Karl Rove is probably the most effective political persuader active in the past 20 years. He wins. Here’s how he wants to win against Obama right now.

The soft attack ad.

Attack ads work. Properly done they reduce support for the issue or person attacked and translate into fewer votes. But, they must be properly done. The proper here revolves around President Obama’s enduring popularity and likability as a person. Many people who voted against him, still find him a winning guy, somebody who’d be a great neighbor, colleague, or guy at the end of the bar. Attacks that don’t account for his likability may fail.

Rove is currently running a soft attack ad that evades Obama’s likability through indirection. Consider Wake Up.

The ad begins with a thirty-something woman alone in bed at 3am awakened by a storm. In voiceover we learn she’s worried about mom, kids, job, retirement. Then she recalls Obama’s plans and promises and we see photograbs of the President, headlines, and charts. The woman continues to worry. We’ve got to do something.

Notice the main element of an attack ad – the direct challenge on character or, in this case, competence. The ad provides those icons of credibility, newspaper grabs, to document the attack, but see how the attack is couched. A young woman in a modest nightgown, worrying alone in bed at 3am as a storm approaches. We see a picture of her with kids and hear about her mom. We never see or hear anything about her partner, but everything about the context looks like she probably has or had one. Thus, we have a young, vulnerable, and highly responsible woman thinking aloud the Attack Arguments against a highly popular and likable Obama.

Please read over the WSJ article about this approach as a great practical lesson in How-To with attack ads. Also find the emerging tactics Rove appears to consider. (I say “appears” because Rove will set you up. More on that in a bit.) Right now Rove sees more risk in the standard attack ad and wants to stay in soft. Rove asserts that he won’t go hard negative with his attacks unless Obama starts it.

Several groups, including American Crossroads, said they were ready to shift tactics if the Obama campaign turned sharply negative in its attacks on Mr. Romney.

That’s manifestly untrue. It sounds good and fair like, “We’re trying to be nice, but the other guy went negative and we had to respond!” Rove is going to maneuver Obama into a corner and punish him with hard attack ads, but that will depend not upon Obama’s attack ads, but when Rove thinks he can put Obama in a corner. Quotes like the one above are a part of those Rove “appearances” where he seems to be speaking plainly, but actually has a persuasion play.

Rove has a strategy. In military terms, Rove has identified the Obama Centers of Gravity and Rove will reduce or neutralize them. Anyone with eyes can see that one major Center for Obama is that likability. Right now Rove is not trying to make Obama less likable; he’s trying to neutralize Obama’s popularity. When Rove makes these soft attacks, he punishes Obama who cannot defend himself with his likeability. Yeah, sure Obama will run a nuanced response ad with shots of him comforting women in nightgowns.

Rove also has a fabulous history of provoking opponents into dysPersuasion. You might recall John Kerry’s babbling caught live on tape, exclaiming that he voted for a bill before he voted against it.

Not to waffle, flip-flop, or talk out of all sides of your mouth no matter how subtle, nuanced, or inspired. Rove had a camera team follow Kerry to town hall meetings then plant questions about this specific legislation that Kerry had voted both ways on. After no luck on several tries, Kerry finally got tired and delivered the double-talk Rove desired.

No single message is decisive in a campaign as long and intense as the race for President. While we learn a persuasion lesson in this specific instance, it’s all part of a much larger plan that can shift with contingency and circumstance. You’ve got to admire Rove for attacking through the strength of an opponent.

This is just a haphazard sampling, but with an Effect Size this Stupendous, even a focus group will demonstrate it. Start with a recent article about the Obama re-election effort.

CHICAGO — With a “chief scientist” specializing in consumer behavior, an “analytics department” monitoring voter trends, and a squad of dozens huddled at computer screens editing video or writing code, the sprawling office complex inside One Prudential Plaza looks like a corporate research and development lab — Ping-Pong table and all.

Now, the popularity of hiring statisticians in business.

Arcane statistical analysis, the business of making sense of our growing data mountains, has become high tech’s hottest calling. There are billions of bytes generated daily, not just from the Internet but also from sciences like genetics and astronomy. Companies like Google and Facebook, as well as product marketers, risk analysts, spies, natural philosophers and gamblers are all scouring the info, desperate to find a new angle on what makes us and the world tick. Computing has become cheap and available enough to process any number of formulas.

Finally, a scientific breakthrough for data mining.

Are there subtle patterns lurking in data that can foretell of a coming financial-system crash? What can explain the variations in sports-star salaries? How about the complex relationship between genes and certain diseases? Scientists in various fields have been searching for better ways to analyze large piles of data for such patterns, but the difficulty has always been that they need to know what they’re looking for in order to find. A new software program, described in the latest issue of Science, is designed to find the patterns in data that scientists don’t know to look for.

You’ve read variations on the Big Numbers theme. There’s Truth in them thar Hills of Data and if you know how to Mine Them, you can Change the Other Guys, win elections, earn trillions, and sit at the Cool Table. Particularly among aspiring persuasion mavens, Big Numbers with Big Data and Big Statistics is the New New Thing. Since everyone is living in Web 2.0 everyone has torrents, tides, and tsunamis of information about Other Guys which has got to lead to Change. Right?

