Framing

NYT - If George Lakoff had his way, the Kerry campaign would have run a commercial attacking the "baby tax."

Dr. Lakoff, a Berkeley linguistics professor and Kerry campaign adviser, wanted to divide the interest on the national debt by the number of Americans born each year. The result, $85,000 per newborn, say, would have been handed to a baby in the form of a bill, and the baby would have started to cry. That, Dr. Lakoff says, "frames" the issue "in a way people can understand."

"Framing" is a hot topic among political junkies and in the blogo-sphere right now, thanks to Dr. Lakoff. In "Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate," his surprise best seller, Dr. Lakoff argues that Republicans have been winning elections because they have been better than Democrats at framing issues - from taxes, to abortion, to national security - in ways that resonate with core American values.

Texas Observor - Frame Wars Luntz and Lackoff represent the opposing sides in the political war to shape ideas. "As long as liberals and progressives insist that having the facts on their side is all that matters, they are doomed to impotence. The next move for the left in the frame war is to accept that it’s okay to cherry-pick reality as long as it conforms to a frame that’s morally acceptable. According to Lakoff, we already do it every day."

From Berkeley an essay of Kerry getting framing half-right.

Those of us on the progressive left, whatever that might mean these days, played our part in the drama like good soldiers, though we had our doubts from the beginning. We contributed our brains to designing elaborate web systems for optimizing the campaign, our bodies to get-out-the-vote drives in Nevada and Florida and Oregon and Ohio, and our money to the Democratic National Committee and America Coming Together. It doesn’t seem to have made a whole lot of difference, because the good grey candidate of the Democratic Leadership Council was never able to get the attention of the electorate with his cautious middle-of-the-road positions.

Jim Hightower has often been quoted as saying that there’s not much in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos, and the timid centrism of the DLC has now given us two successive armadillo tickets. Would’a, could’a, should’a, but what if Kerry had launched his campaign by saying vigorously, “I was wrong about Iraq, but now I’ve changed my mind?”

Kerry was fooled about Vietnam, though he later repented. He was fooled again on Iraq, and he never fully repented. How about, just for variety, a Democratic candidate who catches on early to what’s going on and is not timid about saying so? It’s entirely possible that Howard Dean might have won this election if he hadn’t been sandbagged by the DLC and its media allies. Me-too Democrats fighting for the middle of the road will just continue to be blindsided by the hard right’s shifting compass of phony “moral values.”