Here’s a really nice NYT article looking at academic researchers looking at the Occupy movement. Quite against the main point of the effort, the article reveals why OWS persuasion is so bad. Consider just two observations.

But getting a handle on Occupy, with its amorphous structure and aims, could be more challenging, Ms. Skocpol said. “The Tea Party from the beginning saw themselves as leveraging and changing the Republican Party, while the Occupy people are much more ambivalent,” she said. “That makes them harder to pin down.”

The absence of strategic TACTs kills OWS as a persuasion force and leaves them little more than Dancing Bears, just entertainment from zealots. Passion without purpose destroys persuasion. It’s also pretty bad for research.

Some researchers also say that the sympathy many academics feel for the movement risks undermining objective research. Edward Maguire, a criminologist at American University who is leading a study of attitudes toward the police and the law among Occupy protesters in six cities, cited an incident in which one research assistant at a demonstration in Washington in March “handed in her ID, turned in her clipboard and within minutes got arrested.”

Youth. Passion. Sincerity. I get it. Hurray Passion! But, please understand the limits of passion. Especially when you are trying to Change the World.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

All Sincere Research Is Worse.

Peggy Noonan destroys the re-election chances of President Obama in this clear, accurate, and pugnacious WSJ takedown.

But — and forgive me, because what I’m about to say is rude — has anyone noticed how boring he is? Plonking platitude after plonking platitude. To see Mr. Obama on the stump is to see a man at the podium who’s constantly dribbling away the punch line. He looks pleasant but lacks joy; he’s cool but lacks vigor. A lot of what he says could have been said by a president 12 or 20 years ago, little is anchored to the moment. As he makes his points he often seems distracted, as if he’s holding a private conversation in his head, noticing crowd size, for instance, and wishing the front row would start fainting again, like they used to.

She then details the wide, deep, and persistent failures of Obama ranging from his elegant empty suits to his revulsion at the politics of the fleshly with important stops along the way for personnel and policy failures. Counting his flaws, Noonan finds hope for change in November.

Anybody in political persuasion will read this article and stop. Noonan is not a fool on this one and what she writes resonates. But, she’s wrong. Let’s zig on her zag.

Progressive Democrats have spent a lot of time in the Presidential desert since 1980. In those past 32 years they had Clinton for 8 years, but progressives hated Clinton and grit their teeth counting his years in their column. Only 2009-2010 with Obama were golden. They had a bad year in 2011 and 2012 won’t be better, but they are in power with a guy they love. You think they won’t be standing when the bell rings?

Obama will take terrible hits over serious failures in office, most notably on the Say-Do gap between his spoken campaign promises on the economy and the Administration performance on the economy. Romney will clobber him on this. So what?

If Obama can take a punch, then he’ll be dangerous on Election Day. His base will be energized if only at the punishing prospect of loading up the camels and the tents for Four More Years in the sand. If Obama survives the punishment of the campaign AND runs a first class Get Out The Vote operation on Election Day, then progressives will send camels to the Republicans.

Now the analysis gets interesting. All elections depend on turnout, but this one will be crucial, more like George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign. John Kerry could have easily won that race, but made blunders that left him a nose behind at the finish line. Bush needed blunders and a great turnout to win. That’s the standard that Obama wants to hit.

Again, while all elections are difficult, Mr. Obama has never faced a race like this one. Everyone knows him and lots of them hate his guts. In none of his prior races has he confronted so much resistance and enraged counter-attacking. This is an Existential Race and Obama’s first.

Thus, this election turns less on Obama’s performance than on his will. He starts with incumbency, a strong base, a lot of money, and plenty of experience. Even with his failures and the energized campaigning of his opponents, Obama only needs to take a punch and deliver the turnout on Election Day to win. And that demands a will to win.

If you’re old enough then you might recall the 1992 election when George H.W. Bush ran for re-election versus Bill Clinton. Bush had triumphed in Desert Storm, but then mishandled a slumping economy, seeming out of touch and unconcerned. Bush knew the economic numbers were better than they looked and felt confident the slump would end soon. But, his confidence came across as boredom or disdain. It was captured in this shot.

Bush always seemed like he wanted to be somewhere else than campaigning for his job. He lacked the will to power in every sense of that clichéd phrase. Bill Clinton, by sharp contrast, was nothing but an earnest job-seeker, telling anyone who would listen that he wanted the job and would work hard at it.

Does Obama have the will to power?

Persuaders Can Be Famous or Effective, but Not Both.

P.S. Scroll down for two related posts on Obama election persuasion.

President Obama is getting chippy about being the Commander In Chief. First, he released an ad extolling his virtues in bringing justice to Osama bin Laden, to generally unfavorable reviews. But, I get it. The message clearly persuades with his base and his base is crucial for the re-election. So Obama with a Smoking Gun makes persuasion sense if you understand the TACT: Get out the Vote!

