Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

It was the case that Republicans had been paying attention for some time to the use of language to sharpen their political message. In this the key event had been the collaboration between Representative Newt Gingrich and consultant Frank Lutz to take Congress for the Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections. The centerpiece of the campaign was the “Contract with America.” According to Lutz, the word contract was chosen because plan sounded insufficiently binding, promises were made to be broken, pledges went unfulfilled, platforms were too political, oaths too legal, and covenants too religious. The adjective “Republican” was left off to encourage independents to keep an open mind.2 In the actual document, a lot of effort went into talking about personal responsibility, family reinforcement, and tax cuts (“American Dream Reinforcement”). In 1995, the two men combined on a memo for the new Republican Congressmen entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which urged that they talk of themselves using such words as “opportunity, truth, moral, courage, reform, prosperity” and portray their opponents in term of such words as “crisis, destructive, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, betray.”3