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Home | Opinion Exchange

Mark Bowden: The lost art of influence

Want your views to be heard? Stop screaming. Start convincing.

By MARK BOWDEN , Philadelphia Inquirer

Last update: October 22, 2009 - 8:48 PM

We are living in a time when honest discussion is often drowned out by the noise of partisan cheerleading.

More and more, cable TV shows, blogs, radio stations, websites and magazines exist to openly advocate a political agenda, ideology, candidate or product.

As an old reporter who has done his share of railing against this trend, I thought today I might try going with the flow, and offer some advice to the legions of advocates who are fast replacing my profession.

So listen up, you partisan bloggers, angry mass e-mailers and assorted media pontificators: If your aim is to do something more than to draw attention to yourself and increase your ratings, if your goal is to actually move the world in your desired direction, I have a new word for you: "Persuasion."

It is one thing to give a speech before a cheering crowd of supporters, to blog or broadcast to an eager audience of the like-minded, and quite another to address someone who disagrees with you and actually change his mind. The former is what we get from partisan mouthpieces, a plague of our age, and the latter is something of a lost art. The former is easy; the latter is hard.

Hard, but not hopeless.

My first encounter with the basics of this lost art was a man of my father's generation who had begun his working life as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. I told him that sounded like a very difficult and unpleasant job, knocking on doors and trying to sell something most people already had.

"Not at all," he told me. "It was a great job. Where's the challenge of standing around the appliance section in a department store, selling to people who have already come in looking to buy? The challenge was turning 'no' into 'yes.'"

He offered quick lessons in salesmanship that I later found spelled out in greater detail in the disciplines of classical rhetoric. The door-to-door pitch my old friend memorized contained the basics. Rule One is to be likable, presentable and pleasant. Say something nice, tell a joke or a self-deprecating story, put your potential customer at ease, let them know you appreciate their point of view.

In political argument this means acknowledging up front whatever truth or strength there is in an opposing point of view. Smart people disagree with you for a host of reasons, some of them good. Graciously give ground where you can, such as, for Republican diehards, "You know, I'd have to agree that the Bush administration poorly handled that Katrina flooding," or, say, a prochoice advocate in the abortion debate, who might concede at the outset that ending a pregnancy is a graver matter than having a tooth pulled.

The worst thing you can do is begin with an insult, as do so many of the e-mails I receive after stating an unpopular opinion, those that begin with, to use printable terms, "You are a blithering idiot." You might as well stop writing at that point, because no one is going to bother sticking around for the rest of your pitch. The door has just slammed in your face.

The salesman next would make his pitch. That was the easy part. Next came the inevitable objections: "I just bought a vacuum cleaner," or "I can't afford it." My old friend's company had done an amazingly good job, he said, of preparing him for every conceivable obstacle to the sale.

"It was very rare for a customer to offer a reason not to buy that I could not answer," he said. "If they already had a vacuum cleaner, this one was better. If they couldn't afford it, we had easy payment plans. You name it, whatever objection they raised, I was ready."

This is the hardest lesson for advocates to learn. To persuade, you must anticipate and refute objections. It means exposing your convictions in advance to thorough, skeptical scrutiny.

Being persuasive is hard, because it demands you consider that you might be wrong. To refute opposing points of view capably (and winningly) you must first really hear opposing points of view.

There's a catch here. Sometimes you might find that after really "hearing an opposing viewpoint," you can't refute it. Then you must do the unthinkable:

Change your mind.

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