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By MATT BAI
Published: July 17, 2005
After last November's defeat, Democrats were like aviation investigators
sifting through twisted metal in a cornfield, struggling to posit
theories about the disaster all around them. Some put the onus on
John Kerry, saying he had never found an easily discernable message.
Others, including Kerry himself, wrote off the defeat to the unshakable
realities of wartime, when voters were supposedly less inclined to
jettison a sitting president. Liberal activists blamed mushy centrists.
Mushy centrists blamed Michael Moore. As the weeks passed, however,
at Washington dinner parties and in public post-mortems, one explanation
took hold not just among Washington insiders but among far-flung contributors,
activists and bloggers too: the problem wasn't the substance of the
party's agenda or its messenger as much as it was the Democrats' inability
to communicate coherently. They had allowed Republicans to control
the language of the debate, and that had been their undoing.
Even in their weakened state, Democrats resolved not to let it happen
again. And improbably, given their post-election gloom, they managed
twice in the months that followed to make good on that pledge. The
first instance was the skirmish over the plan that the president called
Social Security reform and that everybody else, by spring, was calling
a legislative disaster. The second test for Democrats was their defense
of the filibuster (the time-honored stalling tactic that prevents
the majority in the Senate from ending debate), which seemed at the
start a hopeless cause but ended in an unlikely stalemate. These victories
weren't easy to account for, coming as they did at a time when Republicans
seem to own just about everything in Washington but the first-place
Nationals. (And they're working on that.) During the first four years
of the Bush administration, after all, Democrats had railed just as
loudly against giveaways to the wealthy and energy lobbyists, and
all they had gotten for their trouble were more tax cuts and more
drilling. Something had changed in Washington -- but what?
Democrats thought they knew the answer. Even before the election,
a new political word had begun to take hold of the party, beginning
on the West Coast and spreading like a virus all the way to the inner
offices of the Capitol. That word was ''framing.'' Exactly what it
means to ''frame'' issues seems to depend on which Democrat you are
talking to, but everyone agrees that it has to do with choosing the
language to define a debate and, more important, with fitting individual
issues into the contexts of broader story lines. In the months after
the election, Democratic consultants and elected officials came to
sound like creative-writing teachers, holding forth on the importance
of metaphor and narrative.
Republicans, of course, were the ones who had always excelled at framing
controversial issues, having invented and popularized loaded phrases
like ''tax relief'' and ''partial-birth abortion'' and having achieved
a kind of Pravda-esque discipline for disseminating them. But now
Democrats said that they had learned to fight back. ''The Democrats
have finally reached a level of outrage with what Republicans were
doing to them with language,'' Geoff Garin, a leading Democratic pollster,
told me in May.
By the time Washington's attention turned to the Supreme Court earlier
this month, rejuvenated Democrats actually believed they had developed
the rhetorical skill, if it came to that, to thwart the president's
plans for the court. That a party so thoroughly relegated to minority
status might dictate the composition of the Supreme Court would seem
to mock the hard realities of history and mathematics, but that is
how much faith the Democrats now held in the power of a compelling
story. ''In a way, it feels like all the systemic improvements we've
made in communications strategy over the past few months have been
leading to this,'' Jim Jordan, one of the party's top strategists,
said a few days after Sandra Day O'Connor announced her resignation.
''This will be an extraordinarily sophisticated, well-orchestrated,
intense fight. And our having had some run-throughs over the past
few months will be extremely important.''
The most critical run-through for Democrats, in light of the test
ahead, was the defense of the filibuster, and for that reason, it
offers some useful clues to how Democrats may try to frame the Supreme
Court fight as well. The battle began late last fall, when Senate
Republicans, feeling pretty good about themselves, started making
noises about ramming judges through the Senate by stripping Democrats
of their ability to filibuster, a plan the Republican senators initially
called ''the nuclear option.'' The fight was nominally over Bush's
choices for the federal bench, but everyone knew it was in fact merely
a prelude to the battle over the Supreme Court; the only way for Democrats
to stop a confirmation vote would be to employ the filibuster.
In January, Geoff Garin conducted a confidential poll on judicial
nominations, paid for by a coalition of liberal advocacy groups. He
was looking for a story -- a frame -- for the filibuster that would
persuade voters that it should be preserved, and he tested four possible
narratives. Democratic politicians assumed that voters saw the filibuster
fight primarily as a campaign to stop radically conservative judges,
as they themselves did. But to their surprise, Garin found that making
the case on ideological grounds -- that is, that the filibuster prevented
the appointment of judges who would roll back civil rights -- was
the least effective approach. When, however, you told voters that
the filibuster had been around for over 200 years, that Republicans
were ''changing rules in the middle of the game'' and dismantling
the ''checks and balances'' that protected us against one-party rule,
almost half the voters strongly agreed, and 7 out of 10 were basically
persuaded. It became, for them, an issue of fairness.
