The benefits of political messaging are fairly clear: to persuade your audience to support your proposal, you need to talk to them; the more effectively you do this, the more support you get.

Perhaps all persuasion is politics: every time I want to persuade someone to agree with me, maybe I will do better if I accept that I'm a political actor.

I certainly think this will be true in understanding and addressing Digital Poverty: for one thing, we need a better name for it.

The West Wing and the Poor Tax

A lot of recurring West Wing characters are expert speech writers, highly skilled in political messaging and persuasion, as well as in beautiful writing.

In the West Wing, Season 6, Episode 12 "365 Days", we address how the messaging for a proposal can have an impact on its uptake and acceptance: the Earned Income Tax Credit is a Government-proposed programme that would alleviate childhood poverty in some way. With a Democratic White House but a Republican Congress, minority Congressional Democrats are unwilling to get behind it because of political ramifications in their home states.

The players here are:

Charlie Young, a politically inexperienced but very bright White House staffer who played some part in creating the programme;

Annabeth Schott, a technically unqualified but very effective media consultant who ended up as White House Deputy Press Secretary; and

Leo McGarry, ex-White House Chief of staff, brought back in after heart attack recovery to act as general consultant.

The actual proposed programme here is almost irrelevant; what we're looking at here is how the messaging is used to help push this through an unwilling Congress. In these exchanges, nobody proposes changing the underlying programme itself - all we're talking about is the words used to talk about it.

Ultimately, the EITC becomes the Poor Tax. There is probably a general principle here, but the instance of the principle in this case is that the original name is dull, and the name they end up using is something that is hard to argue against.

Don't just rename it - reinvent it

This means in particular that they are not merely renaming a concept, but in fact choosing a new concept and naming that; the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Poor Tax sound very much as if they are opposite: a vote in favour of the tax credit matches a vote against the tax.

Where does this leave us with Digital Poverty? How do we persuade the digital tech sector, Parliamentarians and others to get behind this?

Thoughts welcome.

Transcript

Full relevant dialogues, along with timings from the version I watched, are below; there may be transcription errors, but they're mine if so.

12:18

Annabeth: "I know what it is. I just has a dull name."

Charlie: "Earned Income Tax Credit; it's the one Government programme that actually sounds like what it is."

Annabeth: "Exactly! D-U-L-L."

[Irrelevant Annabeth-Carol aside]

Charlie: "It was the highlight of the President's address last night."

Annabeth: "If by 'highlight' you mean a chance for viewers to wonder whether they're gonna have sex that night or plan what they're gonna wear in the morning."

[Irrelevant Annabeth-Carol aide]

Charlie: "It's important; 36 million Americans live below the poverty line, which is a million more than last year."

Annabeth: "Let's shout that out from the roof tops, why don't we?"

Charlie: "We blame the Republicans."

Annabeth: "Oh, there's a fresh angle!"

[Irrelevant Charlie/Ed-Larry aside]

Charlie: "No Government programme would do more to lift children out of poverty that the EITC."

Annabeth: "Oh God, I thought the name was dull; the acronym is worse! You've been working on this for two months, and you can't find a catchier handle? 'Marriage Penalty'. 'Death Tax'. Now that you remember!"

21:25

Charlie: "Hey, Leo."

Leo: "Hey."

Charlie: "What're you watching?"

Leo: "Old State of the Unions."

Charlie: "What for?"

Leo: "Just curious. How you doing?"

Charlie: "A little whiplashed. Last night [the State of the Union] was such a high."

Leo: "There is a staffer sitting at the adult table!"

Charlie: "We watched it at home. My sister threw me a party cos I got a line in the speech."

Leo: "Which one?"

Charlie: "'We must help those working hardest to help themselves.'"

Leo [smiling]: "I see your fingerprints all over it!"

Charlie: "Only EITC's already in trouble."

Leo: "[Hence] the whiplash?"

Charlie: "Yeah."

Leo "House Dems?"

Charlie: "They're defeatist! And Annabeth doesn't like its name"

Leo: "She's not wrong. I don't get excited when I hear 'EITC'; do you?"

Charlie: "Maybe if it had a more memorable name, it'd be easier to fight for?"

Leo: nods head …

Charlie: "I think it we could define it more clearly as a tax cut… so a vote against it would be seen as raising taxes on the working poor … [thinking] I don't see how you could [easily] oppose it."

27:30

Charlie: "You were right."

Annabeth: "About so much! To which specific or category of things are you presently referring?"

Charlie: "The Earned Income Tax Credit needs a better name."

Annabeth: "To brand it."

Charlie: "Not to something zipper or catchier."

Annabeth: "No, something to help you fight for it."

Charlie: "To make it harder to fight against it."

[aside]

Annabeth: "'Work Fair' is taken. 'Work Aid'?"

Charlie: "Sounds like a handout. … 'Employment Incentive'?"

Annabeth: "Oh, no, no, that's terrible. 'Work Tax'?"

Charlie: "It's all a work tax. 'Poverty Tax'?"

Annabeth: "Mmm, that's closer!"

Charlie: "'Poor Tax'. It's simple. Direct."

Annabeth: "'Poor Tax'? It's good."

[aside]

Charlie: "Hard to argue on the floor of Congress to institute a Poor Tax."

Annabeth: "Yeah."

Charlie: "Thanks!"