Matt Miller's meditation on persuasion is a good piece, and it's particularly relevant to us in the blogosphere. His basic point is that we don't live in a land of open-minded intellectuals conducting a constant search for new and better information with which to form arguments. Indeed, we live among a hardened populace where ideas, be they firmly based or intuitively arrived at, are most always protected in a transcendent mental realm that facts can't touch. That's why conservatives believe single payer health care can't work, why liberals have started decrying the infringement on states rights from NCLB, and why George W. Bush was considered better able to combat terror despite having failed to prevent an attack, failed to capture its financier, and weakened us by diverting energies towards Iraq.
But the territory that Matt ignores is more important. It's not that all of America has couched their ideology in armor, it's just that the portion willing to swing, 20% or so of voters, are reliably the least informed. They, the very ones willing to be convinced, are happily ignoring the nation's many organs of persuasion. Most don't read the New York Times, watch Fox News, or flit around blogs. Indeed, they don't twist their head towards politics until election time, when they tune into the ads, and maybe a debate or two, and make up their mind.
So the question really isn't how do we persuade the partisans, but how do we reach the unpersuaded. The right has found a fairly effective strategy: use Limbaugh and other talking point dissemination systems to arm your supporters and then unleash them on water coolers nationwide. The left is also beginning to find their footing, with blogs and MoveOn and Air America offering Democrats daily ammunition in the fight to convince their coworkers. But in the end, neither group is likely to win because the water cooler in much more likely to focus on Sally in accounting -- "have you seen the legs on her!"? -- than judicial nominations.
So this group will decide as they always have, tuning in towards the end, glancing at the candidates, picking up on a variety of heuristics, and making a gut call. And if we want to win them over, we're going to need candidates who win the first impression wars and campaigns that hit the right background buttons, just as it's always been. Which is why, in a way, what Miller and me do is a little outdated. Despite our late night fantasies, we're not actually persuading anyone. Hopefully there's some platonic good in informing, in being intellectually rigorous, in promoting discussion, those things we do. But we don't persuade. Not because we don't want to, but because the reason the unpersuaded are so open to argument is that they're not reading us.