Garin then convened focus groups and listened for clues about how
to make this case. He heard voters call the majority party ''arrogant.''
They said they feared ''abuse of power.'' This phrase struck Garin.
He realized many people had already developed deep suspicions about
Republicans in Washington. Garin shared his polling with a group of
Democratic senators that included Harry Reid, the minority leader.
Reid, in turn, assigned Stephanie Cutter, who was Kerry's spokeswoman
last year, to put together a campaign-style ''war room'' on the filibuster.
Cutter set up a strategy group, which included senior Senate aides,
Garin, the pollster Mark Mellman and Jim Margolis, one of the party's
top ad makers. She used Garin's research to create a series of talking
points intended to cast the filibuster as an American birthright every
bit as central to the Republic as Fourth of July fireworks. The talking
points began like this: ''Republicans are waging an unprecedented
power grab. They are changing the rules in the middle of the game
and attacking our historic system of checks and balances.'' They concluded,
''Democrats are committed to fighting this abuse of power.''
Cutter's war room began churning out mountains of news releases hammering
daily at the G.O.P.'s ''abuse of power.'' In an unusual show of discipline,
Democrats in the Senate and House carried laminated, pocket-size message
cards -- ''DEMOCRATS FIGHTING FOR DEMOCRACY, AGAINST ABUSE OF POWER,''
blared the headline at the top -- with the talking points on one side
and some helpful factoids about Bush's nominees on the other. During
an appearance on ''This Week With George Stephanopoulos'' in April,
Senator Charles Schumer of New York needed all of 30 seconds to invoke
the ''abuse of power'' theme -- twice.
By the time Reid took to the airwaves in late May, on the eve of what
looked to be a final showdown on the filibuster (''This abuse of power
is not what our founders intended,'' he told the camera solemnly),
the issue seemed pretty well defined in the public mind. In a typical
poll conducted by Time magazine, 59 percent of voters said they thought
the G.O.P. should be stopped from eliminating the filibuster. Perhaps
feeling the pressure, a group of seven Republicans joined with seven
Democrats in a last-minute compromise. Bill Frist, the Senate majority
leader, and his team, smarting from crucial defections, had no choice
but to back down from a vote. The truce meant that several of Bush's
judges would be confirmed quickly, but it marked a rare retreat for
Republicans and infuriated conservative activists, who knew that a
Supreme Court battle would now be messier than they had hoped.
For their part, Democrats were euphoric at having played the G.O.P.
to a draw. The facts of the filibuster fight hadn't necessarily favored
them; in reality, the constitutional principle of ''checks and balances''
on which the Democrats' case was based refers to the three branches
of government, not to some parliamentary procedure, and it was actually
the Democrats who had broken with Senate tradition by using the filibuster
to block an entire slate of judges. (''An irrelevancy beyond the pay
grade of the American voter,'' Garin retorted when I pointed this
out.) And yet it was their theory of the case, and not the Republicans',
that had won the argument. As Garin explained it, Republicans had
become ensnared in a faulty frame of their own making. The phrase
''nuclear option'' -- a term Frist and his colleagues had tried gamely,
but unsuccessfully, to lose -- had made Dr. Frist sound more like
Dr. Strangelove. ''It's a very evocative phrase,'' Garin said. ''It's
blowing up the Senate. It's having your finger on the button.''
Garin was gloating, but it was hard to blame him. On the eve of what
promises to be a historic debate over the direction of the nation's
highest court, Democrats on Capitol Hill seemed to have starkly reversed
the dynamic of last fall's election. Then, they had watched helplessly
as George W. Bush and his strategists methodically twisted John Kerry
into a hopeless tangle of contradictions and equivocations, using
words and imagery to bend him into a shape that hardly resembled the
war hero he had been. Now, Democrats believed, they had deciphered
the hieroglyphics of modern political debate that had so eluded them
in the campaign, and in doing so they had exacted some small measure
of revenge. As one of the party's senior Senate aides told me a few
days after the filibuster compromise was reached, ''We framed them
the way they framed Kerry.''
The father of framing is a man named George
Lakoff, and his spectacular
ascent over the last eight months in many ways tells the story of
where Democrats have been since the election. A year ago, Lakoff was
an obscure linguistics professor at Berkeley, renowned as one of the
great, if controversial, minds in cognitive science but largely unknown
outside of it. When he, like many liberals, became exasperated over
the drift of the Kerry campaign last summer -- ''I went to bed angry
every night,'' he told me -- Lakoff decided to bang out a short book
about politics and language, based on theories he had already published
with academic presses, that could serve as a kind of handbook for
Democratic activists. His agent couldn't find a publishing house that
wanted it. Lakoff ended up more or less giving it away to Chelsea
Green, a tiny liberal publisher in Vermont.
