The other day, Michelle Malkin urged readers against being distracted by the $165 million in taxpayer-backed bonuses for AIG employees, in light of the trillions in ongoing bailout costs, as well as the $1.5 trillion the Fed announced it is printing this week and dumping from helicopters.
Left unasked in all of this is how stories like the AIG bonuses catch fire in the public imagination. One answer is that the AIG bonus story is “made to stick” — simple, surprising, emotional etc. (okay, maybe not simple, but simple to sell). Storytelling is an effective method of getting messages to stick, one to which the Left frequently resorts.
Conversely, it is there in the Alinsky-ite formula of “Pick the target, Freeze it, Personalize it and Polarize it.” It is there in Joe Stalin’s observation that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” |
And a good point in the comments that Reagan was a master story teller and that was part of his success.
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