In today’s New York Times. Charles Blow makes a point about discourse that I’ve seen made around the media for some time now. We’ve been told that the President is too cerebral. In fact that critique was close to the heart of the Clinton campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Here’s Blow’s version:

Conservatives speak in bumper stickers. Obama speaks in thesis statements. In fact, he sometimes seems constitutionally incapable of concision.

He also seems to display a disdain for irrational excitability and confronts it with either princely dispassion, mocking disbelief or stirring oratory that speaks more to posterity than to the people in front of him.

I think Blow is right to the extent that the sloganeering arguments contained in sound bites like “Death panels. Death books. Taxpayer dollars for abortion. Kill Grandma. Take away choice,” have had an impact, or at least seem to have had an impact. Blow follows the common procedure of linking these slogans with polls showing voter confusion and antipathy to the health care proposals that are presently before the congress. Bit I’m not sure I like Blow’s prescription for dealing with that success.

In American debates, and particularly in this debate, facts are not sufficient, no matter how eloquently spoken. We want to be moved by passion and conviction and determination and faith. We coalesce around simple ideas like right and wrong, and for many, yes, good and evil.

Some may dislike this simplicity and wish it were different (I am among them), but in politics you have to play on the field where the game is.

In the first place, the arguments contained in the conservative sound bites are “one-way hash” arguments. There’s a good discussion of this type of argumentation at FactCheck.org. By my reading the cleverness of the conservative sound bites (all of which are what Huck Finn calls “stretchers” and many of which are outright lies) isn’t that they are beautifully simple as Blow claims. The problem is that they are difficult to answer seriously because the answers are complicated. And the slogans succeed, I believe, because brute populist appeals tend to favor conservative causes in today’s political climate, appealing as they do to naive individualism and to the residues of nativism and racism that still plague our social life.

Blow’s analysis invites a war of sound bites. I think that’s a losing proposition for progressives like me and for the President as well. I also think that if we do pass a health care bill and the President gets to sign it into law, there will remain a great deal of irrational opposition to it, just as there is still irrational opposition to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, even from many Americans who benefit from these programs.

One might wish that the Republican Party would abandon its determination to appeal to the worst in people. That seems unlikely, especially in the present political climate. So, yes, it’s fairly urgent for progressives and other democrats to learn to counter that appeal effectively. I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t think Mr. Blow does either. But the President and his team have a pretty good record countering it so far, and they learn fast. I’m anxiously awaiting the President’s health care speech.