That book, ''Don't Think of an Elephant!'' is now in its eighth printing,
having sold nearly 200,000 copies, first through liberal word of mouth
and the blogosphere and then through reviews and the lecture circuit.
(On the eve of last fall's election, I came across a Democratic volunteer
in Ohio who was handing out a boxful of copies to her friends.) Lakoff
has emerged as one of the country's most coveted speakers among liberal
groups, up there with Howard Dean, who, as it happens, wrote the foreword
to ''Don't Think of an Elephant!'' Lakoff has a DVD titled ''How Democrats
and Progressives Can Win: Solutions From George Lakoff,'' and he recently
set up his own consulting company.
When I first met Lakoff in April, at a U.C.L.A. forum where he was
appearing with Arianna Huffington and the populist author Thomas Frank,
he told me that he had been receiving an average of eight speaking
invitations a day and that his e-mail account and his voice mailbox
had been full for months. ''I have a lot of trouble with this life,''
Lakoff confided wearily as we boarded a rental-car shuttle in Oakland
the following morning. He is a short and portly man with a professorial
beard, and his rumpled suits are a size too big. ''People say, 'Why
do you go speak to all these little groups?' It's because I love them.
I wish I could do them all.'' Not that most of Lakoff's engagements
are small. Recently, in what has become a fairly typical week for
him, Lakoff sold out auditoriums in Denver and Seattle.
How this came to be is a story about the unlikely intersection of
cognitive science and political tumult. It began nearly 40 years ago,
when, as a graduate student, Lakoff rebelled against his mentor, Noam
Chomsky, the most celebrated linguist of the century. The technical
basis of their argument, which for a time cleaved the linguistics
world in two, remains well beyond the intellectual reach of anyone
who actually had fun in college, but it was a personal and nasty disagreement,
and it basically went like this: Chomsky said that linguists should
concern themselves with discovering the universal rules of syntax,
which form the basis for language. Lakoff, on the other hand, theorized
that language was inherently linked to the workings of the mind --
to ''conceptual structures,'' as a linguist would put it -- and that
to understand language, you first had to study the way that each individual's
worldview and ideas informed his thought process.
Chomsky effectively won this debate, at least in the sense that most
American linguistics departments still teach it his way. (To this
day, the two men don't speak.) Undeterred, however, Lakoff and his
like-minded colleagues marched off and founded the field of cognitive
linguistics, which seeks to understand the nature of language -- how
we use it, why it is persuasive -- by exploring the largely unconscious
way in which the mind operates.
In the 1970's, Lakoff, verging into philosophy, became obsessed with
metaphors. As he explained it to me one day over lunch at a Berkeley
cafe, students of the mind, going back to Aristotle, had always viewed
metaphor simply as a device of language, a facile way of making a
point. Lakoff argued instead that metaphors were actually embedded
in the recesses of the mind, giving the brain a way to process abstract
ideas. In other words, a bad relationship reminds you on an unconscious
level of a cul-de-sac, because both are leading nowhere. This results
from what might be called a ''love as journey'' frame in the neural
pathways of your brain -- that is, you are more likely to relate to
the story of, say, a breakup if it is described to you with the imagery
of a journey. This might seem intuitive, but in 1980, when Lakoff
wrote ''Metaphors We Live By,'' it was considered fairly radical.
''For 2,500 years, nobody challenged Aristotle, even though he was
wrong,'' Lakoff told me, sipping from a goblet of pinot grape juice.
Humility is not his most obvious virtue.
Through his work on metaphors, Lakoff found an avenue into political
discourse. In a seminal 1996 book, ''Moral Politics,'' he asserted
that people relate to political ideologies, on an unconscious level,
through the metaphorical frame of a family. Conservative politicians,
Lakoff suggests, operate under the frame of a strict father, who lays
down inflexible rules and imbues his family with a strong moral order.
Liberals, on the other hand, are best understood through a frame of
the nurturant parent, who teaches his child to pursue personal happiness
and care for those around him. (The two models, Lakoff has said, are
personified by Arnold Schwarzenegger on one side and Oprah Winfrey
on the other.) Most voters, Lakoff suggests, carry some part of both
parental frames in the synapses of their brains; which model is ''activated''
-- that is, which they can better relate to -- depends on the language
that politicians use and the story that they tell.
