What we need are ideas, action, pride and something to believe in

THEY may be bouncing along on the Sunday Business Post opinion poll results, but I’m still not speaking to Fine Gael, because they didn’t invite me to their think-in.

Not that any political party ever has. I’ve trained people from every party in Dáil Éireann, mopped their tears, celebrated their successes, but invite me to one of their gatherings, they never have. I don’t know why. I could tell them they’re losers, like George Hook did, although not from so great a height or with such enthusiasm.

ALL politicians are losers. Who, other than a born loser, would go into a business where everybody insults you, every journalist tells you what to do, (based on no personal experience whatever) and gloats when you fail to do it, make a mistake, get fat or are clocked speeding? They must all be closet masochists yearning to be beaten with a rolled-up newspaper while the cameras roll, George Lee and Charlie Bird keen in the foreground and Joe Duffy sighs in the background.

Now, to be honest, I have to admit that I would rather attend a ritual Hara Kiri disembowelling than go to any party’s ard fheis or think-in, even if I WAS invited. The competitive style of the women would make me look SO the year before last, grassroots socialising is terrifying in its casually cruel intensity and I’d prefer to re-read George Hook’s marvellous autobiography for the third time than try to figure out why it is that men get motivated by being yelled at by tall blokes.

I wouldn’t have minded sneaking in at the back of the Fine Gael session to hear the American professor who talked to them about communication, though. Professor Drew Westen is an impatient expert Democrat who wrote a book called The Political Brain Bill Clinton said should be read by every politician. It is full of fascinating studies of the cognitive processes involved in choosing and voting for political candidates, the DNA factors that predispose you to instinctively love one political party and despise another, and the post-factum rationalisations we all come up with when our heroes either bite the dust or bite us squarely in our hopes and dreams. The great thing about him, though, is that he can cast all his academic research in words that make sense. Here’s an example.

“If you want to win hearts and minds,” he told Fine Gael, “You’d better start with the heart, or no one is going to care much what’s on your mind.” This is a theme he hammers home constantly. In Limerick he may not have taken a leaf out of George Hook’s manual and told Fine Gael they would be losers at the next general election if they kept doing TV the way the Democrats do it, “reciting their best facts and figures, as if they were trying to prevail in a high school debate tournament”, but the implication was clear: they needed to talk people, not policy, pictures, not data. Westen says the pattern of Republican versus Democrat discourse happens all over the world, including, presumably, in Ireland. Democrats talk about policies and plans and data, Republicans lead with the reason to care about the data.

“In the US, when Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton, a chorus of pundits asked, ‘What went wrong?’ Nothing went wrong,” Westen said in Limerick. “Voters vote as they always do: for the candidate they have the better ‘gut feeling’ about. Obama inspired them. Hillary didn’t. She never undercut the main story told about her since the right start branding her as First Lady: that she’s cold, calculating and ruthless. Whether or not any of that is true, it was the only thing her campaign should have focused on until they saw change in ratings of her warmth in their internal polls. The best thing she ever did was to bring her daughter Chelsea out to speak with and for her. The pundits had it all wrong: that wasn’t effective because it helped win the youth vote against a candidate [Obama] who is very popular with young people. It was effective because it told a story about Hillary Clinton that didn’t fit the old one that she has a very loving relationship with her daughter and led another of people to have a different feeling towards her. Nobody ever doubted Hillary Clinton had the competence to govern. They worried about whether she cared about people like them, regardless of what she said about her policy positions.”

That’s an issue for Fine Gael, too. An issue they may miss, if they pay much attention to the theory, warmly espoused by media commentators, that Enda Kenny should go to an economic grind school, so he can GDP and GNP with the authority of Richard Bruton. Which kind of begs the question: what’s Richard Bruton for? The best thing Kenny has going for him is the bit commentators would like to amputate: his capacity to meet real citizens in a real way so they know — to paraphrase Westen — that “he cares about people like them”. Westen, I hear, also challenged Fine Gael to get over their Democrat-like reluctance to fight back, fast and furiously, when attacked. And to do negative campaigning based on truth. “Barack Obama is running into the same trouble with McCain that led him to lose most of the last half of the Democratic primaries: his reluctance to fight back,” he pointed out.

“Hillary Clinton and her supporters began to paint a picture of him as a eunuch — to talk about his lack of ‘testicular fortitude’ — in exactly the same way McCain and Palin are now doing. Unfortunately, one of his greatest strengths — his tremendous capacity to keep his cool, which God knows we could use in an American president these days — is also his greatest liability, because he takes punches to the jaw without striking back. Last week, McCain ran an advert suggesting he [Obama] was a paedophile and as far as I know, he didn’t even respond. He should have made the election from that day forward a referendum on the character of people who could run that kind of campaign. He’d shown honour by taking Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter off the table as a topic of discussion, saying her kids were none of anyone’s business and off limits. His mistake was to think that she and McCain are decent people who would respond in kind,” said Prof Westen.

If I’d been invited — which I wasn’t — I’d have added one extra plea to Fine Gael: stop calling for public debates. Life in this country is one, never-ending public debate about everything. Health. Banks. Traffic. Politics. Corruption. Celebs. We don’t need more of it. What we need are ideas, action, excitement, direction, pride and something to believe in. Those are the immutable, unconscious, visceral demands we make — without knowing we make them — of politics and politicians. The ones who deliver, we follow.

And when, like the PDs, they stop delivering, we throw them away.