The spinners’ composer

It still is, of course, and it’s a crying shame the locally based DJs are not with us these days, what with the emergence of that singing group we hear constantly. You know the one I mean: The SPINNERS.

They’re unique in that instead of being a choir, they sing to their choirs. They’re always available for party gatherings with their party lines. Their biggest hit, “Message of the Day,” is adapted to every situation. Any issue.

Like any other song-and-dance act, they need their composers, and The Spinners have many of them. But none has gotten more prosperous and generated more publicity for himself than that Spinner guru, Frank Luntz.

Full disclosure: Frank is a longtime friend of mine and might continue to be in spite of what I’m saying here. We go back almost as far as the days when he was designing semantics for the 1994 long-shot Republicans, the ones who rolled over the Democrats and took over Congress.

Sixteen years later, they are salivating at the possibility the Democrats will hand it to them once again, and Frank is still writing their march music.

His stock-in-trade is lyrics. He’s a memo machine, making tons of money showering corporate clients with insights into the words they should choose when making their case. For fun and the TV exposure he loves, he still loyally creates material for the Republican Spinners, the Amen chorus that gave him his first big break.

When you read his stuff, you are struck by how easy it is to push emotional buttons with sinful syntax and how easy it is to cloud the issues. Here is his 2010 list:

ACCOUNTABILITY
TRANSPARENCY & OVERSIGHT
LOBBYIST
LOOPHOLES
ENFORCEMENT OF CURRENT LAWS
BUREAUCRATS
WASTEFUL WASHINGTON
SPENDING
NEVER AGAIN
GOVERNMENT FAILURES AND INCOMPETENCE
LET’S HELP SMALL BUSINESSES
BIG BANK BAILOUT BILL
BLOATED BUREAUCRACY
FINE PRINT
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
SPECIAL INTERESTS
HARD WORKING TAXPAYERS
ANOTHER WASHINGTON AGENCY
UNLIMITED REGULATORY POWERS
DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
RED TAPE

There are 17 pages to this memorandum. He makes big bucks from this kind of stuff.

Obvious, you say? If so, why are the Democrats making it so easy to use those expressions against them? Frank Luntz reads the numbers. In fact, he and his counterparts drive the polls with these words and phrases. Why can’t the Democrats gain traction with their own, like “Republican party of the rich” or “GOP protecting the bankers and insurance companies”?

Why? Because the Democrats’ Spinners are tone-deaf. There’s no harmony. Even with all their squabbling, Republicans are able to sing the same tune. The Democrats can’t carry one, or even perform from the same songbook.

And they can’t even get their act together on radio. Air America has bitten the dust on the left. Meanwhile, the extreme right has the rantings of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and their nutcase clones dutifully reciting the Frank Luntz trash-talk.

Of course, it should be noted that Luntz’s stuff, which is mainly performed from D.C., is scripted in L.A. Even he pulled out the nation’s capital and moved to Washington-West, Santa Monica. All of which proves that in today’s times politics is NOT local. Nothing is. And The Spinners are merely lip-syncing canned material that plays everywhere. The political hits keep on comin’.

Visit Mr. Franken’s website at www.bobfranken.tv.