CHAPTER 5
HOW FEELINGS ARE ANCHORED

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some
hard phrase, round and
solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

— RALPH WALDO EMERSON

If you want to know how some politicians gained so much power through the 1990s, you can start with my former congressman, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich studied the way language and the brain work, cracked the communication code, and then set out to teach that code to his fellow Republicans.

Here’s the key message from his 1996 memo (and later video) with the Orwellian title, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”¹

Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

The words that follow in Gingrich’s essay are designed to trigger the submodality filing system in our brains. They are all words heavy with emotion. The first set contains words Gingrich urged Republicans to use against their Democratic opponents:

decay, failure (fail), collapse(ing) deeper, crisis, urgent(cy), destructive, destroy, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, they/them, unionized bureaucracy, “compassion” is not enough, betray, consequences, limit(s), shallow, traitors, sensationalists, endanger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threaten, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive attitude, destructive, impose, self-serving, greed, ideological, insecure, anti-issue, anti-flag anti-family, anti-child, anti-jobs, pessimistic, excuses, intolerant, stagnation, welfare, corrupt, selfish, insensitive, status quo, mandate(s) taxes, spend(ing), shame, disgrace, punish (poor…), bizarre, cynicism, cheat, steal, abuse of power, machine, bosses, obsolete, criminal rights, red tape, and patronage.

These are all words that bring up pictures that evoke negative feelings. When Republicans successfully associated these negative emotions with their political opponents, people filed their mental pictures and stories of the opponent under that negative emotion. Afterward, every time the opponent’s name came up, or a picture or sound including that person was presented, the feeling that that evoked was negative. Gingrich changed how voters filed that person, and by doing so he changed how they felt about that person.

The technique of associating a person or an issue with an emotion through the use of sensory modalities or submodalities is what communicators call anchoring.

The same anchoring technique can be used in a positive way to encourage people to adopt a point of view. Here’s what Gingrich says about what he calls “governing” words:

Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent.

Here’s Gingrich’s list of words he wanted Republicans to use to describe themselves and their positions:

share, change, opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth, moral, courage, reform, prosperity, crusade, movement, children, family, debate, compete, actively, we, us, our, candidly, humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, principle, unique, duty,precious, promise, caring, tough, listen, learn, help, lead, vision, success, empowerment, citizen, activist, mobilize, conflict, light, dream, freedom, peace, rights, pioneer, pride, building, preserve, pro-flag, pro-child, pro-environment, pro-reform, pro-workfare, eliminate good time in prison, strength, choice, choose, fair, protect, confident, incentive, hard work, initiative, common sense and passionate.

These are words designed to help Republicans tell the conservative story. Most of the words would work for Democrats too, though not all (liberals rarely want to go on crusades). The point is that each of these words can be used as an anchor—it is rich with emotion and hits the limbic brain—and many of them drop encoding information through the modality filter all the way to submodalities.

ANCHORING CODE TO WIN ELECTIONS

Republican strategists understand the power of anchoring. So do unconsciously competent communicators like Ronald Reagan.

In the election of 1980, Reagan opposed welfare and wanted to anchor it in the negative emotion that he already held for it. He achieved that end through the story of the “Chicago Welfare Queen” with her dozen Social Security numbers, eighty names, and thirty addresses, who picked up her welfare checks (totaling, Reagan often said in his 1980 stump speeches, more than $150,000 a year) in a Cadillac. The Cadillac was the anchor for that tremendously powerful story—it was a strong visual that inspired anger, an anger that then carried over to the issue of welfare.

Even though newspapers across America tried to find a single example of the story’s truthfulness and were unsuccessful—Reagan had hallucinated the entire thing out of a newspaper story about a woman who was convicted of using two aliases to bilk the government out of $8,000 and didn’t have a Cadillac—the story took on an iconic status and paved the way for Bill Clinton’s deconstruction of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which had cut poverty in America in half in just its first four years. Even though today’s statistics show a post-Clinton rise in infant mortality among America’s poor, Reagan’s story is still so powerful that politicians are afraid to speak words in support of “welfare”

Similarly, to sell the “War on Drugs” then President George H. W. Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine on TV on September 5, 1989, saying it had been taken from a drug dealer working out of Lafayette Park, a 7-acre public park right across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Again, a strong visual, the bag of crack cocaine, was anchored to a threat—the threat of drugs so ubiquitous they could even be found in a public park across the street from the White House.

