My Dog Has Three Legs

There is a training role-play exercise used in political communications courses called "My Dog Has Three Legs".  The idea is that you, as a politician, wish to get across to the voters, at all times, that you have a three-legged dog.  So you field questions from a person role-playing an investigative reporter:

Q: What do you plan on doing about water management issues?
A: Water management may be important to many people, but what my neighbors are really concerned about is that My Dog Has Three Legs.

Q: What is your opinion about the president's plan to withdraw troops from Quebec?
A: I have the deepest concern for the people of Quebec, but what voters in my district are talking about is My Three-Legged Dog.

The goal being that practicing this will allow you to substitute your own talking-point for the unfortunate tripodal canine, in the hopes that if five seconds of your interview end up on the news, it will be five seconds about your message.  In person, this can make a politician sound overly rehearsed at best, and ignorant and evasive at worst.  But when you watch the five-second clip on television news, spliced in with a half-dozen other five-second clips, it works.  Television news reports rarely show the question being asked, they usually just show the answer.  If a candidate has the same answer for every question, that answer is what will end up earning media.

A recent environmental forum featuring candidates running for the Florida legislature demonstrated the importance of staying on-message.  There is a candidate running for Florida Senate District 6, John Shaw, whose entire platform relates to hemp legalization.  Hemp legalization, according to this bright and well-spoken young man, will lead to the cure of many of Florida's environmental, economic, energy, and social ills.  And his answers to every question early on stated so.  Not everyone in attendance shared his enthusiasm and optimism for industrial hemp production as an engine for sustainable growth, but as long as he stuck to the topic of hemp he at least sounded like he knew what he was talking about.  

Mr. Shaw's problems at the forum really began when he switched over to water fluoridation, a topic that he brought up, and seemed unfamiliar with.  He went off-message, and started to lose an audience who, while not necessarily agreeing with his hemp-centric platform, at least admired his tenacity.  Hemp as a political talking point, at worst, inspires Cheech and Chong jokes.  Water fluoridation, on the other hand, reminds people of General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.  (A note to younger readers who may not get these film references: substitute "Harold and Kumar" for "Cheech and Chong", and just go ahead and watch Dr. Strangelove.)  Thereafter, he quit talking about hemp so much and began answering questions with whatever sprang to mind.  And so John Shaw's pooch grew a fourth leg, and quickly ran away.

This blog, Message Discipline, will be examining political communication, particularly in the realm of Leon County and North Florida politics.  My aim is to point out how candidates for public office craft their message to appeal to voters, and to try to gauge the effectiveness of their communications.  I welcome all comments and criticism, and look forward to hearing from you.

-Brian Lee