GOP Strategist Frank Luntz: Republicans Must Rebrand Capitalism and Middle Class

Yahoo! News’ Chris Moody was at this week’s The Republican Governor’s Association in Florida, where GOP pollster extraordinaire Frank Luntz instructed attendees on how to stop Occupy Wall Street.

Frank Luntz, Minister of Propaganda, GOP Nation.

As Yahoo! News’ Chris Moody writes, GOP strategist Frank Luntz stated at The Republican Governor’s Association in Florida this week, “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

That, quite simply, is the truth. Although, capitalism didn’t exactly need OWS to crystallize its inherent flaws; the economic system did a fine job of that on its own.

And now the GOP huckster is coaching Republican governors on how to short-circuit this very important national dialogue on the inherent structural problems of capitalism, not necessarily raised by OWS, but certainly popularized by the movement. OWS gave the public’s disgust over American capitalism some contours and Republicans undoubtedly wish this never had happened.

Hence, Luntz’s marketing session with GOP governors and their handlers.

This is proof that the dialogue has shifted and that the GOP and its con artist strategists are now attempting to derail the very healthy debate on what capitalism should be in the 21st century. Indeed, expect a massive brainwashing campaign on multiple fronts, but mostly rhetorical (in debates, print and online) and semantic, wherein capitalism is semiotically rebranded as “economic freedom” and the “free market.”

To an extent, we’ve already seen this in the Ron Paul campaign, which maintains that every recession and depression is precipitated—in a perversion of Adam Smith’s original intent—by the hand of government in the marketplace.

From Moody’s notes, we also know that Luntz is instructing the GOP to avoid using the words “taxing the rich” in favor of “taking the money from hardworking Americans.”

He is also instructing the GOP to rebrand the middle class as hardworking Americans, thus attempting to tap into the middle class sentiment that anyone who opposes the American brand of capitalism, the corporatist way, is by nature not hard-working.

It suggests symbolically (in a way that only advertising can manage) that only Republicans or conservatives are hard-working and the Left is populated with slackers, dopers, intellectuals and those who travel in the slipstream of society, benefiting from social programs that come from the taxes of the hard-working.

Luntz must truly believe he’s rather brilliant, or at least that Americans are dumb enough to bite the bait and send the hook straight into their plebiscite flesh.

Luntz also believes that simply telling an Occupier “I get it” is enough. The whole point of the movement is that every politician says “I get it” to get elected or re-elected, but the moment they are in office the focus changes to real business— ie: corporate business.

And then, through some sort of rhetorical alchemy only possible in the GOP psyche, Luntz states that Obama is the real problem. ”You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington. You should occupy the White House because it’s the policies over the past few years that have created this problem.”

Certainly, sir! Yes, I do agree (how could I have forgotten): the implosion of the economy started right when Obama took office! There were no bubbles in real estate before that time. Lehman Brothers didn’t collapse until Obama was in office. The bailouts didn’t start until Obama was in office. The credit default swaps, the sub-prime mortgages, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Henry Paulson‘s reign as Treasury Secretary, currency troubles, inflation, recession, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns—none of this happened until Obama stepped foot in the White House.

Things were going quite well, indeed, during the last few decades. The economy tanked on account of a Democratic president, not because of the slow accumulation of banking, investment and government policies and financial instruments over at least three presidencies and perhaps more.

That is the land in which Luntz and the GOP live, but it is not reality. It is pure dishonesty for electoral gain.

But, Luntz’s ideas are so dynamic and absurd that they just might work.

They, of course, replicate Hitler’s maxim, as detailed in “Mein Kampf”:

[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

It is not OWS participants who will be drawn into this subtle disintegration of reason, but those who would support them—not hardworking Americans, but the “middle class.”

Americans are but fools if they will believe Luntz’s colossal distortions.