Matt Bai's much-touted article on professor/framing guru George Lakoff came out in the New York Times Magazine this week. I have to admit that I was hoping for more new material (see my previous posts on Lakoff), but Bai does carry the ball forward in a few areas:
1) The disturbing ubiquity of Lakoff among Democrats -- Bai writes that Don't Think of an Elephant! became "as ubiquitous among Democrats in the Capitol as Mao's Little Red Book once was in the Forbidden City." He also has a novel explanation for the Lakoff obsession:
What the framing experts had been telling Democrats on the Hill, aside from all this arcane stuff about narratives and neural science, was that they needed to stay unified and repeat the same few words and phrases over and over again. And these "outsiders" had what Reid and Pelosi and their legion of highly paid consultants did not: the patina of scientific credibility. Culturally, this made perfect sense. If you wanted Republican lawmakers to buy into a program, you brought in a guy like Frank Luntz, an unapologetically partisan pollster who dressed like the head of the College Republicans. If you wanted Democrats to pay attention, who better to do the job than an egghead from Berkeley with an armful of impenetrable journal studies on the workings of the brain?
2) Lakoff's ideas about framing aren't very good, as the Republican pollster Frank Luntz points out:
What Lakoff didn't realize, Luntz said, was that poll-tested phrases like "tax relief" were successful only because they reflected the values of voters to begin with; no one could sell ideas like higher taxes and more government to the American voter, no matter how they were framed. To prove it, Luntz, as part of his recent polling for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, specifically tested some of Lakoff's proposed language on taxation. He said he found that even when voters were reminded of the government's need to invest in education, health care, national security and retirement security, 66 percent of them said the United States overtaxed its citizenry and only 14 percent said we were undertaxed.
3) Lakoff is taking advantage of the need for a simplistic explanation for Democrats' electoral weakness and allowing himself to be framed as the answer. Kenneth Baer, who previously criticized Lakoff in the Washington Monthly, tells Bai that "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.'" Bai shows that, while Lakoff has described reframing as a long-term process, Democrats are interpreting him to be offering a tactical edge that can be obtained without rethinking old ideas:
The message Lakoff's adherents seem to take away from their personal meetings with him, however, is decidedly more simplistic. When I asked Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the minority whip and one of Lakoff's strongest supporters, whether Lakoff had talked to the caucus about this void of new ideas in the party, Durbin didn't hesitate. ''He doesn't ask us to change our views or change our philosophy,'' Durbin said. ''He tells us that we have to recommunicate.'' In fact, Durbin said he now understood, as a result of Lakoff's work, that the Republicans have triumphed ''by repackaging old ideas in all new wrapping,'' the implication being that this was not a war of ideas at all, but a contest of language.
4) Harry Reid, unlike Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi, is smart enough not to be talking to reporters about how he hopes to manipulate people using frames:
Reid waved away the suggestion that language had much to do with the party's recent successes. ''If you want my honest opinion, and I know you do, I think people make too much out of that,'' he said... Reid credited the ''team effort'' and message discipline of the caucus for its victory on the filibuster issue...
After leaving Reid, I walked across the Capitol to see Nancy Pelosi, who told a different story. She assured me that Lakoff's ideas had "forever changed" the way Democratic House members thought about politics. "He has taken people here to a place, whether you agree or disagree with his particular frame, where they know there has to be a frame,'' she told me. "They all agree without any question that you don't speak on Republican terms. You don't think of an elephant."
5) As Bai finally drives home, the Democrats still need ideas -- frames aren't a substitute for them:
The larger question -- too large, perhaps, for most Democrats to want to consider at the moment -- is whether they can do more with language and narrative than simply snipe at Bush's latest initiative or sink his nominees. Here, the Republican example may be instructive. In 1994, Republican lawmakers, having heeded Bill Kristol's advice and refused to engage in the health-care debate, found themselves in a position similar to where Democrats are now; they had weakened the president and spiked his trademark proposal, and they knew from Luntz's polling that the public harbored serious reservations about the Democratic majority in Congress. What they did next changed the course of American politics. Rather than continue merely to deflect Clinton's agenda, Republicans came up with their own, the Contract With America... Those 10 items, taken as a whole, encapsulated a rigid conservative philosophy that had been taking shape for 30 years -- and that would define politics at the end of the 20th century.
By contrast, consider the declaration that House Democrats produced after their session with John Cullinane, the branding expert, last fall. The pamphlet is titled ''The House Democrats' New Partnership for America's Future: Six Core Values for a Strong and Secure Middle Class.'' Under each of the six values -- ''prosperity, national security, fairness, opportunity, community and accountability'' -- is a wish list of vague notions and familiar policy ideas...
Consider, too, George Lakoff's own answer to the Republican mantra. He sums up the Republican message as ''strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government and family values,'' and in ''Don't Think of an Elephant!'' he proposes some Democratic alternatives: ''Stronger America, broad prosperity, better future, effective government and mutual responsibility.'' Look at the differences between the two. The Republican version is an argument, a series of philosophical assertions that require voters to make concrete choices about the direction of the country... Lakoff's formulation, on the other hand, amounts to a vague collection of the least objectionable ideas in American life...
What all these middling generalities suggest, perhaps, is that Democrats are still unwilling to put their more concrete convictions about the country into words, either because they don't know what those convictions are or because they lack confidence in the notion that voters can be persuaded to embrace them. Either way, this is where the power of language meets its outer limit. The right words can frame an argument, but they will never stand in its place.
What no one is talking about, though, are the implications of an arms race in the systematic manipulation of political language. This quickly leads to a war of buzzwords and nasty frames, such as denouncing the other side as practicing "Enronomics" or comparing them to the Taliban or terrorists. And in the long term, it eats away at the very possibility of rational debate. Already, an official within the Bush administration has spoken about its efforts to create its own reality. The conclusion of All the President's Spin argues that this dynamic can be reversed, but the success of Bush's disinformation campaign from 2000-2004 and the Democratic embrace of framing since the election are making me increasingly pessimistic.
Comments