Global Warming? Call it Climate Change.

Estate Tax? Call it a Death Tax.

Don’t Oppose Health Care Reform, Oppose Government Bureaucrats.

Dr. Frank Luntz: “I just give them the words.”

What they do with them is none of his business.

Before launching Bloomberg Watch, we started hacksandflacks.org. We’re long-time New Yorkers and the Bloomberg/Quinn term limits putsch convinced us to put that site on hold until November to try to take our city back. We thought our readers would be interested in this piece that we commissioned right before we put the site on hold.

We haven’t heard that Frank Luntz is working for Bloomberg. So far the mayor seems to be taking the Big Lie approach from everything to his bogus support for gays, affordable housing, public schools, non-partisan elections, and so forth. He’s flooding the airwaves trying to drown out dissident voices.

But we wouldn’t be surprised if he reaches out to the master of the more insidious and subtler approach. Welcome to the World of Lunz-Speak.

By Peter Cox

Simmering beyond the economy, two wars and a foreign policy overhaul is the debate over health care reform.

Led by President Barack Obama, Democrats are pushing to reform the health care system. The reform would likely involve a government insurance plan that would compete with private insurers. This is anathema to most Republicans, some Democrats, and insurance companies who bankroll them.

To do battle, the Republicans have turned to one of their foremost propagandists, Dr. Frank Luntz, a consultant who has been involved with many major issues, both corporate and political, over the past 20 years. Working with focus groups, he finds words and phrases that evoke an emotional reaction – words that help push people to one side of the debate or another.

You’ve seen, or heard, his words many times during the last two decades.

He helped Newt Gingrich formulate the “Contract with America” that led to the first Republican majority in Congress in 40 years.

During the run-up to the Iraq war Luntz instructed Republicans to start all pro-war speeches with references to 9-11, a move which was proven to garner emotional support for the invasion.

Luntz renamed the estate tax the “death tax.” Up to that point, the estate tax question remained an issue of the ultra-rich; but when Luntz re-framed it in the context of family loss and grief rather than the taxation of vast estates, he changed the debate.

Possibly his most famous piece of work was a memo urging Republicans to hammer home the phrase “there is no scientific consensus” regarding global warming.

Luntz is a frequent television pundit, but his work with Fox, MSNBC, PBS and others is about polling, focus groups and reacting to political speeches. Rarely will you find him spouting off the phrases he’s spent so much time honing. That work is for the politicians he coaches.

Born and raised in West Hartford, Conn., Luntz was a bit of a Wunderkind. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. He received a doctorate in politics at the age of 25 from Oxford University, and in 1993 was named a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

He worked with Republican pollster Dick Wirthlin in the late 1980s and did polling for the 1989 New York Mayoral race. His work garnered early notice from billionaire presidential hopeful Ross Perot, who hired Luntz as a pollster in his 1992 presidential bid.

Since then, he’s been a political consultant to hundreds of politicians, and a communications consultant for more than a dozen Fortune 100 companies. He’s also been an adjunct professor at UPenn, George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, and Harvard University.

He wrote the New York Times bestseller ‘Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear,’ in which he explains how to manipulate language effectively.

“He’s possibly the best example of what we could call the pollster pundit: someone who both purports to scientifically poll the opinions of the public, and then also interpret that data to support his own — in Luntz’s case, conservative — point of view,” wrote Dante Chinni in a 2000 profile of Luntz for Salon.com.

His polling methods have landed him in hot water with the American Association for Public Opinion Research. The group accused Luntz of violating their code of ethics in 1997, when he “repeatedly refused to make public essential facts about his research on public attitudes about the Republicans’ ‘Contract with America,’” according to a press release.

Chinni asked how Luntz reacts to the AAPOR’s claim that when a survey’s results are public, then the data from the study should be public.

“‘I don’t agree,’ [Luntz] says. ‘Say you poll on an environmental issue, and on eight of the 10 questions the numbers are in your favor. Why release the other two? It’s like being a lawyer … This is my case, and these are the strong arguments and these are the weak ones. You go with your strongest case.’”

(Ed. Note. Something like a prosecutor who knows the DNA evidence doesn’t match that of the defendant but he has a questionable confession extracted after 20 hours in police custody. Put the DNA report in the desk drawer and go with your strongest case. There are differences, of course, The prosecutor has an ethical obligation to come forward with exculpatory evidence. We only raise the analogy to show that political consultants like Luntz, although they consider themselves professionals, are not. Ethics, the defining characteristic of a profession,  doesn’t come into it.  He doesn’t need a license to practice politics and there are no sanctions for conspiring to mislead the public on the life and death issues of our time.  Think of consultants like Luntz as plumbers: You call him in to fix your toilet. So long as he does the job you paid him for-you have no complaint. He and others like him are the reason we started HacksandFlacks. We’ll get back to it in November. )

It wasn’t the last time his tactics were criticized. During the 2008 election, working as a pollster for Fox News, his focus groups came under scrutiny, especially from Ron Paul supporters who alleged that Luntz and Fox had worked to keep Ron Paul out of the debates and out of the picture by using staged focus groups.