The most compelling part of Lakoff's hypothesis is the notion that
in order to reach voters, all the individual issues of a political
debate must be tied together by some larger frame that feels familiar
to us. Lakoff suggests that voters respond to grand metaphors -- whether
it is the metaphor of a strict father or something else entirely --
as opposed to specific arguments, and that specific arguments only
resonate if they reinforce some grander metaphor. The best evidence
to support this idea can be found in the history of the 2004 presidential
campaign. From Day 1, Republicans tagged Kerry with a larger metaphor:
he was a flip-flopper, a Ted Kennedy-style liberal who tried to seem
centrist, forever bouncing erratically from one position to the other.
They made sure that virtually every comment they uttered about Kerry
during the campaign reminded voters, subtly or not, of this one central
theme. (The smartest ad of the campaign may have been the one that
showed Kerry windsurfing, expertly gliding back and forth, back and
forth.) Democrats, on the other hand, presented a litany of different
complaints about Bush, depending on the day and the backdrop; he was
a liar, a corporate stooge, a spoiled rich kid, a reckless warmonger.
But they never managed to tie them all into a single, unifying image
that voters could associate with the president. As a result, none
of them stuck. Bush was attacked. Kerry was framed.
According to Lakoff, Republicans are skilled at using loaded language,
along with constant repetition, to play into the frames in our unconscious
minds. Take one of his favorite examples, the phrase ''tax relief.''
It presumes, Lakoff points out, that we are being oppressed by taxes
and that we need to be liberated from them. It fits into a familiar
frame of persecution, and when such a phrase, repeated over time,
enters the everyday lexicon, it biases the debate in favor of conservatives.
If Democrats start to talk about their own ''tax relief'' plan, Lakoff
says, they have conceded the point that taxes are somehow an unfair
burden rather than making the case that they are an investment in
the common good. The argument is lost before it begins.
Lakoff informed his political theories by studying the work of Frank
Luntz, the Republican pollster who helped Newt Gingrich formulate
the Contract With America in 1994. To Lakoff and his followers, Luntz
is the very embodiment of Republican deception. His private memos,
many of which fell into the hands of Democrats, explain why. In one
recent memo, titled ''The 14 Words Never to Use,'' Luntz urged conservatives
to restrict themselves to phrases from what he calls, grandly, the
''New American Lexicon.'' Thus, a smart Republican, in Luntz's view,
never advocates ''drilling for oil''; he prefers ''exploring for energy.''
He should never criticize the ''government,'' which cleans our streets
and pays our firemen; he should attack ''Washington,'' with its ceaseless
thirst for taxes and regulations. ''We should never use the word outsourcing,''
Luntz wrote, ''because we will then be asked to defend or end the
practice of allowing companies to ship American jobs overseas.''
In Lakoff's view, not only does Luntz's language twist the facts of
his agenda but it also renders facts meaningless by actually reprogramming,
through long-term repetition, the neural networks inside our brains.
And this is where Lakoff's vision gets a little disturbing. According
to Lakoff, Democrats have been wrong to assume that people are rational
actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says,
cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond
to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds,
and if the facts don't fit the frame, our brains simply reject them.
Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be ''activated''
by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once
the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown
at us.
This notion of ''activating'' unconscious thought sounded like something
out of ''The Manchurian Candidate'' (''Raymond, why don't you pass
the time by playing a little solitaire?''), and I asked Lakoff if
he was suggesting that Americans voted for conservatives because they
had been brainwashed.
''Absolutely not,'' he answered, shaking his head.
But hadn't he just said that Republicans had somehow managed to rewire
people's brains?
''That's true, but that's different from brainwashing, and it's a
very important thing,'' he said. ''Brainwashing has to do with physical
control, capturing people and giving them messages over and over under
conditions of physical deprivation or torture. What conservatives
have done is not brainwashing in this way. They've done something
that's perfectly legal. What they've done is find ways to set their
frames into words over many years and have them repeated over and
over again and have everybody say it the same way and get their journalists
to repeat them, until they became part of normal English.''
I asked Lakoff how he himself had avoided being reprogrammed by these
stealth Republican words. ''Because I'm a linguist, I recognize them,''
he said. Even to him, this sounded a little too neat, and a moment
later he admitted that he, too, had fallen prey to conservative frames
now and then. ''Occasionally,'' he said with a shrug, ''I've caught
myself.''
In May 2003, Senator Byron Dorgan, the North Dakota
Democrat, read ''Moral Politics'' and took Lakoff to a Democratic
Senate retreat in Cambridge, Md. Lakoff had never met a senator before.
''I knew what they were up against, even if they didn't know what
they were up against,'' Lakoff says. ''They were just besieged. My
heart went out to them.''
Lakoff gave a presentation, and in the parlance of comedians, he killed.
Hillary Clinton invited him to dinner. Tom Daschle, then the minority
leader, asked Lakoff if he would rejoin the senators a few days later,
during their next caucus meeting at the Capitol, so that he could
offer advice about the tax plan they were working on. Lakoff readily
agreed, even though he had come East without so much as a jacket or
tie. ''I went in there, and it was just this beautiful thing,'' he
told me, recalling the caucus meeting. ''All these people I'd just
met applauded. They gave me hugs. It was the most amazing thing.''
