Leadership Quote by Frank Luntz

The slickness here is the whole point: it pretends to be a naive request for clarity while quietly rewriting the battlefield. By framing the issue as a matter of interchangeable labels, Luntz nudges listeners away from physics and toward semantics, where persuasion is cheaper than policy. The question format is tactical. Questions don’t have to prove anything; they just have to plant doubt, invite “reasonable” debate, and slow the moral clock.

The subtext is that the problem is less settled than scientists claim, or at least less urgent than the phrase “global warming” makes it feel. “Warming” is vivid, directional, and scary; it suggests a one-way ramp to consequences. “Climate change” sounds managerial, like a syllabus topic or a bureaucratic box to tick. Luntz understood that voters don’t process data as data; they process it as story, mood, and risk. This line is about laundering urgency into ambiguity.

Context matters because Luntz is not a meteorologist stumbling over terminology; he’s a message engineer associated with Republican communications, famous for coaching politicians on language that reduces political liability. In the early 2000s, shifting the preferred term from “global warming” to “climate change” wasn’t a pedantic correction; it was reputational triage for a party caught between industry allies and a public slowly noticing the weather.

The brilliance, and the cynicism, is that it makes the listener feel savvy for questioning the words, while the atmosphere keeps doing what it’s doing.