Skip to content

A Mid-Term Election Will Chase Those Doldrums Away

Sunrise

Frank Luntz is depressed. The infamous GOP “word guru” is fed up with life. What’s wrong with America’s beloved focus group maven?

Luntz is typically described as a “wordsmith,” as his most well-known function involves giving Republicans the proper focus-grouped words they desire to carry out any particular tactic. When they wanted to take over Congress in 1994, Luntz came up with the “Contract with America.” When they wanted to kill the Affordable Care Act, Luntz suggested they refer to it as a “government takeover” or “Washington takeover” of health care. When they wanted to kill financial regulatory reform, Luntz told them to call it the “big bank bailout.” (Both of those last two measures passed, but along party lines, and neither has what can be considered strong cross-party public support these days.) The ethical problem—yeah, sorry, hate to be pedantic—with Luntz’s work here is fairly gaping: he is not reading the text of the legislation to focus groups and then coming away with their conclusions; he’s finding whatever words in the ballpark of a particular issue that people hate and ascribing them to whatever specific text lay before him. But it’s a living.

Although not so much anymore, as The Atlantic’s Molly Ball writes following a downer of a lunch date with Luntz. He “no longer has any ongoing political contracts,” we learn, and derives most of his income from television contracts. He’s sold his home near Washington, D.C., and is considering selling his consulting company. He can’t stand anything he’s hearing in his focus groups. What has brought him to this lowly state? Some combination of genuinely hating politics and frustration with the populace, who believe all the wrong things.

His newfound hatred and avoidance of politics, he says, stems from the polarization of the electorate from which he sees no escape:

They were contentious and argumentative. They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. “They want to impose their opinions rather than express them,” is the way he describes what he saw. “And they’re picking up their leads from here in Washington.” Haven’t political disagreements always been contentious, I ask? “Not like this,” he says. “Not like this.”

[. . .]

“I don’t like this. I don’t like this,” he says, meaning D.C., the schmoozing, the negativity, the division. At football games, “People are happy, families are barbecuing outside, people are playing pitch and toss. A little too much beer, but you can’t have everything. They’re just happy and they’re celebrating with each other and it’s such a mix of people.” The first week of football season, he went to four games in eight days: Sunday night, Monday night, Thursday night, and then Sunday again.

He has a point: football is better than politics. We can relate to that, and, more generally, relate to the idea that anything is better than bickering about politics. (For me, personally, the big breakthrough of 2013 was in realizing that instead of getting worked up about a David Brooks or Thomas Friedman column, I could literally do anything else.) It sounds obvious, but for some, who’ve built their lives and careers around following politics, it can be revelatory.

His other source of frustration is with the people commonly known as “the people.” They feel entitled! Just look at this entitlement they feel and whine about, to him, in his focus groups:

“You should not expect a handout,” he tells me. “You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don’t, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them.” The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone. “We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that’s why they voted for him,” he says. “And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great.”

[. . .]

Most of all, Luntz says, he wishes we would stop yelling at one another. Luntz dreams of drafting some of the rich CEOs he is friends with to come up with a plan for saving America from its elected officials. “The politicians have failed; now it’s up to the business community to stand up and be heard,” he tells me. “I want the business community to step up.” Having once thought elites needed to listen to regular people, he now wants the people to learn from their moneyed betters.

Ahh, there we go, now we’re back on the recognizable spectrum. He is disappointed that his side has been losing elections because everyone wants Obama’s welfare, and the “business elites” are somehow allowing this to happen. Here we have a familiar form of crankery.

The good news for Luntz is that there are ways out of his current funk on the horizon. If he hates politics so much that he can’t bear to be involved in it anymore, then he can just choose to not be involved in it anymore, since he is rich. He can play golf in warm climes everyday for the rest of his life, if he so chooses. Sounds like a good option from where we’re sitting!

If he’s disappointed that his messaging isn’t resonating with a majority bloc of the country, he should be pleased to hear that President Obama is terribly unpopular and Republicans are likely going to make big gains in 2014. Not because anyone likes Republicans, but . . . a win’s a win? Cheer up, Frank Luntz.