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"FacebookPinterest\n\nWednesday night, as the Twittersphere was in meltdown mode over comments Hilary Rosen had just made on CNN, I was blissfully unaware and, in fact, engaging in a nice conversation with the powerful Washington figure who serves as an informal adviser to the White House and major Democratic figures and causes. We were both attending the D.C. premiere of Armando Iannucci's new HBO show, Veep, which bows this Sunday.\n\nThe show is a dead-on satirical send-up of the inanity of how Washington really works. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays the sitting vice president, a position that carries with it very little actual power (and the show masterfully exploits this indignity) but also the promise and burden of having to, at a moment's notice, become the nuclear button pusher. Several of the characters subsist on diets consisting mainly of the tattered reputations of others and the ability to navigate the in-group/out-group tensions that are heightened by the gravity of being in close proximity to the West Wing.\n\nAs the sun rose on Thursday morning, Hilary Rosen found herself at the center of American political debate. The fact that Mitt Romney's campaign reacted so quickly to her comments, as well as the subsequent and lightning fast throwing Rosen under the bus from Democrats, illustrates two basic facts about politics today. One: you win when you use unexpected events to change the parameters of the public discussion. Two: you sacrifice logic, common sense, and sometimes even your scruples to do so.\n\n I've covered politics for about 11 years now, and I've escaped the cloister of cynicism by paying attention to what campaigns and elections do well: they synthesize mass amounts of information and help a rather disinterested public make critical choices about the future of the country. Using the same mechanisms, many of these same political actors can exploit human cognitive biases, creating drama and division, and nudging the media panopticon to pay attention to the most insane and irrelevant issues of the day. Veep keenly mines these manipulative techniques for comedy. And Rosen's story emplifies several of them.\n\nThe first problem is outrage magnification. Let's say that you believe that Rosen's comments that stay-at-home-of-five Ann Romney had \"never worked a day in her life,\" even construed the way she intended to construe them, violated a sensible boundary that exists in the real world. When boundaries are violated, we tend to want to see the violator punished, or reproached. Fair enough. Fairer still is the deep stakes that liberals and conservatives have in the debate about women, gender roles and the economy. Here's the thing: without the help of the conservative universe, no one would have noticed. There would be no controversy. There would be nothing.\n\nBut Mitt Romney, by his own admission, needs women to like him. And therefore, he needs to find ways to prove that he's on the side of women. And his campaign, along with the Republican National Committee and the conservative tribe, has been looking for a way to force Democrats to defend their own views of women in a way that shifts the spotlight from Romney's record to something else. To turn Rosen's remarks into something graver, the level of outrage had to be magnified, artificially. The story can't be \"Democratic consultant says something dumb on CNN.\" It has to be \"Democratic consultant says something so outrageous, something so harmful, that we sober politicians are going to spend our entire today DEMANDING punishment, and justice, for you, Jane Q. Citizen.\" To get from nothing to everything requires the manufacturing of outrage, which is very easily magnified by the tribal instincts of activists, which, in turn, is easily broadcast by social media.\n\nProblem two: Hilary Rosen is one person. And she is not formally affiliated with the president. And there's no reason to think that Barack Obama supports or even takes notice of her views on women. The solution is to fabricate a correspondence between Rosen's views on women and the president's views about women. This is easy. Once again, tribalist instincts take over. Rosen is a powerful Democrat who, gosh, visited the White House more times than Leon Panetta did (she actually did not, but whatever), and therefore must always be and is always speaking directly for the president and channeling his views. The umbrella of his authority and prestige includes her. Present this set of data points to your average person and they'll fill in the blanks, legitimizing the association out of habit. Why? Because we are the most sociable of mammals; we need to be able to make distinctions quickly, and we need to judge people quickly. On average, this serves us well. But political consultants deliberately use this blind spot of ours to generate links that often do not reflect the real value of a relationship between two people.\n\nHere are two other, morally dubious ways of mountain-from-mole-hill making:\n\nFirst, use words that trigger automatic thoughts of very bad things, like \"war.\" Democrats like to say that Republicans have declared \"war\" on women. Republicans are now saying that Democrats have declared \"war\" on women who choose to stay home. Andrew Exum, a veteran of a real war, Afghanistan, Tweeted that \"it's a great thing that war as a phenomenon has disappeared so that we can have metaphorical wars on women, Christmas, religion, etc.\" No one will stop using this rhetorical technique because it comes so naturally, but at least we ought to recognize how manipulative in can be.\n\nSecond\u2014and this is the tactic the media is especially taken with\u2014employ guilt by association, first, and imply that everyone who has a remote association with the guilty party must condemn what the person said (to the satisfaction of the opposing side), and that if they don't, they must endorse the views. I used to have a Google alert set for \"failed to condemn\" or \"refuses to condemn\" until it littered my inbox. Any Democrat who fails to condemn Hilary Rosen must (for some unstated reason) share her views.\n\nAt the end of the day, though, all of these cognitive manipulations boil down to the motive force of politics, and that is tribalism: if the other side does it, it must be bad. And political consultants are paid to create as much separation between the tribes as possible.\n\nThere are skillful psychological manipulators on both sides of America's two islands, and elections often degenerate into cycles upon cycles of outrage signification. This is perhaps fortunate, in that it keeps parity in the system. It is unfortunate because it is an artificial construct designed to bring out the worst in people.\n\nRead more on Death Race 2012\n\n\"Obama Still Thinks Kanye is a Jackass, But Talented\"\n\n[\"Mitt Romney Is The New Al Gore\"\n\n](http://www.gq.com/news-politics/blogs/death-race/2012/04/mitt-romney-is-the-new-al-gore.html)\n\n\"The End of Empathy: Walter Kirn on The Race Between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney\"\n\nFollow @GQPolitics on Twitter for more updates on the campaign trail"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/the-outrage-industry-hilary-rosen-versus-ann-romney>