Informative article but the first paragraphs have been edited out because
Molly Ball
discussed something completely irrelevant to the subject, Lunz's choices
in
cuisine during lunch. Also deleted were most of the additional discussion
of food in
the body of the text, WTH? What would anyone write about a food menu when
reporting political news? Answer: Affectation, trying to be ever-so-cute,
trying to impress her English-Lit-major friends. What a waste of time.
And what stupid priorities.
There are other criticisms in the body of the story courtesy of BR
------------
The Agony of Frank Luntz
What does it mean when America's top political wordsmith loses faith in
our ability to be persuaded?
_Molly Ball_ (http://www.theatlantic.com/molly-ball/) Jan 6 2014
America's best-known public-opinion guru..... Luntz—the tubby, rumpled guy
who runs the focus groups on Fox News after presidential debates, the
political consultant and TV fixture whose word has been law in Republican
circles since he helped write the 1994 Contract With America—has always been a
hard man to please. But something is different now, he tells me. Something is
wrong. Something in his psyche has broken, and he does not know if he can
recover.Frank Luntz is having some kind of crisis. I just can't quite get
my head around it.
"I've had a headache for six days now, and it doesn't go away," he tells
me ... "I don't sleep for more than two or three hours at a time. I'm
probably less healthy now than I have ever been in my life." He's not sure
what
to do. He's still going through the motions—giving speeches, going on
television, conducting focus groups, and advising companies and politicians on
how best to convey their message.
But beneath the surface, he says, is a roiling turmoil that threatens to
consume him.... Frank Luntz, the master political manipulator, a man who has
always evinced a cheery certainty about who's right and who's winning and
how it all works, is a mess.
And yet, over the hour and a half I spend talking with him—the first time
he has spoken publicly about his current state of mind—it's hard to grasp
what the crisis is about. Luntz hasn't renounced his conservative worldview.
His belief in unfettered capitalism and individual self-reliance appears
stronger than ever. He hasn't become disillusioned with his very profitable
career or his nomadic, solitary lifestyle. His complaints—that America is
too divided, President Obama too partisan, and the country in the grip of an
entitlement mentality that is out of control—seem pretty run-of-the-mill.
But his anguish is too deeply felt not to be real. Frank Luntz is having
some kind of crisis. I just can't quite get my head around it.
A few weeks after our lunch, Luntz tells me he's made a move. He has
changed his principal residence from Northern Virginia to a condo overlooking
the
Las Vegas Strip, and he's contemplating a sale of his company, Luntz
Global LLC, the details of which he is not at liberty to discuss. Las Vegas,
he
says, represents "my chance to be intellectually challenged again" by a
place that is "the closest thing to a melting pot America has to offer." As
fresh starts go, it's not much, but Luntz hopes it will bring some new
clarity.
* * *
The crisis began, he says, after last year's presidential election, when
Luntz became profoundly depressed. For more than a month, he tried to stay
occupied, but nothing could keep his attention. Finally, six weeks after the
election, during a meeting of his consulting company in Las Vegas, he fell
apart. Leaving his employees behind, he flew back to his mansion in Los
Angeles, where he stayed for three weeks, barely going outside or talking to
anyone.
"I just gave up," Luntz says."I didn't work on Mitt Romney's campaign. It
just sucked, as a professional. And it killed me."
His side had lost. Mitt Romney had, in his view, squandered a good chance
at victory with a strategically idiotic campaign. ("I didn't work on the
campaign. It just sucked, as a professional. And it killed me because I
realized on Election Day that there's nothing I can do about it.") But Luntz's
side had lost elections before. His dejection was deeper: It was, he says,
about why the election was lost. "I spend more time with voters than anybody
else," Luntz says. "I do more focus groups than anybody else. I do more
dial sessions than anybody else. I don't know shit about anything, with the
exception of what the American people think."
It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. 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."
