Very aware of framing and the meaning thereof. We have let the GOP control the language for ages, since Gingrich, really. You seem to think I am unaware of a lot of things.
My problem is not Obama, but those surrounding him. There is no room in the world of most of them for people who want to stand up for Democrats' traditional beliefs. That is my fear.
You said:
"Base your assertions on something a little more solid than a literal interpretation of campaign slogans. If anything, he effectively re-framed the same party platforms we have always had quite effectively. Elections and legislation is not purely about the actors in any administration, its a lot more complicated than yall are making it."
I want you to read the words of his own Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, when he and Bruce Reed nearly single-handedly destroyed George Lakoff's credibility in DC. Lakoff was talking about reframing, and he was very good at it until Rahm got through with him.
From The PlanNote that they totally misrepresent Lakoff's framing views, and then they stick the knife in.
But Lakoff is flat-out wrong to suggest that Democrats are losing just because Republicans know all the right words. His favorite example is that conservatives learned to call tax cuts "tax relief." He's right that Republicans make a fetish out of using the most misleading, Orwellian words they can find. But let's be honest: Bush didn't manage to pass his tax cuts because he called them tax relief. (Most of the time, he called them tax cuts.) Bush got the chance to pass his disastrous tax cuts because Democrats were too slow to offer real tax reform proposals of our own. The tax debate illustrates what Al From, who founded the Democratic Leadership Council, has astutely observed: In a country with three self-identified conservatives for every two self-identified liberals, when neither side's agenda is sufficiently compelling, Republicans usually win by default.
The real danger of Lakoff 's analysis is that it reinforces Democrats' favorite excuse -- that Republicans have succeeded by pulling the wool over Americans' eyes, and that we'll start winning as soon as we learn the same dark arts.
Some Democrats want to believe that we can stand in front of the mirror and practice the words to win America back. "Ever wonder how the radical right has been able to convince average Americans to repeatedly vote against their own interests?" Ariana Huffington says in plugging Lakoff 's book, "It's the framing, stupid!" One glowing reviewer declared, "While Democrats were campaigning as if policy mattered, Republicans were waging their campaign on a far more fundamental, and more powerful, psychological level."
Lakoff insists that when arguing against the other side, the main principle of framing is "Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame -- and it won't be the frame you want." What he doesn't realize, however, is that the whole notion that words matter more than reason is the Republicans' frame, and it's the wrong one for the country's future.
If we believed in conspiracy theories, we'd think that only Karl Rove could dream up the idea of a linguistics professor from Berkeley urging Democrats to "practice reframing every day, on every issue." Lakoff even sounds like Rove when he says (approvingly!) that Republicans offer the "strict father" worldview and Democrats the "nurturant parent." He describes 9/11 in phallic terms: "Towers are symbols of phallic power, and their collapse reinforces the idea of loss of power. Another kind of phallic imagery was more central here: the planes penetrating the towers with a plume of heat, and the Pentagon, a vaginal image from the air, penetrated by the plane as missile." With frames like that, who needs enemies?
Really?
And that's just his chief of staff. Here are the words of the head of the think tank forming the policy for the party, the one of which Rahm and Hillary are top leaders...and which also counts as members these others on staff.....Napolitano, Summers, Salazar, Kirk, and Vilsack. Plus others.
Al From's words very recently....words of advice to Obama.
Keeping the promise of Post Partisanship Obama, like President Bill Clinton in 1993, will come into office with substantial Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
That’s good. But ironically, it could make it more difficult for him to keep the central promise that propelled him to the White House.
That promise is to change Washington, govern bigger than his party and forge a post-partisan political era. He pledged to tackle the country’s most pressing economic, domestic and security challenges by delivering a new kind of politics.
With the superpartisan Bush White House finally history and swelled majorities in both Houses, Democratic constituencies will have plenty of pent-up demands, and some Democrats in Congress may be tempted to engage in political payback.
I can sympathize with those desires, but Obama needs to resist them, for the success of his presidency — and, ultimately, his success in building a lasting political majority — will depend not on whether he satisfies the insiders in Washington but on whether he improves the lives of ordinary Americans who put their trust in him.
Al From is actually urging him to not pay too much attention to his own party. How about that?
Also read the words of
our new party chairman on women's rights, civil unions for gays, and labor. Does he really believe those things? Or did he win on pretending to believe them. It's an important distinction.
Our Democrats have caved in on Iraq, FISA immunity, bankruptcy reform, and emergency contraception for military women...as well as other rights for women.
Where does it stop? Where do we draw the line?
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