In fact, there were no drug dealers in Lafayette Park. Bush’s handlers had successfully urged Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents to use huge incentives to talk a teenage drug dealer from the east side of the city to come all the way downtown to meet them in the park so Bush could have his photo op. The story’s being a lie didn’t much harm Bush—he still got laws that would throw more young Black men (and fewer White ones, as Whites were more likely to use powder than crack cocaine) into jail and, in many states like Florida, off the voter rolls.

Anchoring can be used in more-subtle ways than it is in these stories. To get a sense of how anchoring can be used subliminally, we need look no further than the Republican ads in the 2004 presidential campaigns.

One of the most effective anchors in George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign was subtle but consistent, and it worked. At the end of each ad for his campaign, we heard, “I’m George W. Bush, and I approve this message.” In many of those ads, especially toward the end of the campaign, the image shown was Bush on the phone, holding a sheaf of papers, head down. He looked busy. He looked like a man so hard at work that he didn’t even have time to say, “I approve this message.” In fact, the audio on that tagline was blurred, as if the PR people hadn’t been able to get face-time with the president to even record those few words.

By contrast, John Kerry in the Bush 2004 ads always was pictured dressed in a business suit. He looked good—but he looked like someone on the campaign trail. Taken by itself, that image could have had any emotion attached, even a positive one. But after being contrasted again and again with the visual of Bush at work, the image of Kerry on the campaign trail began to acquire a negative emotion: he’s not busy; he’s not working. It tied in with the Bush campaign’s message that Kerry was a flip-flopper, which also suggested flip-flops and windsurfing…and laziness.

Anti-Kerry ads implying that Kerry was lazy, a dilettante, and a flip-flopper also used similar visuals to depict Kerry as did Kerry’s own ads, causing a blurring between the two anchors.

See enough Bush ads, and every time people saw John Kerry looking happy and carefree in a business suit, they’d see an image of George W. Bush slaving away in his office or feel the emotion from the anti-Kerry ads. After a while people would start seeing Kerry in a business suit and feel a negative emotion and think, what a lazy flip-flopper. It was brilliant because Kerry, of course, thought he was busy looking presidential when he wore those suits. The more often Kerry put on a jacket and a tie, the more often folks who’d seen the Bush ads saw Kerry as being a lazy flip-flopper. That’s the impact of anchoring.

FINDING THE RIGHT WORDS

In addition to his flawed ad campaign, John Kerry himself often used long sentences and polysyllabic words to describe his ideas. That would work if his words were being heard only by the rational part of the brain, but they were not. So all of Kerry’s really smart ideas just flew by listeners who did not already have some sort of filing system set up to receive those ideas. They resonated with the already convinced but weren’t so emotionally persuasive for the fence-sitters.

Hillary Clinton is another politician who struggles with communication. In a speech she made as senator in 2006, Hillary tried to make the point that even though we are threatened by terrorists, we must remember to hold on to our values. At that time the Senate was in an uproar after having discovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had gone way beyond the Patriot Act and had wiretapped thousands of Americans without any authorization at all. This was a moment liberals could have seized to engage the country.

At a key point in this important speech about wiretapping, Hillary said:

So therefore we do need legal protections that are up-to-date with the technological and national security needs of our time— for a world in which we can be confident that our security and our privacy are both protected. And that is what I would like to propose today.²

Nothing in that speech anchors her listeners to any strong feeling. There are a lot of abstractions and very few modal words. The one arguable anchor Hillary uses, security, belongs to the conservatives—it conjures an image of 9/11 and a feeling of fear that is part of the conservatives’ basic storyline.

Hillary would have given a much more effective speech had she told the liberal story, using visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements that would make it more memorable. For example, she could have said:

The world is changing before our very eyes. The Internet gives us the freedom to talk with friends and family in the far corners of the world. Cheap airfare lets us fly to see them. As the world comes together, the world’s bullies think they can push us around. Corporations invade our privacy. Terrorists make us feel insecure. But we Americans have always treasured the freedom to speak our minds when, where, and how we please. Our Founders wrote that freedom into the Constitution. Even as the world changes, our values must stay true to what generations of Americans have fought for, from the founding of this nation to today. That’s why we all should work hard to defeat the ongoing Republican assault on our legal right to say what we want, how we want, to whomever we want.

