Rightwing pollster Frank Luntz is out promoting his new book: “What Americans Really Want, Really” and getting his definitions completely wrong in regards to Political Science, which I seriously doubt is an amateurish mistake.
On Alan Colmes Radio, Luntz continued the conservative rhetoric that United States of America is a “center-right country” and his words in explanation of this were very revealing as to his own personal bias against getting the definitions right, even when those words might not serve your own political ends.
“This is a center-right country but the definition of ‘Center-Right‘ has changed. ‘Center-Right’ doesn‘t mean keeping government out of our lives anymore, .. now it means fighting corruption.”
This is the Word-Weasel at work.
Fighting corruption in both government and private sectors has always been the ideals of The Progressive Reformist Movement since it's inception and these ideals have remained as a fact of American Life since then. To attach his own ideological group to these values is outright inaccurate.
Frank Luntz is very good at catering messages that appeal to conservatives and work well for The Republican Party but I find the notion that he is not affected by political bias in most of his statements completely absurd.
Center-Right has, and always will, mean exactly what Luntz claimed on the air that it does not mean.
It is clear to me that he feels free to change the definitions of words as he sees fit in order to further his own personal political agenda. If he cannot admit that the nation obviously shifted to Center-Left with the election of a Democratic President, and the ambitions of sixty House seats being attained by The Democratic Party then I am left to question the very conclusions of his work.
No doubt he has attained a great deal of significant data in his 6,000+ focus groups he used to compile his recent book, but if the standards of recognizing professional bias and personal bias are ignored then the conclusions of the body of work become suspect.
This is a Radio-interview Review, not a Book Review, so that body of work is not my focus and I invite anyone interested to avail themselves of this literature.
My only point is that if Frank Luntz is going to change the definitions of sound science to fit his image on a radio show, it begs to question other matters of credibility as well.
In his credit, I don’t believe he ever joined in the hateful mantra of “socialist” aimed at liberals, Democrats and mainly Obama.
On the list of all the partisans out there, Luntz is a minor offender.
But I still find it the worst of offenses to change the words to fit your needs, and considering they call him ‘The Words That Work Guy’; I think maybe it should be elongated to ‘The Words That Work No Matter What Guy’.
Frank Luntz is a smart cookie. But I’d personally almost compared him to Karl Rove, myself. Dancing around the truth has never been part of The Scientific Approach.
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What Americans really want, really, is for pollsters to stop telling them what they think when it’s really just what the pollster thinks about what you think.
