The Democratic Party sets Drew Westen's "frontal pole aflutter." But he's not at all happy with his party's leaders. A professor of psychology at Emory University and the founder of a political and corporate consulting firm, Westen believes that by betting the farm on rational appeals to dispassionate voters, Democratic strategists and standard bearers have created a "Bland Old Party" that "speaks softly and carries Massachusetts."
While the party with heart speaks to the mind, Westen argues, the ruthless Republicans win election after election by understanding that political brains are emotional brains and manipulating positive and negative feelings during campaigns.
Based on the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, Westen's new book, The Political Brain, a savvy, scary, partisan, provocative, take-no-prisoners-political primer, with cautionary tales drawn from the emotionally-challenged Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry campaigns, each of which snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
When he compartmentalizes reason and emotion, contrasts the two parties, stylistically and substantially, and scripts the responses candidates should have made to attacks by their opponents, Westen tends to go over the top. But his analysis of how and why political rhetoric stimulates voters' "networks of association, bundles of thoughts, feelings, images, and ideas" will be instructive, if also infuriating, to political junkies, no matter what their partisan affiliation.
Successful candidates, Westen emphasizes, present a master narrative, "an emotional constitution." No one did it better than Ronald Reagan, whose story revolved less around his biography, than his faith in enduring American ideals: individualism, independence, military strength, fiscal restraint, patriotism and religion.
Recognizing that voters' feelings about values - and the trustworthiness of a candidate - trump their beliefs about specific policies, Reagan turned the Rooseveltian discourse about the role of government on its head. He called taxation "confiscation," the Great Society "a costly social experiment," and regulation of the market "economic tinkering."
Since "The Great Communicator" left the White House, Westen suggests, Democratic "policy wonks" have deconstructed issues, with appeals to logic, self-interest and practical utility, while Republicans continue to frame them in emotionally laden language.