This speech would have hit all three primary modalities right away: “talk”—auditory, “see"—visual, and “push"—kinesthetic. It would anchor Clinton’s talk in freedom, a word with very positive associations for both liberals and conservatives, and values. Also, the idea of “coming together” is another positive anchor and an important part of the liberal story. And it ends with a call to action that also anchors Republican to assault.

ANCHORING AN ISSUE: HEALTH CARE

When it comes to communicating, feeling comes first. Most people are not won over by rational arguments but rather by the stories we tell. To communicate effectively, tell people a story that evokes an emotion and is highly visual.

Consider health care. While conservatives are busy telling the American public that a national health-care system would “ration” care (a negative anchor word that could easily be on Gingrich’s list), liberals are busy talking statistics. For example, the United States ranks twenty-fifth in the world in life expectancy, infant mortality, and immunization rates. That kind of statistic is compelling—for a person who already believes that our health-care system has a problem. But persuading people who believe that, despite all its flaws, our health-care system is the best in the world requires a different approach. People need a story.

This is the true story of a man named Dave Flowers that you can find—along with his picture—on www.americansforhealthcare.org:

I own a pizzeria in Peoria called Mickie’s Pizzeria, where I have 25 employees. However, I am unable provide health insurance to my employees because I can’t afford to pay the premiums.

I haven’t just seen the health-care crisis, I’ve lived it. In 2002 I acquired a viral infection that almost collapsed my heart. I lost a job because I was unable to work full-time.

I couldn’t afford the COBRA rates because they were $1,000 a month for my family. It was frustrating and scary. I found a way to get them insurance but I couldn’t afford it for myself. No insurance company will insure me as an individual because of my pre-existing condition.

The health of my wife and two daughters is what I value most. Nothing in life is more important.

But I don’t want this to happen to my employees or their families. Quality, affordable health care is a right, and I am going to do everything I can to get coverage for all my employees. No one should have to make the choice that I did.

Dave’s story is so persuasive in part because in his first two paragraphs he uses sensory modalities to bring us into his world. He “hasn’t just seen” the health-care crisis (visual), he’s “lived it” (kinesthetic). His health-care issues were “frustrating and scary.” These are emotional words that trigger our own feelings.

What makes Dave’s story even more powerful is that these sensory and emotional triggers are tied directly to the values embodied in the liberal story. Dave was compassionate because he wanted to insure his family. He cares about his employees and their families. He believes that health care is a right. The story anchors the health-care issue directly in liberal values by using emotional and sensory triggers.

Dave’s story moves from his specific case to the biggest story, the story all liberals have to tell: that health care is a right, not a privilege, because it has to do with the founding idea of our nation, that the purpose of government is to backstop us all, to provide a base from which we can reach our highest potential, a net to catch us when we fall, and ultimately to provide the basis for “Life [as in staying alive with health care!], Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Our society used to have a shared understanding that health care was uniquely different from other products and services. Through most of the twentieth century, most states required hospitals and health insurance companies to be nonprofit organizations. That’s because we all believed that the main goal of health-care providers was to provide health care.

That all began to change during the Reagan area, when conservatives pushed states to drop the requirement that health-care and health insurance companies be not-for-profit. The primary goal of health-care providers became making a profit for their shareholders, which conservatives believed would produce greater efficiency and lower health-care costs for everybody. It made several billion dollars in profits for Bill Frist’s family, but meanwhile the “life” part of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” dropped out of the American social consensus.

Health care is a right, not a privilege, in every industrialized nation in the world except the United States. Liberals the world over believe that people should have the right to be able to see a doctor and go to a hospital and get well without breaking the bank. We’re all in this together, and if any of our people are sick, we should heal them, as that radical liberal Jesus said.

An anchor like the story of Dave Flowers helps people see, hear, and feel that health care is a right, not a privilege. Dave Flowers’s true story is one example of a way to use anchoring that’s ecologically consistent.