The Framing ThingInteresting
post over at Donklephant, the group weblog for centrists, based on
this article in the NY Times by Matt Bai. Basically, the article is about George Lakoff, a linguist from Berkeley, who's selling the idea that Democrats don't need to change their message so much as change the words they deliver it with.
Luntz's dismissiveness is what you might expect to hear about Lakoff from a Republican, of course. But the same complaint has surfaced with growing ferocity among skeptical Democrats and in magazines like The Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic. An antiframing backlash has emerged, and while it is, on the surface, an argument about Lakoff and his theories, it is clearly also a debate about whether the party lacks only for language or whether it needs a fresher agenda. Lakoff's detractors say that it is he who resembles the traveling elixir salesman, peddling comforting answers at a time when desperate Democrats should be admitting some hard truths about their failure to generate new ideas. ''Every election defeat has a charlatan, some guy who shows up and says, 'Hey, I marketed the lava lamp, and I can market Democratic politics,''' says Kenneth Baer, a former White House speechwriter who wrote an early article attacking Lakoff's ideas in The Washington Monthly. ''At its most basic, it represents the Democratic desire to find a messiah.''
In a devastating critique in The Atlantic's April issue, Marc Cooper, a contributing editor at The Nation, skillfully ridiculed Lakoff as the new progressive icon. ''Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, 'Don't Think of an Elephant!' is a feel-good, self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can't believe how their common-sense message has been misunderstood by eternally deceived masses,'' Cooper wrote. In Lakoff's view, he continued, American voters are ''redneck, chain-smoking, baby-slapping Christers desperately in need of some gender-free nurturing and political counseling by organic-gardening enthusiasts from Berkeley.'' Yes, that seems to be the theme of Lakoff's work, that Americans are too dumb to understand that the Democrats are better for them economically, that they are tricked into voting for Republicans because the GOP does a better job of "framing" the issues. And it's not as if Lakoff was the first to make this point; the book,
What's the Matter with Kansas? makes the same argument according to this
Amazon review:
The largely blue collar citizens of Kansas can be counted upon to be a "red" state in any election, voting solidly Republican and possessing a deep animosity toward the left. This, according to author Thomas Frank, is a pretty self-defeating phenomenon, given that the policies of the Republican Party benefit the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the average worker.Now of course a lot of us would argue that Democratic policies do not benefit the average worker, and that this may be the central flaw in the Democrats' argument. The Democrats seem to have the idea that the way to victory is to tell the working class, "Look, we'll only raise your taxes by $100 a month, but we'll raise them on the rich guy much more, so you'll come out ahead!", and so they end up scratching their heads when the working class respond, "I'd rather keep that $100 a month."
When a political party is mired in a losing streak like the Democrats, there are three basic responses they can make:
1. There's something wrong with our ideas; we need to move towards the center.
2. There's something wrong with our ideas; we need to move away from the center to energize our base.
3. There's nothing wrong with our ideas; the voters are idiots.
Lakoff (and Frank) take door #3. This is an appealing notion, because it doesn't require the Democrats to abandon any of their principles, just to change a few words around. It's not risking complete disaster, like #2, and it doesn't anger the base like #1. But will it recapture the middle? I have grave doubts, as does the
original poster at Donklephant:
Sure, some ideas are going to be brought up again and again because (I think) they’re good ideas (universal health care?), but you can’t just “frame” everything and think that’s going to work.
