areas that more personal than which type of detergent to purchase. Our political decisions – from whether or not we support free trade to our political candidates of choice – fall into the former rather than the latter. We make political decisions based on internal visions of how the world works and how the issue or candidate in question fits that view.

As such, just showing the data and hoping for a conversion is bound to fail. And insisting on our truth, the rhetorical equivalent of repeating yourself louder and slower, mostly makes you look foolish and angers the person you’re talking to.

The problem isn’t fungible truth or “mere relativism.” The problem is that most issues and most people are mostly true on a lot of fronts. Free trade does, on balance, increase the wealth of the nations that engage in it, while trade barriers are on balance bad. So the truth is that free trade is good. But free trade does create winners and losers, does perpetuate a capitalist system which itself has winners and losers, and development (a result of trade) does hurt the environment. So the truth is free trade is bad. One does not deny the other.

And, of course, while truth may not be relative is it is often personally held. So even if the person who thinks they have Truth has a lie, telling them “you’re living a lie, your beliefs are misguided at best and evil at worst, join me because I’m better than you” is not likely to succeed.

Good persuasion learns what the audience believes to be true and matches the action to that belief. Rather than saying, “you’re wrong, I’m right, do this” good persuasion says “you’re right, do this.”

I recently took part in a day-long meeting that wanted to discuss ideal model legislation absent political considerations – what would the participants like to see as law if politics weren’t a concern?

On its surface this is an appealing notion and logical first step, like a career planning session in which you start with “if you could be anything what would it be?” You start where you want to end up and then figure out how to get there. There are several problems with this approach.

Organizers made political assumptions going into the meeting. The issue was framed as one of good public policy, a way for states to save money and as being non-partisan. These are political considerations.

Organizers asked what participants would want in a law. Laws, of course, do not do anything by themselves (if they did there would be no crime). Laws give people something to enforce through fines, incarceration or public pressure. This question put the outcome in a political context. A better question would have been “what policy outcomes do you want?” This leaves open the opportunity for local regulations or administrative rules, organizational best practices, or court rulings.

Participants contributed to the failure of the approach as well. Rather than focus on painting the ideal picture, many made two political moves. First, many worked within the assumptions above (though some did talk about looking at non-state legislative bodies and one made a strong case to avoid laws and instead work to change agency rules). Second, and more tellingly, many participants talked about what they thought needed to be in the law to get it to pass.

Most importantly, however, organizers assumed that public policy could be made non-political. It cannot. In a democratic society, public policy is inherently political. This is not a cynical assertion with a hidden lament for the good old days when good people did the right thing because it was the right thing to do. Those days never were, and as long as we have to argue about how to solve our shared social problems, policy will be political. Some in the discussion suggested that the best way to achieve the ends would be to quietly act, burying provisions in long bills, sneaking new procedures in to administrative rules. But hiding from politics doesn’t work. Someone would notice and make it political, and advocates would lose their gains. Positive change needs a favorable political environment in which success is likely. The policy outcome – the social change – being sought by organizers depends on public support to succeed.

The ultimate problem is that organizers got their approach backwards. Rather than start with the bill and then figure out how to manage the politics to get to there, they should have asked what political environment participants wanted to achieve and then what role, if any, laws could play in getting there.

It’s past time to put together the next Milo Public Affairs eNewsletter. And this being summer it is also past time for summer reading lists. What’s on your reading list? Post your suggestions here or email them to me at ploge@milopublicaffairs.com and I’ll put them in the next eNews in a week or so.

“The best political commercials are Rorschach patterns,” [Tony Schwartz] wrote in his book “The Responsive Chord” (Anchor Press, 1973). “They do not tell the viewer anything. They surface his feelings and provide a context for him to express these feelings.”

Over the weekend media guru Tony Schwartz died in his home (The New York Times obituary is here).

Schwartz was, of course, most famous for The Daisy Spot, an ad for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 that contrasted a little girl pulling petals off a daisy and counting up to ten with a cold voice counting down from ten and ending in a mushroom cloud. The ad, which aired only once, never mentioned Barry Goldwater by name – but made a clear argument that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for global annihilation.

In his first book, The Responsive Chord, Schwartz argues that sounds – not arguments or conversation, but the ambient sounds of our lives – ‘pluck’ responsive chords and remind us of things we already believe. A good ad-man can put the product into that recollection and sell almost anything. The Daisy Spot reminded viewers that Goldwater was nuts (something a lot of folks believed) by contrasting innocence and life with a machine sounding voice and global death. Similarly a Schwartz-created ad for Coke featured a sweating bottle and the sound of soda being poured – viewers weren’t told “when it’s hot you sweat a lot, and often it feels good to have a cold soda to both cool you down and rehydrate you; Coke is a soda that can be served cold; so on hot days consider purchasing and consuming a Coke.” Instead, viewers were subconsciously taken to hot and sweaty, then cooled and refreshed, via Coke.

The core Schwartz’s insight, a lesson not well-enough learned by advocates and candidates, is that the best arguments remind rather than tell. The most compelling arguments find something the audience already believes to be true and puts the issue in the context of that belief.

This is not a new insight – it’s the basis of Aristotle’s enthymemes. There are echoes in Stephen Toulmin’s notion of the warrant and in countless other analysis of rhetoric and persuasion.

And yet…as campaign season heats up and advocates try to make ever more clever arguments with ever more clever data (and at ever increasing volume), as economists construct ever more complitacted charts to show why they are right about taxes or recessions, and as environmentalists create ever more depressing maps about where less and less land will be, it is a lesson that will likely be again forgotten.

Those who are the most successful in the November elections (and in Congress and other legislatures, and pretty much everywhere else) will be those who remember that it’s more persuasive to remind than it is to tell.

I offer the below for your consideration – citation and explanation follow the lengthy quote.

The blog…is a one man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and “high brow” than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the blog is always short…in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the blog does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, in can consist largely of maps, or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of “reportage.” All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.

As one might guess, this isn’t about blogs at all, but rather about pamphleteers writing before the American Revolution. The original quote is below, and is taken from Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winning book, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Bailyn, in turn, is quoting Orwell writing in British Pamphleteers.

The pamphlet [George Orwell, a modern pamphleteer, has written] is a one man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and “high brow” than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, in can consist largely of maps, or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of “reportage.” All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.