Frank Luntz is in Agony

Molly Balljan of the Atlantic informs us that America's top spin doctor is deeply sick in the heart.

The Agony of Frank Luntz

MOLLY BALLJAN 6 2014, 6:00 AM ET

The crisis began, he says, after last year's presidential election, when Luntz became profoundly depressed.[...]

But Luntz's side had lost elections before. His dejection was deeper: It was, he says, about why the election was lost. "I spend more time with voters than anybody else," Luntz says. "I do more focus groups than anybody else. I do more dial sessions than anybody else. I don't know shit about anything, with the exception of what the American people think."

It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn't listen to each other as they once had. They weren't interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. "They want to impose their opinions rather than express them," is the way he describes what he saw. "And they're picking up their leads from here in Washington." Haven't political disagreements always been contentious, I ask? "Not like this," he says. "Not like this."

Luntz knew that he, a maker of political messages and attacks and advertisements, had helped create this negativity, and it haunted him. But it was Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived, had absorbed the president's message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution. It was a message Luntz believed to be profoundly wrong, but one so powerful he had no slogans, no arguments with which to beat it back.

Democrats who are often said to be notoriously bad at messaging, outmessaged Frank Luntz and sent him into a message-less funk from which he has yet to recover.

As we head into the 2014 election year, with Democrats vowing to champion the crisis of wealth inequality, it is heartening to know that America's top spin doctor may have finally met his waterloo.

By the way, Frank Luntz' agony has not caused any soul searching or change of heart.

"You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don't, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them." The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone.

May Frank Luntz' agony be America's electoral ecstasy.