Apart from these questionable practices, there is the method itself. Luntz doesn’t deal with the statisticians ‘law of large numbers’ rather, his work studies the reaction of individuals.

David C. Johnson writes about Luntz in his book about lobbying and tax manipulation, ‘Perfectly Legal’. Luntz is quoted as offering a “classic example.”

“If you ask people, ‘Would you be willing to pay more taxes to improve law enforcement?,’ 51 percent of Americans would say yes. If you ask people, ‘Would you be prepared to pay more taxes to halt the rising crime rates?’ 68 percent say yes. Same thing. Law enforcement is the process. Halting rising crime rates is the result. Half will pay more for process but two thirds will pay more for results. The key to this is how you wrap the language … the difference between tax cut and tax relief.”

‘Wrapping the language’ is key to Luntz’s work. It isn’t so much about the issue in question as predisposing people’s reaction to it.

As Johnson writes, “The term ‘death tax’ is a superb example of marketing triumphing over reasoned debate.”

Luntz is unapologetic about his tactics. He claims he has no ethical responsibility for how the work he does is used to shape the political debate that will determine policy.

In a 2007 interview with Fresh Air’s Teri Gross, he capably weaves and dodges the specificity of Gross’ questions, meanwhile arguing (mirabile dictu) that the linguistic changes he recommends actually make for greater accuracy.

Accuracy wasn’t the goal when he urged the change from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change.’ It was emotional language he was looking for. “Climate change creates less hysteria; it is more thoughtful… global warming causes people to divide,” he tells Gross.

In fact, his memo to Republicans on the environment, which was leaked in 2003, indicates there is enough scientific evidence that global warming is a fact, but urges a repeated denial of consensus.

The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.

The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science. Americans believe that all the strange weather that was associated with El Niño had something to do with global warming, and there is little you can do to convince them otherwise. However, only a handful of people believe the science of global warming is a closed question. Most Americans want more information so that they can make an informed decision. It is our job to provide that information.

The information being provided wasn’t more accurate, but was designed to placate the emotional reaction to global warming. Luntz’s words, which were used often over the next five years, calmed people. It shifted their focus from alarm over the accelerated melting of polar ice caps to allowing scientists more time to come to a ‘consensus.’

In the Frontline documentary ‘Hot Politics’ Luntz is grilled about his work with the memo, and his argument that there was no scientific consensus. In the interview, he takes no responsibility for how his words shaped the debate: he wasn’t the one saying them, he reminds his inquisitor.

Instead, he says proudly, “I found good language.”

In a 2007 profile of Luntz in London’s The Independent, Luntz makes the argument that he doesn’t govern, just gives words to those who do.

‘”A pollster doesn’t enact public policy,” he says. “A pollster impacts public communication. I make language recommendations.” So where does that leave us? Should un-elected political operators bear any responsibility for the policies that actually emerge? Again, Luntz passes the buck: “You cannot succeed in politics by just having good words and phrases. You have to have good policies. Even the best language will not effectively sell a bad policy.”’

Nevertheless, there is presently very little policy behind the opposition to healthcare reform; just the necessity to fight it. And Luntz is now focused on giving the opposition the language to do so.

When the New York Times Magazine asked him who had hired him for this work, Luntz replied, “It’s not relevant.”

While this man of words had little to say about who hired him, his memo demonstrates well the reason he was hired.

His 28-page memo (PDF here) provides a structure for the opposition. It lays out twelve rules and talking points for Republicans to use in debating health care reform.

In May the memo to Republicans regarding the healthcare debate was leaked. In it, he advises them to agree for the necessity for an overhaul. “You simply MUST be vocally and passionately on the side of reform. The status quo is no longer acceptable.”

His advice is to “humanize your approach,” and stay away from making business arguments about the free market. Make it rather an argument against Washington bureaucracy.

Luntz encourages framing the democratic plan as a “Government takeover of healthcare” and a “Bailout for the insurance industry.”

He pushes phrases that evoke images of the government making choices on what is covered and taking treatment options out of the hands of doctors and patients. “Decisions about you and your healthcare should be between you and your doctor and no one else,” Luntz writes.

“One size does not fit all,” is commended as a key phrase.

There are key words too. He urges peppering conversations about the Obama plan with the words ‘deny’ or ‘denial’ when referring to necessary treatment.

The words “Ration” or “Rationing” appear 25 times throughout the memo.

If one does a Google news search for the words ‘rationing and healthcare,’ one will find plenty of articles with quotes from Republican senators and congressmen regarding healthcare.

ThinkProgress shows that shortly after the Luntz memo went out, his words were ubiquitous.

Media Matters has found Luntzian words throughout the GOP’s arguments here and here, Mitch McConnell stands on the floor of the Senate.

On CNN’s The Situation Room, Rep. John Boehner does a great job of incorporating all Luntz’s points in a tirade about health care reform.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Minority Whip of the House, packs an interview on Bill Bennett’s radio show as many of Luntz’s talking points as possible.

Will Luntz-Speak succeed in blocking health care reform? The Republicans and their insurance company allies are betting it will. Stay tuned.

Peter Cox is a freelance writer based in St. Paul, Minn.