The Republican party is entirely responsible for giving us Donald Trump. They may worry about what he is doing to their party but he used the nasty racist and xenophobic and misogynistic climate they created to ride to power. Now some of them are trying to dodge the blame. One of them is Republican pollster Frank Luntz who has been the person they went to to craft all their divisive messaging for the past two decades.
His technique was to convene focus groups to test out the language to use to sell people on the oligarchic-friendly party agenda by demonizing opponents and their policies. He is now trying to distance himself from the party, even saying that he is not sure if he can call himself a Republican anymore. But he does not go as far as to actually denounce Trump.
Speaking with the host, Luntz slammed the “poisonous atmosphere” he has seen while talking to voters and said the U.S. can’t continue down the road it is on under Donald Trump — while ducking pinning the blame on the president when pressed.
“Do you regret any of the tactics of your past, and are you now moving to a different place when you talk about ‘I want to spend 2019 finding common ground’?” Kurtz pressed the pollster. “That’s not Frank Luntz the partisan warrior.”
“It’s hard to be a partisan warrior when you see the damage that’s done,” Luntz lamented, before the Fox host asked him, “Do you still consider yourself a Republican?”
“I don’t know,” Luntz replied before attacking both Republicans and Democrats over inner-city policies.
He decries the rising lack of trust in our public institutions and the blurring of news and opinion and says that his new goal is to get people talking to each other without anger, without acknowledging his role in creating this poisonous climate.
Watch him bob and weave to evade responsibility.
.@FrankLuntz tells me people are confused by blurring of news & opinion, and when asked if he's still a Republican: "I don't know." #Mediabuzz https://t.co/lKfyfEsaeF
— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) November 25, 2018
Sorry Luntz, you cannot escape responsibility by trotting out some new resolution.
Ralph Nader recently had quit a bit to say about Luntz.
I particularly like how Luntz, who crafted the term death tax, when asked what he might have advised if he were working for the Democratic Party said, “I’d call it the billionaire tax.”
I don’t expect Luntz to have an Atwater moment.
Nader is right. Democrats suck at labeling.
Jeff
The “party of personal responsibility”…