Of course, the idea that language and narrative matter in politics
shouldn't really have come as a revelation to Washington Democrats.
Bill Clinton had been an intuitive master of framing. As far back
as 1992, Clinton's image of Americans who ''worked hard and played
by the rules,'' for instance, had perfectly evoked the metaphor of
society as a contest that relied on fairness. And yet despite this,
Democrats in Congress were remarkably slow to grasp this dimension
of political combat. Having ruled Capitol Hill pretty comfortably
for most of the past 60 years, Democrats had never had much reason
to think about calibrating their language in order to sell their ideas.
''I can describe, and I've always been able to describe, what Republicans
stand for in eight words, and the eight words are lower taxes, less
government, strong defense and family values,'' Dorgan, who runs the
Democratic Policy Committee in the Senate, told me recently. ''We
Democrats, if you ask us about one piece of that, we can meander for
5 or 10 minutes in order to describe who we are and what we stand
for. And frankly, it just doesn't compete very well. I'm not talking
about the policies. I'm talking about the language.''
Dorgan has become the caucus's chief proponent of framing theory.
''I think getting some help from some people who really understand
how to frame some of these issues is long overdue,'' he says, which
is why he invited Lakoff back to talk to his colleagues after the
2004 election. Meanwhile, over on the House side, George Miller, a
Democrat from the San Francisco area, met Lakoff through a contributor
and offered to distribute copies of ''Don't Think of an Elephant!''
to every member of the caucus. The thin paperback became as ubiquitous
among Democrats in the Capitol as Mao's Little Red Book once was in
the Forbidden City. ''The framing was perfect for us, because we were
just arriving in an unscientific way at what Lakoff was arriving at
in a scientific way,'' says Representative Nancy Pelosi, the minority
leader in the House.
In fact, though Lakoff started the framing discussion, he was by no
means the only outside expert whom Democrats were consulting about
language. To the contrary, a small industry had blossomed. Even before
the 2004 election, Pelosi had enlisted John Cullinane, a software
entrepreneur in Boston, to help the caucus develop the wording for
a vision statement. Cullinane spent an hour and a half with members
of the caucus one afternoon, while his aide scrawled suggestions on
a white board. Among his recommendations was that they come up with
a list that had six parts -- either six principles or six values or
six ideas. When we spoke, I asked Cullinane why it had to be six.
''Seven's too many,'' he replied. ''Five's too few.''
Then there was Richard Yanowitch, a Silicon Valley executive and party
donor, who worked with Senate Democrats, providing what he calls ''private-sector
type marketing.'' Last December, at Dorgan's request, Reid put Yanowitch
in charge of a ''messaging project'' to help devise new language for
the party. Another adviser who became a frequent guest on the Hill
after the election was Jim Wallis, a left-leaning evangelical minister
who wrote ''God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left
Doesn't Get it.'' In January, after addressing a Senate caucus retreat
at the Kennedy Center, Wallis wrote a memo to the Democratic Policy
Committee titled ''Budgets Are Moral Documents,'' in which he laid
out his argument that Democrats needed to ''reframe'' the budget in
spiritual terms.
What all of these new advisers meant by ''framing,'' exactly, and
whether their concepts bore much resemblance to Lakoff's complex cognitive
theories wasn't really clear. The word had quickly become something
of a catchall, a handy term to describe anything having to do with
changing the party's image through some new combination of language.
So admired were these outside experts that they could hardly be counted
as outsiders anymore. In May, for instance, Roger Altman, Clinton's
former deputy treasury secretary, held a dinner for the former president
to discuss the party's message with about 15 of its most elite and
influential thinkers, including James Carville, Paul Begala, the pollster
Mark J. Penn and John Podesta, president of the Center for American
Progress, the liberal think tank. Lakoff sat at Clinton's table; Wallis,
at the next one over.
Bush's plan to reform Social Security provided, last winter, the first
test of the Democrats' new focus on language and narrative. In retrospect,
it shows both the limits of framing and, perhaps, the real reason
that Democrats have managed to stymie critical pieces of the Bush
agenda.
Almost as soon as Bush signaled his intention to overhaul the existing
program, Democrats in Congress, enamored of Lakoff's theories, embarked
on a search for a compelling story line. Yanowitch's highly secretive
messaging group met for months on the topic and came up with two ''sample
narratives'' that Democrats might use. The first, titled ''Privatization:
A Gamble You Can't Afford to Take,'' stressed the insecurity of middle-class
families and compared Bush's plan to a roll of the dice. The second,
''The Magical World of Privatization,'' spun out a metaphor that centered
on Bush as ''an old-fashioned traveling salesman, with a cart full
of magic elixirs and cure-all tonics.'' Some of this imagery found
its way into the dialogue, for better or worse; Pelosi and other House
members, never too proud to put their dignity above the greater good,
held an outdoor news conference standing next to a stack of giant
dice.
