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SEIFFE:  This Week's Big Shows 

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

By Ralf Seiffe

The car business and politics have certain similarities because both require a long-term decision that usually involves significant financial considerations. When one buys a new car, they are stuck with the choice for two to six years.  Likewise, when voters hire a politician, they are stuck with their choice through the same range of time. 

These resemblances tend to dictate that both businesses adopt comparable techniques to market themselves and when compared, it’s amazing how car companies and politicians use parallel techniques to manipulate their customers. 

In Chicago, we are lucky to have these methods on display all in the same week with Super Tuesday yesterday and The Chicago Auto Show opening on Friday. 

The realities behind selling automobiles and running political campaigns are similar in the sense that once a purchase is made that person will be “out of the market” for a long period of time.  Visit any car dealership and you’ll hear some variation of “what do we have to do now to sell you a car, today?”   The pressure is intense because the stakes are high for the salesman, the dealer and the manufacturer.  If they do not succeed, they won’t have another chance for a very long time. 

The same holds true for political campaigns. A decision is made in two, four or six year intervals and without death or conviction, no opportunities in-between.  This explains the intensity of the campaign season and the huge amount of resources brought to bear over the active period. 

“Branding” is an important tool for both businesses.  A brand is simply a promise to deliver on the buyers’ expectations.  For example, the Corvette promises to be “America’s Sports Car” and it’s succeeded for half a century.  The promise it makes is different than that made by Toyota’s Avalon and it is even distinct from a Porsche 911’s promise. 

Automobile companies manufacture products that are complex and hard to completely understand.  Worse, they constantly retire old models and replace them with new ones. All this marketplace activity makes winnowing and choosing all the more difficult.  Except for the most hard-core gear heads, keeping this expansive array of choices straight is confusing. So, to help, the companies invest heavily in their “brand” to help consumers understand and narrow choices.  The steadfastness of a “brand” is an important tool buyers use to discriminate between their many choices. 

Like the auto business, politics has a never-ending supply of new office-seekers, the equivalent of a new automotive model.  Politicians are even more complex than a BMW I-Drive (and usually less reliable) so branding is even more important for political parties.  By nominating (or slating) a candidate, the party can make an expansive promise to marginally interested voters at a very low cost.

In politics, the brand promise has been distilled into two basic choices--Democrat or Republican.  Democrats have carefully cultivated their brand by making a series of promises:  affirmative action, reproductive choice, nationalized health care, support for organized labor, easy money and collective activity designed to impose entropy on society.  Republicans once had a stronger brand:  low taxes, strong defense, internationalism and privacy--which they believed would create a durable society.  In the last several years however, Republicans have adulterated their promise while the Democrats have successfully expanded theirs. 

In contrast to the drama of buying a car or coming to decide on one’s favorite political choice, the reality of driving the car or living with the resulting government is mostly boring.  The key--or now, increasingly the key fob--starts the car and it takes you to your destination without commotion.  Similarly, the streets get shoveled, the water is pumped, deeds get recorded and campaign contributions are collected.  This keeps the voters happy and the municipal workers employed but it does not engage the vast majority of the public. 

The method manufacturers use to keep consumers interested is to cook up new interpretations of their brand’s pledges and express them as concept cars.  These fantasy vehicles make promises to current and potential buyers that the manufacturer almost always intends to break.  Many are transparently fraudulent while others are touted as “just around the corner--green lighted for production!”  Yet, if they ever do arrive on the showroom floor, the compromises are so rampant that one wonders why the makers bothered to tease us with the much more exciting concept.  This year’s great disappointment will be the Dodge Challenger; once shown as a two-door hardtop concept, the production version has sprouted pillars behind the door which ruins the initial promise of a new, six-window, American coupe. 

Politicians are no different because they must also keep the public enthused.  Since the Truman Administration some 60 years ago, Democrats have been proposing “caprices” like low-cost, national health insurance, the world’s best educational system, freedom from the effects of the business cycle and the abolition of gravity.  Recently they have invented some new concepts like global warming, the north-south divide, below-market mortgages and an energy policy that seems to depend on perfection of a perpetual motion device.  Each election cycle, they bring out these evergreen concepts with the earnest promise that they will bring them to Congress--and pass them--in the next legislative cycle. 

Democrats have little reason to act on these promises because they serve them better as unrealized concepts than as policy.  If they did nationalize health care, the public would understand why the idea has eventually failed everywhere.  If they actually improved education, the newly minted critical thinkers would reject victim status and then where would the brand be?  Preserving the issue rather than solving it with policy helps explain why African-Americans’ economic progress slowed remarkably when the Great Society started by shattering their family units--but civil rights and affirmative action sure makes great policy concepts on the stump! 

The Republican’s perpetual concept is “tax reduction.”  They promise to reduce taxes to improve the economy’s performance and lower rates certainly will but that’s like putting a 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass on the concept display stand.  The marginal tax reduction concept made great sense in 1981 when rates were much higher and the opportunity was a 30 percent point marginal reduction.  At a three-percentage point opportunity, the concept has the excitement and prospects of a new Edsel.  The Republican display should show a radical concept that eliminates income taxes and the IRS.  Like the car company that shows a vehicle powered by something other than gasoline, a radical concept shows the company’s intentions, extending brand loyalty.  That’s something Republicans could badly use, just now. 

Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois and is a political analyst and columnist for the Illinois Leader and Illinois Review.

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