Luntz knew that he, a maker of political messages and attacks and
advertisements, had helped create this negativity, and it haunted him. But it
was
Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived,
had absorbed the president's message of class divisions, haves and
have-nots, of redistribution. It was a message Luntz believed to be profoundly
wrong, but one so powerful he had no slogans, no arguments with which to beat
it back. In reelecting Obama, the people had spoken. And the people, he
believed, were wrong. Having spent his career telling politicians what the
people wanted to hear, Luntz now believed the people had been corrupted and
were beyond saving. Obama had ruined the electorate, set them at each other's
throats, and there was no way to turn back.
Why not? I ask. Isn't finding the right words to persuade people what you
do? "I'm not good enough," Luntz says. "And I hate that. I have come to the
extent of my capabilities. And this is not false modesty. I think I'm
pretty good. But not good enough." The old Frank Luntz was sure he could
invent
slogans to sell the righteous conservative path of personal responsibility
and free markets to anyone. The new Frank Luntz fears that is no longer the
case, and it's driving him crazy.
* * *
Luntz has a squat build, a big slab of a face, and a mop of light-brown
hair. [more irrelevant verbiage ] His affect is by turns boyish and hangdog.[
still more affectation ]People meeting him for the first time always
comment on the loud sneakers he typically pairs with slacks or a suit. [ this
kind of wriitng is horse crap ] This is by design: He began wearing them, he
says, to divert people's attention from his considerable girth.[ still more
crap ] He found he enjoyed collecting designer sneakers, and now has more
than 100 pairs—all of which he wears, even though some are rare editions
worth more than $1,000. Luntz is a collector. [ additional irrelevance ]
Before moving to Las Vegas this month, he spent most of his free time in a $6
million mansion in Los Angeles crammed with American political artifacts
and politically themed decor. It also has a bowling alley. Luntz's house in
Northern Virginia is similarly crammed, but with pop-culture collectibles.
(He also keeps an apartment in New York City.)
Luntz lives alone. Never married, he tells me he is straight (and that no
reporter has ever asked him about his sexual orientation before), [ a Lefty
would do this ] just unable to sustain a romantic relationship because of
all the time he spends on the road. "My parents were married for 47 years.
I'm never in the same place more than 47 minutes," he says. When I point out
he's chosen that lifestyle, he says, "You sound like my relatives."
Luntz did political polling for Pat Buchanan's 1992 primary campaign and
Ross Perot's independent presidential bid, but he became truly famous when he
hitched his star to Newt Gingrich, helping draft the Contract With America
and advising Gingrich's crusading Republican majority. He considers
Gingrich and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, another former client, his
most
important political mentors. In the '90s, he became known as the man who
could sell any political message by picking the right words. "Estate tax"
sounds worthy and the right thing for a democracy to do, but "death tax"
sounds distasteful and unfair. "Global warming" sounds scary, but "climate
change" sounds natural or even benign. Luntz became a well-compensated
speaker,
TV commentator, and convener of on-camera focus groups, which he led with
manic curiosity to shed light on what the people really thought about
political debates and presidential speeches.
"It's not what you say," goes his oft-repeated slogan, "it's what they
hear."
Luntz is famous not just on television—he has talking-head contracts with
both CBS and Fox News, a rare arrangement—but among the political and
business elite. When he walks into the Capitol Hill Club, he is beset by
Republican members of Congress wanting to talk to him and soak up his aura of
celebrity. He boasts that he speaks to at least one Fortune 500 CEO every
day. Yet, in his telling, he is still the little guy, the outsider, the schlub—
half anxious, half awed by the trappings of power. He tells of being
summoned for a conversation with Bill Clinton and being unable to enjoy the
honor of the occasion because of the panic he felt at the president's vise
grip
on his shoulder. "This is Bill fucking Clinton, asking me to deliver a
message to the Senate majority leader, and I'm about to faint," he recalls,
ruefully. "Because I understand the significance of this conversation, and I
am not worthy of it."
Luntz's work has always been predicated on a sort of populism—the idea that
politicians must figure out what voters want to hear, and speak to them in
language that comports with it. He proudly claims that his famous
catchphrases, like branding healthcare reform a "government takeover" in 2010,
are
not his coinages but the organic product of his focus groups. The
disheveled appearance, the sardonic wit, all add up to a sort of tilting
against the
establishment, an insistence that it listen to the Real People.