As they would later with the filibuster fight and with the Supreme
Court, Senate Democrats, under Reid's direction, set up a war room
and a strategy group, this one run by Jim Messina, chief of staff
for Senator Max Baucus of Montana. Eschewing all the lofty metaphors,
the war room stuck to two simple ideas: Bush's plan relied on privatizing
the most popular government benefit in America, and it amounted to
benefit cuts coupled with long-term borrowing. In addition to keeping
members focused on their talking points, Messina's team and its allies
-- led by two liberal interest groups, MoveOn.org and Campaign for
America's Future, with help from the all-powerful AARP -- also had
to stop senators and congressmen from offering compromise plans that
might drive a wedge into the caucus. In this way, Democrats had decided
to follow the example of Bill Kristol, the Republican strategist who
had urged his party (shrewdly, as it turned out) to refrain from proposing
any alternatives to Clinton's doomed health-care plan in 1993. ''The
minute we introduce a plan, we have to solve the problem'' is how
one senior Democratic aide explained it to me. ''We are the minority
party. It's not our job to fix things.''
As it happened, this was where Lakoff himself proved most helpful.
In a meeting with House Democrats, some of whom were considering their
own versions of private accounts, he urged them to hold firm against
Bush's plan. ''I pointed out that as soon as you allow them to get
a privatization frame in people's minds about retirement and Social
Security, it becomes an unintelligible difference,'' he recalled.
''People will not be able to tell the difference between your plan
and the other guy's.'' Referring to Pelosi, he added, ''Nancy was
saying the same thing, and so they stopped.'' As Democrats stood firm,
Bush's idea for private accounts, which was never all that popular
with voters to begin with, seemed to slowly lose altitude. A Gallup
tracking poll conducted for CNN and USA Today showed the president's
plan losing support, from 40 percent of voters in January to 33 percent
in April.
Bush had tried to recast his proposed ''private accounts'' as ''personal
accounts'' after it became clear to both sides that privatization,
as a concept, frightened voters. But as they did on the filibuster,
Democrats had managed to trap the president in his own linguistic
box. ''We branded them with privatization, and they can't sell that
brand anywhere,'' Pelosi bragged when I spoke with her in May. ''It's
down to, like, 29 percent or something. At the beginning of this debate,
voters were saying that the president was a president who had new
ideas. Now he's a guy who wants to cut my benefits.'' At this, Pelosi
laughed loudly.
What had Democrats learned about framing? In the end, the success
of the Social Security effort -- and, for that matter, the filibuster
campaign -- may have had something to do with language or metaphor,
but it probably had more to do with the elusive virtue of party discipline.
Pelosi explained it to me this way: for years, the party's leaders
had tried to get restless Democrats to stay ''on message,'' to stop
freelancing their own rogue proposals and to continue reading from
the designated talking points even after it got excruciatingly boring
to do so. Consultants like Garin and Margolis had been saying the
same thing, but Democratic congressmen, skeptical of the in-crowd
of D.C. strategists, had begun to tune them out. ''Listening to people
inside Washington did not produce any victories,'' Pelosi said.
But now there were people from outside Washington -- experts from
the worlds of academia and Silicon Valley -- who were making the same
case. 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?
You might say that Lakoff and the others managed to give the old concept
of message discipline a new, more persuasive frame -- and that frame
was called ''framing.'' ''The framing validates what we're trying
to say to them,'' Pelosi said. ''You have a Berkeley professor saying,
'This is how the mind works; this is how people perceive language;
this is how you have to be organized in your presentation.' It gives
me much more leverage with my members.''
On a recent morning in his Virginia office, seated next to one of
those one-way glass walls that you find only in the offices of cops
and pollsters, Frank Luntz explained why George Lakoff and his framing
theory were leading the Democratic Party astray. In recent years,
Luntz's penchant for publicity -- he is a frequent commentator on
cable television -- has earned him no small amount of scorn and ridicule
from fellow Republicans; that Lakoff's little book had suddenly elevated
Luntz to a kind of mythic villain seemed to amuse him. ''In some ways,
the Democrats appreciate me more than the Republicans do,'' Luntz,
43, told me with a trace of self-pity.
The problem with Lakoff, Luntz said, is that the professor's ideology
seemed to be driving his science. Luntz, after all, has never made
for a terribly convincing conservative ideologue. (During our conversation,
he volunteered that the man he admired most was the actor Peter Sellers,
for his ability to disappear into whatever role he was given.) Luntz
sees Lakoff, by contrast, as a doctrinaire liberal who believes viscerally
that if Democrats are losing, it has to be because of the words they
use rather than the substance of the argument they make. 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.
