The past few weeks I’ve been reading “What Americans Really Want…Really” by Frank Luntz, which I picked up using one of my many Borders gift cards I received for Christmas. It’s supposed to be a distillation of what famous Republican message man Frank Luntz has found about what Americans want out of all aspects of life, from his many, many focus groups. The book started off good, but by the end I found myself somewhat disappointed.
I can’t remember where I first heard of the book, but I do know I came across it on the internet and it looked interesting. I thought I would check it out despite the fact that Luntz is a big part of the Republican machine, since he is an expert when it comes to these focus groups. This led to the first disappointment with the book: not that he is a Republican, but because he starts off pretending that his book is going to be unbiased despite his political leanings. It unsurprisingly turns out not to be completely on the level (I didn’t realize that only Democrats had bad public love affairs!), and the false promise not to be rang hollow. I’ve long been a believer in the folly of being objective: everybody is biased, and the best thing to do is simply acknowledge it. I know Luntz is conservative, I don’t need an unfulfilled promise to read his book.
The books starts out well enough. The first chapter is about what Americans do in their daily lives, which I found to be interesting since I am definitely not a typical American. Few Americans commute to work via mass transit, for example; few watch as little TV as I do, and so forth. For businesses looking to connect with their customers, there is some good information. Ditto for what Americans really want, which is usually more money. I’d go with time, again because I’m not the typical American who would like more goods. The information about what people want in their jobs isn’t too earth-shattering, but still pretty good.
It begins to go downhill when it comes to two major issues, politics and religion. The section on politics is pretty vague when it comes to solutions, whereas I was hoping for more concrete policy answers based on what the majority of Americans really want. Given the fact that people in this country are typically wildly inconsistent when it comes to politics, though (such as valuing a balanced budget without willing to cut funding for things like education, the environment, and defense) it’s probably not Luntz’s fault that the answers to all of our political problems can’t be found in focus groups. Similarly, the section on religion was vague and had the least amount of new information in my opinion.
The book then moves onto a section on the youth of America, and while I don’t quite fall into the Millennial Generation, I’m close enough that much of it was familiar: although sexting didn’t exist even when I was in college, I’m one of those people for whom giving up the internet would hurt a lot more than giving up TV. Because I can readily identify with people in the Millennial Generation, I didn’t find anything that was terribly new and shocking, but for people older than myself it could be of use.
Something I couldn’t identify as much with was the section on what Americans want out of retirement, which was probably the most depressing part of the book. True, given the recent economic crisis and the resulting devastation to people’s retirement portfolios and plans, it would be hard to write an upbeat section on retirement, but the sense of desperation and defeat that many people express when they voluntarily or involuntarily cease working is somewhat hard to read. Like the section on politics, this section has no good answers simply because there aren’t any. We’ll just have to deal as we go along.
The book then ends with a list of nine priorities that people really want. I won’t get into details so as not to spoil the surprise, but given Luntz’s political leanings you can probably guess what a few of them are. I will say, though, that his slights against atheists, intentional or not, rubbed me the wrong way: he makes it sound that non-belief is a path that leads to certain unhappiness. I’d like to remind him that correlation does not imply causation, and that there are plenty of non-believers such as myself that lead happy, fulfilling lives.
Overall, I’d give this book a B-. It has information about the vast majority of people in this country I am not like that I found to be interesting and possibly useful, but on a few occasions his own personal beliefs got in the way when there was really no need. Like I said, had he not led off professing ideological neutrality in this book it would have been more forgivable, but that kind of statement means being held to a higher standard. That said, I’m sure most people would be able to get something useful out of this book.