News Intelligence Analysis
I Could Kiss The New York Times
by RenaRF
Mon Jul 18th, 2005 at 11:09:35 PDT
(Cross-Posted at My Left Wing)
God I love my new job. I'm sure you're wondering what that has to do with kissing The New York Time, so I'll explain a bit.
I discovered on my very first day at my new job that my boss is a HUGE George Lakoff fan. For those who just read the name and said "who?", I am going to urge you... beg you... implore and beseech you to get your hands on a copy of Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant. It is, as far as I'm concerned, required reading for liberals and progressives.
This morning my boss brought me her copy of the Sunday New York Times Magazine. The front cover is the lead into their featured story on framing. Hence my desire to kiss The New York Times.
More after the flip.
RenaRF's diary
This is a long article. Very long, actually. Give yourself some
time and be sure you read all of it. The link can be found here
(sign-in required).
For many of you in the liberal and progressive blogging community, the first part of this diary is old hat. Matt Bai, the article's author, talks about the 2004 election cycle and the dawning recognition on the part of Democrats that they needed to communicate better in order to win. They needed to draw from the Republicans' successful and winning strategy. They needed to embrace the framing of issues and stop simply standing there, baffled, when the facts did not, in fact, speak for themselves. From the article:
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.
Outrage indeed, and not a moment too soon. Speaking on a strictly personal level, I've never believed that Democrats don't have good ideas. They just really, really need help with message discipline and continuity of messaging. In short, they had to beat the Republicans at their own game or forever stand there, scratching their heads, wondering why the truth and facts didn't seem to make a whit of difference.
I remember being glued to the TV during the "nuclear option" days. I was off work (I like to call it a sabbatical, but let's face it - I was unemployed) and sucking up C-SPAN like a junkie. As the nuclear option rhetoric was heating up, I saw Joe Biden say something from the Senate floor that made me stand up and shout at the TV, "FINALLY!! They're framing issues!!". Only the cats heard me but I swear it happened. I even remember feeling like a bit of a goober for yelling to a room devoid of another human, but hey - I was excited. What Biden said, essentially, was that killing the fillibuster was a blatant "abuse of power" by the other side. From The New York Times article:
Cutter's [former Kerry spokeswoman] 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.
During that period you couldn't fall down without landing on a Democrat politician, pundit or spokesperson shouting "abuse of power"! It was awesome. I was thrilled. Framing works. If it didn't, how could you possible explain that a party who controlled neither the White House nor either house of the Legislature managed to come away with what most people believe was a HUGE win, given the circumstances?? As Geoff Garin, advocate of framing and Democratic pollster pointed out,
"We framed them the way they framed Kerry."
Quite an apt statement, I think. Like many, I was frustrated during the '04 election cycle with the constant feeling that we were back on our heels - we weren't winning the war of words and no matter what we did, GWB commanded the language which drove the perception of Kerry. Lakoff saw it, too. The article summarized this so perfectly that I have to include an excerpt here:
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.
Oh my goodness. So true. That explains my seeming over-reaction when seeing framing techniques used by prominent Democrats. I think it's high time we serve back what we were forced to eat.
The next clear framing attempt I saw came when Sandra Day O'Connor announced her intent to resign. I didn't realize before reading the article, however, that the attempt to frame a Supreme Court nomination had been underway since May. Within hours of O'Connor's resignation, leading Democrats were out framing, conceptually, the replacement as being a "moderate conservative". They used those words exactly and expounded upon O'Connor's wonderful service and exemplary jurisprudence. It was and has been a smart move. Said the article:
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.''
Now. I have been arguing quite loudly all across the blogs for the need to frame, frame frame. Framing is not a replacement for good ideas. There is only so much you can frame an idea that is universally unappealing. The soundness of the idea themselves are a given in my mind but are, by themselves, completely useless if not framed properly. Lakoff and others clearly think the same way and I was thrilled to see, in the article, that Senators such as Byron Dorgan (D, ND) and Representative Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) are leading the charge to get accurate framing advice and put it into practice.
There are, however, framing detractors. Frank Luntz says of Lakoff:
Luntz sees Lakoff... 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.
First and foremost, consider the source. Second, to me, that's essentially the same argument as saying that putting lipstick on a pig won't make it a supermodel. As I said above, no amount of framing will cause a completely unpopular idea to take popular root (case in point: rather than conceptually frame Iraq, the Administration just lied about it). There are, however, so many areas where the message is solid, the ideas and principles and values are uniquely Democratic and the message doesn't get through due to the lack of a proper frame in which to posit it.
Now is a good time to reiterate a few of Lakoff's key approaches and 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 [my emphasis added], 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.
Years if not decades. If/when you read his book, Lakoff spends just enough time detailing how and when the Republicans started framing issues and underscores their agility with the tactic as well as their head start.
Finally, from Byron Dorgan comes one of the key points I think should be underscored:
''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.''
I had felt myself, in recent days and months, becoming really, really discouraged becuase Democrats seemed to be falling back into the same ineffective tactics. As a wise person once said, "The definition of insanity is doing things the way you've always done them and expecting different results". This article encouraged me more than I can say. It let me know that there is a plan, that framing techniques are being embraced, and that we're on our way to at least begin fighting more effectively. I needed that article.
That's why I could kiss The New York Times.
I strongly urge folks to take the time to read the whole article. Also, if you haven't read Lakoff's book, read it. It has been one of the most influentual books I've read in the last decade.
Thanks for reading.
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