Product Description

Through a bravura tour of American political leaders and their appeals to the electorate, Drew Westen shows that Americans don't vote with their heads but with their hearts--and that Democratic politicians had better wise up in their approach. The Political Brain is a serious and groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in deciding the outcome of elections. It looks at data across several presidential elections from the 1950s through 2000, examines the evidence for the role of emotion in driving voting behavior, and provides a "clinical" view of a number of campaign ads, debate lines, and personal profiles of the candidates who have sought to win our hearts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55229 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781586485733
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"The most interesting, informative book on politics I've read in many years" Bill Clinton "May prove to be one of the most important studies of political campaigning of recent times." Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian"

About the Author
Drew Westen received his B.A. at Harvard University, an M.A. in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex (England), and his Ph.D. in clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he subsequently taught for six years. For several years he was Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, GA.

Customer Reviews

Democratic strategists please read this book
As a frustrated Democrat who is tired of seeing his party cede important cultural territory, I devoured this book. The Political Brain is perhaps the best book I have read on crafting a party message that resonates with the American public. Drew Westin offers helpful advice to Democrats by showing them how to frame an emotionally compelling and principled stance on the issues that Republicans have used to defeat Democratic contenders for decades. Starting from the perspective of a cognitive psychologist, Westin weaves together the clinical and the politically practical in his diagnosis of the Democrats' "values" and message problems. This book is a perfect companion to George Lakoff and should be required reading for any Democratic strategist. If you have ever asked yourself what Democrats stand for or have noticed some dissonance between the Republican master-narrative and their governance, I suggest that you read The Political Brain.

Want to Win? Read this Book!
Drew Westen's The Political Brain describes why Democrats routinely lose to Republicans despite being right on the issues. Democrats approach elections like job interviews, whereas Republicans see elections as dates. Specifically, Democrats foolishly believe that voters are "dispassionate" calculators of relative utility whereas Republicans understand that to win the mind you must first capture the heart.

Democrats will find the passages dealing with Bush/Gore and Bush/Kerry agonizing reading. Again and again, George Bush and his attack dogs mauled Al Gore without any response. Gore foolishly allowed Bush to go scot free on his drunken-cocaine-belly up business record.

Kerry stupidly allowed draft dodging war zero Bush to "swift boat" him into oblivion. Both Gore and Kerry thought they were taking the high ground by ignoring Bush's slimy attacks. Instead, they took the fast track to oblivion.

In both cases, Kerry and Gore chose not to rebut Bush's vicious attacks and by so doing, they appeared weak. Voters thought 'if you can't fight back against Bush, how will you fight back against America's enemies'?

Westen's most compelling passages are his proscriptions to Democrats. When Republicans demagogue on Flag Burning, Democrats should counter with "Flag Hiding" proposals that legally require all deceased service people to be brought home in flag draped coffins in public. That way, Republicans are forced to show the true cost of their wars and bloodlust.

The GOP "death tax" is countered by a Democratic charge of a Republican "birth tax", i.e., the monstrous Bush-Cheney deficits impose a gigantic tax burden on every baby born in every state in this nation.

Some of Westen's more detailed explanations of scientific procedure and methodology are turgid and difficult reading. But hopefully, he can release a new book in a role playing format.

Barack Obama receives high marks for his intuitive, charismatic style. But all Democrats can and should learn from this important book.

The Many Layers of Practical Politics in the U.S.
This book contains many layers of analysis, all of which are connected to the methodological machinery of recent brain research; and all of which are imminently plausible in the context of contemporary American politics. However, each has its own rather subtle flaws.

At the first level of analysis, the Machiavellian like advice given to democrats: that they must move away from taking "the intellectual high road" and move to a more "gut level emotional approach" to politics if they are to ever expect to reach the "Guns, God and anti-gay" (or Sarah Pallin) faction of the American electorate, is on its face not just reasonable but entirely sage advice. But also, if one takes into account the larger tectonic forces that tend to move the American electorate, then this advice is trivially true and obvious. And here, by tectonic forces I mean economic issues, issues of America's role on the international scene, and issues of general fairness. However, as anyone who has studied the American political mind, or the political process, know all too well, both are ever evolving dynamic and organic systems. And thus, what may have been sage advice today may be entirely irrelevant advice even a few months later -- as the election of Barack Obama so aptly demonstrates: Apparently, some of Westen's so called "emotional racist elements" evidently had to find it within their hearts, and within their emotional power to vote for Obama overriding and trumping their emotional anti- minority ideological posture. For it is a given that in order for Mr. Obama to have achieved a 56% mandate to rule, he had to have had at least a sizeable chunk of that faction's vote.

For my money, if "emotional politics" are to be used as a basis for electoral analysis," I prefer the more indirect approach of Dick Morris perfected through his "triangulation process, a process put to such excellent effect by "Team Clinton." The Morris approach, took implicit advantage of the dynamic qualities of the American political mind (and process) without having to characterize it either positively or negatively. For once an emotional valence is attached to the political process that attachment then becomes a self-fulfilling part of the political narrative itself.

At the second level of analysis: of voter decision making based on interrogation of brain cells via "implanted electrodes." This is at the very least tricky, "cutting edge" and "risky" scientific -- not to mention political business. And while the author's analysis in this area does indeed track well with the seminal work in this area of Daniel Goldman (in both his "Emotional Intelligence" and his "Primal Leadership") as well as that of Michael S. Gazzaniga's "The Social Brain," the research here is not done nearly as carefully as that performed by say, Andrew Newberg, et al in their "Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief." (See my Amazon review).

In that book, the reader may recall that those authors performed a similar analysis: interrogating subjects about their beliefs as electrodes were inserted into their brains. To their credit, Newberg was very modest and restrained in the claims he made about the mapping between feelings and beliefs based on brain states -- and indeed in what that might all mean to an individual's belief in God. An accurate summary of their very restrained approach could be paraphrased as: "Brain scans can indeed show that something is going on among the neurons that doesn't happen at other times, but there is no way to know exactly what that something is. Suffice it to say that it is incumbent upon the researcher to make clear what it is that "electrode interrogation" is measuring and more important, what it is capable of measuring. Not only has Westen not done this, his research in this area has such a paucity of citations, one wonders whether or not he is working entirely alone and in the dark?

Finally, this approach, of "tracking" the discrepancies and contradictions in the decision making and emotional judgments of individuals, has a rich and well-known pedigree in the literature on "Cognitive Dissonance," invented by Leon Festinger (in his Theories of Cognitive Consistency: A Sourcebook) and made famous by Shel Feldman (in his Cognitive Consistency). I was disappointed not to see this large and important body of literature even mentioned in the author's analysis. I tried unsuccessfully to connect to the website with his larger bibliography and set of references.

Despite these concerns, this author has hit a rich mother lode and is pushing forward, with or without relying on his academic bone fides. Five Stars for sheer intellectual guts.