Posted on January 10, 2014

The Agony of Frank Luntz

Molly Ball, The Atlantic, January 6, 2014

Frank Luntz does not want the buffet. We are on the top floor of the Capitol Hill Club, the members-only Republican hangout a block from the Capitol, where a meaty smell is emanating from steam trays. Today’s main course is ham, and Luntz shakes his head.

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America’s best-known public-opinion guru hasn’t suddenly gone vegan. Luntz — the tubby, rumpled guy who runs the focus groups on Fox News after presidential debates, the political consultant and TV fixture whose word has been law in Republican circles since he helped write the 1994 Contract With America — has always been a hard man to please. But something is different now, he tells me. Something is wrong. Something in his psyche has broken, and he does not know if he can recover.

“I’ve had a headache for six days now, and it doesn’t go away,” he tells me as we take our seats at a table downstairs. “I don’t sleep for more than two or three hours at a time. I’m probably less healthy now than I have ever been in my life.” He’s not sure what to do. He’s still going through the motions — giving speeches, going on television, conducting focus groups, and advising companies and politicians on how best to convey their message.

But beneath the surface, he says, is a roiling turmoil that threatens to consume him. {snip}

And yet, over the hour and a half I spend talking with him — the first time he has spoken publicly about his current state of mind — it’s hard to grasp what the crisis is about. Luntz hasn’t renounced his conservative worldview. His belief in unfettered capitalism and individual self-reliance appears stronger than ever. He hasn’t become disillusioned with his very profitable career or his nomadic, solitary lifestyle. His complaints — that America is too divided, President Obama too partisan, and the country in the grip of an entitlement mentality that is out of control — seem pretty run-of-the-mill. But his anguish is too deeply felt not to be real. Frank Luntz is having some kind of crisis. I just can’t quite get my head around it.

A few weeks after our lunch, Luntz tells me he’s made a move. He has changed his principal residence from Northern Virginia to a condo overlooking the Las Vegas Strip, and he’s contemplating a sale of his company, Luntz Global LLC, the details of which he is not at liberty to discuss. Las Vegas, he says, represents “my chance to be intellectually challenged again” by a place that is “the closest thing to a melting pot America has to offer.” As fresh starts go, it’s not much, but Luntz hopes it will bring some new clarity.

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The crisis began, he says, after last year’s presidential election, when Luntz became profoundly depressed. For more than a month, he tried to stay occupied, but nothing could keep his attention. Finally, six weeks after the election, during a meeting of his consulting company in Las Vegas, he fell apart. Leaving his employees behind, he flew back to his mansion in Los Angeles, where he stayed for three weeks, barely going outside or talking to anyone.

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His side had lost. Mitt Romney had, in his view, squandered a good chance at victory with a strategically idiotic campaign. (“I didn’t work on the campaign. It just sucked, as a professional. And it killed me because I realized on Election Day that there’s nothing I can do about it.”) But Luntz’s side had lost elections before. His dejection was deeper: It was, he says, about why the election was lost. “I spend more time with voters than anybody else,” Luntz says. “I do more focus groups than anybody else. I do more dial sessions than anybody else. I don’t know shit about anything, with the exception of what the American people think.”

It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. “They want to impose their opinions rather than express them,” is the way he describes what he saw. “And they’re picking up their leads from here in Washington.” Haven’t political disagreements always been contentious, I ask? “Not like this,” he says. “Not like this.”

Luntz knew that he, a maker of political messages and attacks and advertisements, had helped create this negativity, and it haunted him. But it was Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived, had absorbed the president’s message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution. It was a message Luntz believed to be profoundly wrong, but one so powerful he had no slogans, no arguments with which to beat it back. In reelecting Obama, the people had spoken. And the people, he believed, were wrong. Having spent his career telling politicians what the people wanted to hear, Luntz now believed the people had been corrupted and were beyond saving. Obama had ruined the electorate, set them at each other’s throats, and there was no way to turn back.

Why not? I ask. Isn’t finding the right words to persuade people what you do? “I’m not good enough,” Luntz says. “And I hate that. I have come to the extent of my capabilities. And this is not false modesty. I think I’m pretty good. But not good enough.” The old Frank Luntz was sure he could invent slogans to sell the righteous conservative path of personal responsibility and free markets to anyone. The new Frank Luntz fears that is no longer the case, and it’s driving him crazy.

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Luntz is famous not just on television — he has talking-head contracts with both CBS and Fox News, a rare arrangement — but among the political and business elite. When he walks into the Capitol Hill Club, he is beset by Republican members of Congress wanting to talk to him and soak up his aura of celebrity. He boasts that he speaks to at least one Fortune 500 CEO every day. Yet, in his telling, he is still the little guy, the outsider, the schlub — half anxious, half awed by the trappings of power. {snip}

Luntz’s work has always been predicated on a sort of populism — the idea that politicians must figure out what voters want to hear, and speak to them in language that comports with it. He proudly claims that his famous catchphrases, like branding healthcare reform a “government takeover” in 2010, are not his coinages but the organic product of his focus groups. The disheveled appearance, the sardonic wit, all add up to a sort of tilting against the establishment, an insistence that it listen to the Real People.

But what if the Real People are wrong? That is the possibility Luntz now grapples with. What if the things people want to hear from their leaders are ideas that would lead the country down a dangerous road?

“You should not expect a handout,” he tells me. “You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don’t, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them.” The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate — one that cannot be undone. “We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that’s why they voted for him,” he says. “And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great.”

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Luntz’s populism has turned on itself and become its opposite: fear and loathing of the masses. “I am grateful that Occupy Wall Street turned out to be a bunch of crazy, disgusting, rude, horrible people, because they were onto something,” he says. “Limbaugh made fun of me when I said that Occupy Wall Street scares me. Because he didn’t hear what I hear. He doesn’t see what I see.” The people are angry. They want more, not because we have not given them enough but because we have given them too much.

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