Take PR 101. Never leave the other side in control of the narrative. If you play by left branding rules, you will lose.

You realize, of course, that this idea that the connotation matters more than denotation is a "science" that, historically speaking, has generally been associated with the left: a association which, if I considered myself a leftist, I would find quite insulting. Those sorts of attitudes are a big part of what drove me away from the left in my late teens, in fact. (the rest was, well, mostly that I was making a lot of money; it's hard not to be a libertarian at 19; way more so when you are making lots of money.)

Barthes was an interesting writer, sure, and he brought up some interesting points, but like most leftists of his era, (ok, to be fair, just about everyone of his era.) he vastly underestimated the complexity of the human brain.

The problem with relying too heavily on semiotics is that it's pretty obvious; and it's really easy to sound like you are trying too hard to manipulate your audience; something most of us find pretty offensive. The other problem is that the connotation of a particular word varies quite a lot on the cultural background of the speaker; so while semiotics can work to whip up people who are like you and agree with you, it's unlikely to work well when speaking to a group of people from diverse backgrounds.

That's a reasonable strategy if turnout is fixed and you have a unimodal distribution of political views.

With, e.g., a bimodal distribution and turnout affected by enthusiasm, you actually want to pick a candidate as close as possible to the peak on your side of the distribution rather than a centrist.

While either of those models is ridiculously simplified, there is lots of reason to believe that the real distribution of political views and real electoral behavior is more like the second than the first.

And if its like the second but those on the far extreme, even if smaller than those near the local peak, have more extreme enthusiasm swings based on candidate suitability -- then it may make sense actually chose candidates more extreme than the near peak.

The counterexample here is Obama. Aside from his skin color, he's about as moderate and unexciting as you can get. My takeaway from the "change" bit was "Hey, I'm not associated in any way with GWB; hell, I don't look anything like him. and I sound reasonable and educated" Which, of course, after 8 years of GWB, sounded absolutely amazing. Nearly every vote for Obama in 2008 was actually a vote against GWB. My take is that the democrats could have run a literal empty suit and it would have won by a landslide.

You remember when they gave Obama the peace prize for not being GWB? The whole world was in love with him, not for what he was or what he did, but for who he wasn't.

Now, if I'm right, I think that if the republicans, say, ran Romney instead of McCain in 2008? they would have had a much better chance; not because McCain is fundamentally incompetent or unreasonable or anything like that, but because he smells a lot more like GWB than Romney does. I mean, from what I read, McCain is an actual war hero, and was heroic in ways that even a pacifist would admire, at great personal cost, and it's not right to compare him to a chicken hawk like GWB, but the truth of the matter is that, in the minds of most voters, the two are related.

Sure, I think Romney probably still would have lost, just because he was a republican and so was GWB, but he would have had a better shot at it than McCain did.

There was a lot of talk about disappointment with Obama, with big expectations that he never delivered on... but I think that was mostly made-up by his enemies. I mean, he wasn't amazing or anything, except compared to his predecessor, but he did a fine job of sounding reasonable and educated. He wasn't perfect, but he didn't massively screw anything up.

I think the fact that Obama won in 2012 supports my argument that most people see him as basically competent. Not bad. A reasonable moderate who did a moderately reasonable job.

Of course, you could also make a different argument about 2012 (and about the counterfactual run in 2008) Romney is not the sort that the republican base would get excited about. He's as centrist as Obama is. I can see myself voting for someone like Romney. (I'd take Obama over Romney, sure, but we could do worse than Romney as President. A lot worse.) And he's a Mormon... a religion that many Christians don't consider to be christian at all. You can make a very good argument, using your theory, that Romney lost because the GOP base wasn't excited and just stayed home.

My basic understanding of Obama's reelection in 2012 is that the liberal vote wasn't ready to admit how simply they had been conned by some clever marketing in 2008.

I think the set of people who voted for him that also later felt deceived by his policies is pretty small. I think that the talk of this feeling of betrayal and deception is largely manufactured by his political opponents; it's something I hear a lot from my friends on the right, and something I hear very little from my friends on the left.

The truth of the matter, as I see it, is that while he's not one of our best presidents, he's basically competent. He does his job, and after GWB, I think most people see a guy who can do the job with a basic degree of competence as pretty great.