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Sunday, June 17, 2007
On your next trip to the Emerald City, go for the heart instead of the brain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Very possibly, the last time you heard about Drew Westen, it was 2004.
The Emory University researcher had just finished peering into the brains of 15 right-handed, over-the-top John Kerry fans, and 15 right-handed, rabid supporters of George W. Bush.
In addition to plenty of sawdust, Westen found this: Regardless of political party, the human mind will twist an unwanted fact into a pretzel to prevent it from contradicting a deeply held belief.
Political strategists, diplomats and parents of teenagers know this as a matter of faith. But Westen and his compadres documented it.
What’s more, they saw that, once uncomfortable facts are disposed of, brains reward themselves by activating some of the same circuitry that makes drug addicts feel so warm and fuzzy about their chemical experiences.
Anyone who finds a biological underpinning for the phrase “self-deluding political junkie” is obliged to write a book. Westen, in fact, has parlayed his research into “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”
But the professor wasn’t satisfied with academic cliché. He’s also become a Democratic political consultant.
The Emory researcher began writing his book last June, and sent the early chapters to a colleague, who copied an editor at the liberal magazine, American Prospect. By the fall of 2006, Westen was in Washington, lecturing Democratic strategists in a backroom of the Old Ebbitt Grill.
Westen’s chief message is that, unlike Republicans, Democrats have allowed mere facts to get in the way of the gut-level campaigns needed to persuade and motivate voters. “They do so, I believe, because of an irrational emotional commitment to rationality,” he writes.
Think Michael Dukakis in 1988, Al Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. All candidates determined to show themselves as masters of detail, all beaten by Republicans who understood the emotional short-cuts into the psyches of voters.
“Democrats think rationality equals ethical, and emotional equals unethical,” Westen said last week. “But you can appeal to people’s better angels through emotion. In fact, the easiest way to get them to think about something is to get them to feel about it.”
In other words, no matter what Frank Baum thought, the Tin Man, not the Scarecrow, was the better politician. Westen’s model candidate? Bill “I Feel Your Pain” Clinton. And FDR. And in a pinch, Lyndon Johnson.
Already, Westen has held confabs with representatives from every major presidential campaign in the Democratic field. He says he has Democratic backers want him to vet messages and strategies for candidates up and down the ’08 ticket.
The book comes out next week. In no uncertain terms, “The Political Brain” is directed at a Democratic audience.
Westen dissects the role of the amygdala — that area of the brain that synthesizes emotional information, even subliminal messages — in the racially driven Willie Horton ads used against Dukakis in ’88. He discusses the importance that evolution places on emotions in the fight to survive, and why music is so important, and why so much of it is wrong in Democratic campaign ads.
But be not afraid. While dead serious, the book is written in breezy fashion, by a man who - in another, non-academic life - dabbled in stand-up comedy.
Nor is it a dry well for Republicans. Read it, and you might understand why talk of a White House run by uber-rationalist Newt Gingrich is fading, and why the campaign of Fred Thompson — like Ronald Reagan, a professional emoter — is taking off.
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