Go to Original
The Framing Wars
By Matt Bai
The New York Times
Sunday 17 July 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.
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