But, consider this second example of Virile Obama. Read under the headline, Terror Risk Falls, U.S. Officials Say

WASHINGTON—The chances of a Sept. 11-style attack have substantially decreased as a result of U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials who provided an assessment Friday of the state of al Qaeda a year after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. A high-casualty attack by a foreign terrorist group is “unlikely in the next year,” said Robert Cardillo, a top official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “That’s a result of the counterterrorism pressure that’s been applied.”

I can see no worthwhile persuasion value to this story for the Obama re-election. At best it comes off as a kind of self congratulatory message that Obama won the war on terror. At worst it challenges Other Bad Guys to mount a fatal terrorist attack and see if it qualifies as “high-casualty.” Further, it appears to have no resonance with the Obama base. I searched the DailyKos, as an exemplar, and found one entry related to this story and that was part of a daily news feed, a summary posting with links to outside sources. DailyKos itself provided no comment on it.

Part of my persuasion problem is locating the TACT, of finding the persuasion strategy that implements a persuasion tactic like this. Insulting your enemies on the anniversary of a big event is a tricky play. And getting nothing from your zealots for the insult does nothing to help with the election. This looks surface smart, but tidal stupid. Obama asserts his competence as Commander In Chief – smart. Obama insults his enemies and misses his allies – stupid.

The only way I can resolve this is to note that if some bad guys attack on US soil before the election, Obama is ruined. Therefore, maladroit statements like this can’t hurt unless a bad guy does something and since Obama cannot control all the bad guys all the time, so what if he talks chippy? Sure, others like me can criticize him for shooting his mouth off like this, but as long as we see no smoking buildings on CNN, it’s just trash talking.

Of course, kids, this is May. November is a very long way off . . . hmmm. Kinda of a cop out from me. Is Obama a maven or a muggle, Steve?

Consider Ford-Carter 1976 then Carter-Reagan 1980 then finally Bush-Clinton 1992. Each different, but the incumbent losers all lost the same way. Right now Obama is campaigning more like the loser of those races, Ford, then Carter, then Bush. He’s got the power of the incumbency, a lot of money, and a good base, but his campaign is just not smooth, fluent, compact, structured. He’s thrashing, experimenting, adjusting, altering.

Of course, he got himself elected President and all I got was this blog . . .

No stats, just perceptual counting: Obama is getting a general beat down from the Media Cool Table on the anniversary celebration of killing Osama bin Laden. Bad taste. Overdone. Tone deaf. View the video and draw your own conclusion, but realize that it’s not just Republicans throwing a yellow flag on this play. The Elite Media, assumed to be in Obama’s pocket, are crying Foul, too.

Why would he do something this dumb?

Visit the DailyKos here or here.

As I noted in this post zigging on a Peggy Noonan zag, Obama’s base reacts favorably to this persuasion. Obama will need the base on Election Day to get Turnout.

I missed the planning for this event probably because I paid my student loans a couple of years after graduating and that was a while ago. Now, all the Other Guys going to college have accumulated an estimated one trillion dollars of debt, more than the debt for credit cards or automobiles. This issue got lost in the larger Occupy Wall Street movement, but was part of the concern. Folks with over a hundred thousand in debt and only a sociology degree to show for it! And they thought that put them in a 99%. Man. A hundred grand for a soc degree must surely be a 1%. But, that’s not the persuasion point today.

On April 25 folks organized a national protest day, 1Tday, the 1 Trillion Dollar day. Like I said, I hadn’t been contacted earlier and just learned about it in a bottom story somewhere. (The Google news aggregator notes about 60 sources.) You’d think with a total debt of one trillion dollars and all those people with at least some college experience and a Facebook page that this would have been the lead story of the day much like OWS in those early days. But, not so much.

Here’s their Facebook page.

Jeepers. Fewer than 400 people indicate they are attending a rally. Fewer than 60 maybes. Shootfire on any college campus on any day anywhere in America you can get more than 60 maybes for picking up litter. And look at their twitter page. The 1Tday twitter page has 166 followers as of April 25. It’s tweeted more (193) than it is followed.

You might have noticed that President Obama has been talking up the issue of student debt on college campuses. The President feels their pain. He notes that the Obama’s themselves were paying off their student debt up until eight years ago. (Is this a great country or what? You make your last payment on your student loan and eight years later you’re running for re-election as President of the US. Kinda undercuts the protest if you think about it, but I don’t think anyone wants you to think about it that way. Back to the opera.)

While I admire much of Obama’s election persuasion, I think he should rethink courting college voters on this issue. His similarity to them is engaging, but ultimately counterproductive. Worse still, even Other Guys with the debt won’t even sign up as Maybes for a protest on a spring day. Where do you think these Other Guys will be on a dreary November later this year?