While there’s a ton of nuance in the answer to that question, the First Nuance for me is:

Numbers without Theory is just a million Monkeys at the Abacus.

Just as those monkeys at the typewriter won’t produce Shakespeare, neither will these monkeys at the abacus produce Fishbein and Aizen or Petty and Cacioppo or, to be more famous about it, Kahneman and Tversky. Yet, the New New Thing rush to Big Numbers pretends you can drop the theorist and as long as you have monkeys with degrees from Stanford or Carnegie Mellon armed with quantum computers, you can discover like Einstein.

You see my bias. I’m a theory guy and that reflects both my nature and nurture. Without a schematic, a blueprint, scribbles on a paper cocktail paper, you will not find Truth whether for elections, business, or science. Theory is the One Ring that binds all other Rings. And the better your Theory, the better everything else about your persuasion.

Sure, If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It. But remember.

Just Because You Can Count It, Doesn’t Mean You Can Change It.

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic candidate for US Senate in Massachusetts, is getting stomped over her careless handling of her ethnic heritage.  Warren reports a family history with an honorable Native American in the past . . . somewhere back there.  Documentation is available to indicate a 1/32 trace which is faint mark in that column for the US Census report.  Even Democrat allies like Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager in 2004, are ripping Warren.

 “There’s nobody watching this that doesn’t think she’s in big trouble,” one well-known Massachusetts Democrat said.  Joe Trippi, a prominent national Democratic consultant, told the Herald that while Warren has time to recover, the campaign should have anticipated this issue would surface.  “The problem is they weren’t ready for something they should have been ahead of,” Trippi said.

And Warren isn’t helping with defensive comments about her ethnicity focused on stereotyped facial features of Native Americans.

I still have a picture on my mantel and it is a picture my mother had before that – a picture of my grandfather. And my Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a 1,000 times remarked that he – her father, my Papaw — had high cheek bones like all of the Indians do.

You can imagine George W. Bush saying that and the firestorm of derision and outrage it would trigger.  Warren evades some of that criticism, but not enough of it.  This clearly hurts her campaign.

But – and this is the persuasion lesson – it’s May and the election is in November.  While this is a bad error from Warren, it is better understood as a persuasion test.  How does she persuade past this?  She’s got over six months to repair the damage of this particular incident and fix the problem Joe Trippi alludes to.  She should not have gotten hit like this and more importantly she should have reacted better than she has.  The failure marks her persuasion weaknesses, but she can fix it if she is a persuasion maven.

Warren typically gets high marks for her earnest Sincerity as both a Harvard professor and a defender of the financial interest of everyday people.  Since All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere and she’s going to need a lot of persuasion to beat Senator Scott Brown, you can mark her persuasion skill in the coming months with how well she learns to pose Authentically while moving Persuasively.

Robert Caro publishes his fourth volume on Lyndon Baines Johnson. This book covers Johnson’s final years as master of the Senate through becoming President following the assassination of John Kennedy. The reviewer, former President Bill Clinton, offers a sharp, concise, and smart summary of LBJ’s skills.

If you were a partisan, he’d call on your patriotism; if a traditionalist, he’d make his proposal seem to be the Establishment choice. His flattery was minutely detailed, finely tuned and perfectly modulated. So was his bombast — whatever worked. L.B.J. didn’t kiss Sam Rayburn’s ring, but his lips did press against his bald head. Harry Byrd received deference and attention. When L.B.J. became president, he finally had the power to match his political skills.

Most people hated Johnson for a wide variety of reasons ranging from Left to Right: Viet Nam and Civil Rights to name two big ones. Johnson accomplished more legislatively than most Presidents and it came from his knowledge of the Senate and his persuasion skills. You feel the tension and the glory of this in Bill Clinton’s book review.

See the mix of Arguments and Cues. See how Johnson made his Box and Play fit each unique person.

More importantly, see the Rules.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

You Can Get Farther with a Kind Word and a Gun Than You Can with Either Alone.

But, if you know the rest of the story: Power Corrupts Persuasion.

P.S. Excellent book review from Clinton. He fails to fail as many reviewers do and avoids those clumsy nuances a smart reviewer intrudes upon either the book writer or the book topic. Clinton reviews the book well. He also admits his respect for Johnson, providing another reason why so many progressives hate Clinton like they hated Johnson. And, as good as Clinton was as a persuasive President, Johnson still leaves him in the shade. If you like Big Government, you need to study the Great Society.

Now, we’re getting serious.

SAN ANTONIO, April 26 (Reuters) – U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called on Thursday for a federal law to ban talking on a cell phone or texting while driving any type of vehicle on any road in the country.

This is a US Federal Government Cabinet Secretary here, not some Cool Table academic at Charlie Rose U. Of course, laws specifically banning cell phone use while driving have no, none, nada impact on accident, injury, or mortality rates, but those kind of numbers don’t count. What counts is the politics and the self concept, baby.

Is this an election year or what?

Seriously. This is an election year and such persuasion follies are haute cuisine for the Obama base. Implicit in LaHood’s charge is the thought that as long as Obama is President, we might actually get legislation like this. No Obama, No Hope!

Of course, even with Obama, Hope, but alas, No Change.

Must be lots of Dissonance Reduction served at the Table of Brother-and-SisterHood. Mmmmm, these Warning Labels sure taste good!