“How to Speak Republican,” Katharine Mieszkowski’s Salon interview with Frank Luntz, offers a revealing look at how the GOP’s top wordsmith sees their midterm debacle. Asked what he thought were the GOP’s “linguistic mistakes” in the ’06 campaign, Luntz says:

Earmarks became a public issue and they were silent on it. The bridge to nowhere was a complete disaster for the GOP. Not articulating the sense of accountability with Mark Foley and Duke Cunningham and [Bob] Ney. I think that the language that was tied to the policies of 1994 represented politics at its best, and language tied to the politics of 2006 represented politics at its worst.

Asked for some examples of failed language, Luntz responds:

You tell me. What was the Republican message for 2006? I’ve asked congressmen, senators. I even asked the people responsible for creating the message for 2006. What was the message for the Republican Party in 2006? Not a single person can give me an answer. None of them. No one at the Republican National Committee, no Republican senator, no Republican House member, no operative, none of the Democrats, can answer it either. Nobody knows. That’s the failure. So when you say to me, “Give me an example,” I can’t. There’s no message to criticize because there was no message. It was nothing.

Luntz credits Gingrich for giving the Dems their winning slogan “Had enough?” but says they won more because they got a free ride, thanks to GOP ineptitude. He takes predictable pot shots at the netroots, but sees Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as generally effective communicators. A stickler for oppo research, Luntz says he reads all of George Lakoff’s books and spends “half my time” reading Democratic blogs and studying congress in action on the floor. Luntz also has a new book “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear,” which probably merits a read by political language junkies of both parties.
Yet, after giving Luntz credit for identifying some key GOP failures in the midterms, absent here is any sense that maybe voters rightly concluded that the occupation of Iraq was a bad idea, based on lies and poorly executed. It’s all about communication. Instead of “surge,” Luntz believes President Bush would have done better using the euphemisms “reassessment” or “realignment.” Thoughtful political communication is important. But at a certain point, using evasive language to describe bad policy is putting lipstick on a pig.

Just to add a little factual background perspective to the interesting fray on the Netroots and progressives underway at TPM Cafe (featuring TDS’s Scott Winship), we recommend The Audience for Political Blogs” New Research on Blog Readership a study published by Joseph Graf at the web pages of The Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Among the factoids Graf serves up:

The Regular, daily audience for political blogs is fairly small. We estimate in the millions of readers, not tens of millions.
Nine percent of the survey sample looked at political blogs “almost every day”
Nearly two-thirds, 66 percent, of daily readers of political blogs get most of their national and international news from the internet.
The audience for political blogs is highly concentrated among “dozens of blogs, not thousands.”
One-third of those who read political blogs every day consider themselves “strong liberals.”
The higher traffic political blogs are disproportionately liberal.

Interesting, but no shockers here. The survey had its limitations — respondents in the sample were 7,683 California registered voters who chose to take an online survey, and it didn’t include any insights about developing trends. It would appear that television is still the medium of choice for political information for the time being, given the declining levels of print readership. With the expected merging of television and internet access in millions of homes, it could be a very different picture before too long.
There is mounting evidence that political blogs are finding a more avid audience among opinion leaders and those employed in political work. Henry Copeland reports on recent studies indicating that about 90 percent of “congressional offices” read blogs, and 64 percent of congressional staff readers believe “blogs are more useful than mainstream media for identifying future national political problems and debates.” He notes also that “52% of journalists believe blogs have ‘some to a great deal’ of influence on the way media covers stories.”

Kagro X has a succinct guide to 11 legislative proposals challenging the Bush/McCain “surge” over at Daily Kos. His wrap-up provides a helpful sense of the range of interesting responses being considered by Dems.

The 2007 Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday finds a growing portion of Americans opposed to increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. As the first poll of Americans following President Bush’s ‘surge’ address (PDF here) indicates, 66 percent of Americans oppose sending another 20 thousand plus troops to Iraq, while 32 percent are in favor. CNN notes further:

Half the respondents said they “strongly oppose” sending more troops, while 16 percent “moderately oppose.” Only 19 percent “strongly favor” sending additional troops, and 13 percent “moderately favor” the idea…With Democrats controlling Congress, Americans show substantially more support for the Democratic Party on the issue of Iraq. Just more than half — 51 percent — said they have more confidence in the Iraq policies of the Democrats in Congress, while only 34 percent said they have more confidence in Bush’s Iraq policies.

If this rising tide of dissent rings a bell, go back almost 40 years to February 25, 1967, when Dr. King had this to say in his speech “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam”:

It’s time for all people of conscience to call upon America to return to her true home of brotherhood and peaceful pursuits. We cannot remain silent as our nation engages in one of history’s most cruel and senseless wars. America must continue to have, during these days of human travail, a company of creative dissenters. We need them because the thunder of their fearless voices will be the only sound stronger than the blasts of bombs and the clamor of war hysteria.

The entire speech may be read The King Papers Project website.

For those of us who are a little behind in understanding the use of viral video and other new video tools in politics, Peter Leyden’ Blog at NDN provides a good introduction here. Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, paints an interesting picture of the unfolding communications technology leading up to the 2008 elections:

Emotionally powerful, visually complex video has finally arrived on the internet – and it’s moving fast. Those in politics will need to hustle to keep up with it.
This urgency is particularly important today, because the forty-year reign of broadcast and cable television thirty-second ads is coming to a close. Among other things, the spread of digital video recorders (DVRs) like TiVo allows an increasing chunk of Americans to skip ads altogether. By the 2008 election roughly one-third of all American households will have DVRs, and the percentage of likely voters with them will be even higher.
Understanding video also requires understanding how people are accessing video. NPI Fellow Tim Chambers tells us that “by the 2008 election, more than 90 percent of the mobile phones used in the U.S. will be internet-enabled…by 2011, 24 million U.S. cellular subscribers and customers will be paying for some form of TV/video content and services on their mobile devices.” At that point mobile video services combined would have more than 3 million more users than the largest cable operator in the U.S. does today.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to visualize the potential power of such tools for creating buzz for candidates and campaigns with limited budgets. And it can cut both ways. Leyden notes that George Allen’s “macaca moment” was first publicized through “viral video” (wikipedia also has an informative entry on the term here). Leyden introduces the first installment of NPI’s new series “Re-Imagining Video” with former Hollywood producer Julie Bergman Sender’s more in depth piece on the subject “Viral Video in Politics: Case Studies in Creating Compelling Video” Readers can link to the PDF from this summary.