But what if the Real People are wrong? That is the possibility Luntz now
grapples with. What if the things people want to hear from their leaders are
ideas that would lead the country down a dangerous road?
"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.""It
seems like the Democrats are going so far overboard, and the Republicans are
going nowhere. So I'm mad at both of them."
To my ears, this sounds like rather standard-issue up-by-your-bootstraps
conservative dogma. But to Luntz, it not a matter of left or right. He
periodically comes under attack from the right for not toeing the Republican
line, and has been critical of the party's right wing. "It seems like the
Democrats are going so far overboard, and the Republicans are going nowhere,"
he
tells me. "So I'm mad at both of them." Increasingly, he says, he seeks to
maintain relationships with members of both parties. His closest
friendship in politics today, he says, is with a Democrat, Senator Michael
Bennet of
Colorado (disclosure: Bennet is the brother of Atlantic editor in chief
James Bennet). "It's not weird," Luntz says. "He's just a decent guy. We
play foosball."
Luntz's political ideas, as far as I can tell, amount to a sort of Perotian
rich man's centrism, the type of thing you might hear from a Morning Joe
panel or a CEOs' retreat. We've got to do something about the deficit, for
our children's sake. We ought to have universal healthcare, but without
forcing people to buy insurance through the government. We need immigration
reform, but that doesn't have to include a path to citizenship. The bankers
who contributed to the financial crisis ought to be in jail, but we ought to
stop demonizing the financial-services industry. To the tycoons who embrace
them, these kinds of ideas are not partisan or ideological at all. They're
the common-sense plans we'd all be able to agree on if Congress would stop
bickering and devote itself to Getting Things Done.
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.
Luntz's populism has turned on itself and become its opposite: fear and
loathing of the masses. "I am grateful that Occupy Wall Street turned out to
be a bunch of crazy, disgusting, rude, horrible people, because they were
onto something," he says. "Limbaugh made fun of me when I said that Occupy
Wall Street scares me. Because he didn't hear what I hear. He doesn't see
what I see." The people are angry. They want more, not because we have not
given them enough but because we have given them too much.
* * *
Luntz is not sure what to do with his newfound awareness. He's still best
known for his political resume, but politics hasn't been his principal
business for some time: He still advises his friends here and there, but he no
longer has any ongoing political contracts. (Corporations and television
networks, not politicians, are his main sources of income.) He goes to as many
NFL games as he can, where he sits in the owner's box courtesy of onetime
client Jerry Richardson, the owner of the Carolina Panthers, with whom he
has developed a close rapport. "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.
Luntz would also like to break into Hollywood as a consultant, but he can't
get his calls returned. He can't figure it out. He thinks it must be a
partisan thing. In every other industry, he says, 90 percent of his
presentations result in a contract. But in entertainment, he pitches and
pitches and
pitches (he wouldn't tell me which studios or shows) and things seem to go
well, but then there's some excuse. Not this time. Not the right project.
If he could, Luntz would like to have a consulting role on The Newsroom,
Aaron Sorkin's HBO drama. "I know I'm not supposed to like it, but I love
it," he says. He feels a kinship with Jeff Daniels' character, the gruff,
guilt-ridden, ostensibly Republican antihero, who is uncomfortable with small
talk and driven by a "mission to civilize." "I love that phrase," Luntz
says. "That doesn't happen in anything that we do."
When he's at home in Los Angeles, The Newsroom is the high point of
Luntz's week. He turns off his phone and gets a plate of spaghetti bolognese
and
a Coke Zero [ still more crap that is supposed to be professional level
writing ] and sits in front of his 85-inch television, alone in his
14,000-square-foot palace. "That's as good as it gets for me," he says.
But today, Luntz is late for his afternoon talk to a D.C. lobbying shop.
"Am I whining?" he asks. "Just say it if I am." I tell him it sounds like
he's going through something very real, very human. "I am nothing if not
human," he says, breaking into a grin. "I'm super-human. I'm a
human-and-one-fifth. My God, if I'm not careful, I'll have to go not to the
big and tall but
the big and bigger store!" And then he walks away toward the elevator, off
to do his soft-shoe routine for another audience of the rich and powerful.
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