Luntz presented this data to chamber officials on a slide with the
headline ''George Lakoff Is Wrong!!''
''He deserves a lot of credit,'' Luntz said of Lakoff. ''He's one
of the very few guys who understands the limits of liberal language.
What he doesn't understand is that there are also limits on liberal
philosophy. They think that if they change all the words, it'll make
a difference. Won't happen.'' (Last month, after we talked, Luntz
challenged Lakoff, through me, to a ''word-off'' in which each man
would try to ''move'' a roomful of 30 swing voters. Lakoff responded
by counterchallenging Luntz to an ''on-the-spot conceptual analysis.''
Since I had no idea what either of them was talking about, I let it
go.)
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.''
Lakoff doesn't have much patience for criticism (he's a tenured professor,
after all), and he keeps at his disposal a seemingly bottomless arsenal
of linguistic and philosophical theories with which to refute such
attacks. In response to Cooper's article and another in The Atlantic,
by Joshua Green, Lakoff fired off a nine-page draft response to a
long e-mail list of friends and journalists in which he accused Cooper
and Green of living in the ''rationalist-materialist paradigm'' (that's
RAM for short), an outdated belief system that mistakenly assumes
the rationality of other human beings. He also pointed out that they
had cleverly, but unsuccessfully, tried to trap him in the ''guru
frame,'' a story line about one individual who passes himself off
as having all the answers to other people's problems.
Lakoff has some valid points. In his writing, at least, he explains
framing in a way that is more intellectually complex than his critics
have admitted. His essential insight into politics -- that voters
make their decisions based on larger frames rather than on the sum
of a candidate's positions -- is hard to refute. And Lakoff does say
in ''Don't Think of an Elephant!'' albeit very briefly, that Democrats
need not just new language but also new thought; he told me the party
suffers from ''hypocognition,'' or a lack of ideas. What's more, when
it comes to the language itself, Lakoff has repeatedly written that
the process of reframing American political thought will take years,
if not decades, to achieve. He does not suggest in his writing that
a few catchy slogans can turn the political order on its head by the
next election.
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.
The question here is whether Lakoff purposely twists
his own academic theories to better suit his partisan audience or
whether his followers are simply hearing what they want to hear and
ignoring the rest. When I first met Lakoff in Los Angeles, he made
it clear, without any prompting from me, that he was exasperated by
the dumbing down of his intricate ideas. He had just been the main
attraction at a dinner with Hollywood liberals, and he despaired that
all they had wanted from him were quick fixes to long-term problems.
''They all just want to know the magic words,'' he told me. ''I say:
'You don't understand, there aren't any magic words. It's about ideas.'
But all everyone wants to know is: 'What three words can we use? How
do we win the next election?' They don't get it.''
And yet Lakoff had spoken for 12 minutes and then answered questions
at the U.C.L.A. forum with Huffington and Frank, and not once had
he even implied that the Democratic problem hadn't been entirely
caused by Republicans or that it couldn't be entirely fixed by language.
The more time I spent with Lakoff, in fact, the more I began to suspect
that his complaint about ''magic words'' was another example of framing;
in this case, Lakoff was consciously framing himself in his conversations
with me as a helpless academic whose theories were being misused.
The reality seemed to be that Lakoff was enjoying his sudden fame
and popularity too much to bother his followers with troubling details
-- like, say, the notion that their problem might be bigger than
mere words or that it might take decades to establish new political
frames. After all, Lakoff is selling out theaters and making more
money than he ever thought possible; in 2006, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
will publish his next book, on how conservatives have changed the
meaning of the word ''freedom.'' At one point, Lakoff told me he
would like to appear as the host of a regular TV segment on framing.
Peter Teague, who oversees environmental programs at the liberal Nathan
Cummings Foundation, was Lakoff's most important patron in the days
after he wrote ''Moral Politics.'' When I spoke with Teague about
Lakoff a few months ago, he sounded a little depressed. ''There's
a cartoon version of Lakoff out there, and everyone's responding to
the cartoon,'' Teague said. ''It's not particularly useful. As much
as we talk about having a real dialogue and a deeper discussion, we
really end up having a very superficial conversation.
''I keep saying to George, 'You're reinforcing the very things you're
fighting against.'''
I asked Lakoff, during an afternoon walk across the Berkeley campus,
if he felt at all complicit in the superficiality that Teague was
describing. ''I do,'' he said thoughtfully. ''It's a complicated problem.
Of course it bothers me. But this is just Stage 1, and there are stages
of misunderstanding. People have to travel a path of understanding.''
His celebrity may yet prove to be his undoing. When I visited him
in Berkeley in April, Lakoff, who until then had done all his work
with Washington Democrats on a volunteer basis, had submitted a proposal
to leaders in the House for a consulting contract. Although the details
were closely guarded, it had something to do with a project to use
focus groups to study narrative. In May, House Democrats decided not
to finalize the deal after some members and senior aides wondered
out loud if Lakoff mania had gotten out of hand. Lakoff, it seemed,
was experiencing a common Washington phenomenon to which Frank Luntz
could easily relate: the more famous an adviser gets, the more politicians
begin to suspect him of trying to further himself at their expense.
A friend of Lakoff's suggested to me that we were witnessing the beginning
of an all-too-familiar frame: the meteoric rise and dizzying fall
of a political sensation.
If that were true, it seemed, then the whole notion of framing might
just be a passing craze, like some post-election macarena. It certainly
sounded like that might be the case when I visited Harry Reid just
before Memorial Day. 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. ''I'm not a person who dwells on all these people
getting together and spending hours and days coming up with the right
words. I know that my staff thinks, 'Oh, why don't you tell him about
all this great work we've done on framing?' But honestly, that's not
it.''
Reid credited the ''team effort'' and message discipline of the caucus
for its victory on the filibuster issue. At one point, when I asked
Reid, a former boxer, about Lakoff's theories, he seemed to equate
them with psychotherapy. ''I'm not going to waste a lot of time sitting
in a room talking about how my parents weren't good to me or something
like that,'' Reid said firmly. ''I'm not involved in any of that gimmickry.''
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.''
I suggested that maybe she and Reid had different views on the value
of framing as a strategy. ''Oh, no,'' she said emphatically, drawing
out the last word. ''He's been a leader on it! The two of us know
better than anyone what's at stake here. In fact, he sort of initiated
our abuse-of-power frame.
''It was hard to know what to make of these conflicting
conversations. Perhaps Reid feared that if he admitted to caring about
framing, he would be framed as one of those clueless Democrats seeking
easy answers. Perhaps Pelosi was covering for him by suggesting they
were unified when in fact they weren't. But it seemed more likely
that the disconnect between the party's two elected leaders reflected
a broader confusion among Democrats about what they actually mean
by framing. There is no doubt that having a central theme and repeating
it like robots has made Democrats a respectable opposition force in
Congress. To Pelosi and a lot of other Democrats, that is the miracle
of this thing called framing. To Reid, it is just an intuitive part
of politics, and he doesn't need some professor to give it a name
or tell him that Democrats haven't been very good at it.
Whatever you call it, this kind of message discipline will be a crucial
piece of what will most likely become, in the weeks ahead, a Democratic
push to block Bush's designs on the Supreme Court. In order to stop
a nominee, Democrats will have to frame the filibuster battle in the
public arena all over again, and this time, they will have to convince
voters that it is Bush's specific choice for the nation's highest
court -- and not simply a slate of faceless judges -- who represents
the reckless arrogance of Republican rule. Even in the hours after
O'Connor made her announcement, you could see in Democratic responses
the first stirrings of this new campaign. ''If the president abuses
his power and nominates someone who threatens to roll back the rights
and freedoms of the American people,'' said Ted Kennedy, lifting lines
directly from Garin's latest polling memo, ''then the American people
will insist that we oppose that nominee, and we intend to do so.''
Meanwhile, Susan McCue, Reid's powerful chief of staff, offered me
a preview of the theory to come: ''It goes beyond 'abuse of power.'
It's about arrogance, irresponsibility, being out of touch and catering
to a narrow, narrow slice of their ideological constituency at the
expense of the vast majority of Americans.''
It is not inconceivable that such an argument could sway public opinion;
Americans are congenitally disposed to distrust whichever party holds
power. 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, which promised 10 major legislative acts that were,
at the time, quite provocative. They included reforming welfare, slashing
budget deficits, imposing harsher criminal penalties and cutting taxes
on small businesses. 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. (''Make health care
affordable for every American,'' ''Invest in a fully funded education
system that gives every child the skills to succeed'' and so on.)
Pelosi is proud of the document, which -- to be fair -- she notes
is just a first step toward repackaging the party's agenda. But if
you had to pick an unconscious metaphor to attach to it, it would
probably be a cotton ball.
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. Should we spend more or less on the military? Should
government regulate industry or leave it unfettered? Lakoff's formulation,
on the other hand, amounts to a vague collection of the least objectionable
ideas in American life. Who out there wants to make the case against
prosperity and a better future? Who doesn't want an effective government?
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.
Matt Bai, a contributing writer, covers national politics for the
magazine. He is working on a book about the future of the Democrats.
Copyright 2005; The New York Times Company
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