“The problem is that he has a frame of his own to sell, a model that may have some explanatory power but which he has stretched far beyond its limits. The difference between left and right, he argues, is best understood as a split between two concepts of the family. Conservatives follow a "strict father" morality; liberals favor the "nurturing parent" approach. Both project their preferred ideal onto the nation.... [but] For now, we're left with an elaborate variation on the ancient libertarian joke that Republicans want the government to be your father, Democrats want the government to be your mother, and libertarians want to treat you as an adult.... Except that Lakoff's frame doesn't have room for the third option, or for any variations of the left or right that call the parental metaphor into question.” -- Jesse Walker
Lewis, Frame This! | Safire, Inside the Republican Brain |
The Man Who Framed Himself
How George Lakoff got trapped in his own metaphors
Reason (January 12, 2005) Jesse Walker

Like potholes after a snowstorm, when Democrats lose an election the linguist George Lakoff will surface to explain the defeat. Between the recall of California Governor Gray Davis and the failure of the Kerry campaign, he has had countless opportunities to make the case that Democrats must rethink how they frame their issues. Language matters, he argues; everyday phrases can come bundled with unspoken assumptions.

That much is common sense, and should be obvious to anyone who has spent time unpacking the rhetoric of politicians and the press. The best recent illustration I've seen was sketched by Steve Koppelman, a liberal blogger with a libertarian streak, as the Bush-Kerry race entered the home stretch:

If someone owns a large home on a big piece of land with horse stables, a guest house and servants' quarters, and doesn't use the land for farming, what do you call it?
What if it's in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania?
What if it's in Texas?
Now try this: Every time you see or hear a reference to George Bush's "ranch," substitute the word "estate." When you see a reference to John and Theresa Heinz Kerry's "estates" in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, substitute the word "ranch."

Lakoff's favorite example is a little less impressive. He doesn't like the phrase "tax relief," he writes in his 2004 booklet Don't Think of an Elephant!, because "When the word tax is added to relief, the result is a metaphor: Taxation is an affliction." When Democrats use language like that, he warns, they're "accepting the conservative frame. The conservatives had set a trap: The words drew you into their worldview." Lakoff himself seems to have embraced a key component of the Republican worldview: that the Democrats are the party of taxes.

But the problem with Lakoff isn't merely that he's politically tone-deaf, nor that he's unwilling to confront the possibility that there's such a thing as a bad tax. He is hardly the only Democrat to suffer those two debilities. The problem is that he has a frame of his own to sell, a model that may have some explanatory power but which he has stretched far beyond its limits. The difference between left and right, he argues, is best understood as a split between two concepts of the family. Conservatives follow a "strict father" morality; liberals favor the "nurturing parent" approach. Both project their preferred ideal onto the nation.

In his 1996 book Moral Politics, Lakoff presents the details of these rival visions. He also acknowledges some of the complications that set in when you remember that left and right are not monolithic blocks. These are "radial" categories, he writes, in which a "central model...gives rise to systematic variations that radiate out from the center like the spokes of a wheel." He then sets about cramming outlooks into one wheel or the other—a surprisingly easy task, since he doesn't clutter his research with interviews or other sociological investigations, sticking instead to reading some representative texts. (Or even less: His brief comments on the militias are based only on unspecified "reports" that "former KKK members have been joining the militia movement.") Racial nationalists of the left are ignored. Feminists are sorted into piles of left and right. Libertarians are shoved under the "strict father" ethos, even though many prefer arguments that reflect Lakoff's "nurturing parent" values—and quite a few don't really fit either category at all. If there's one thing libertarians ought to agree on, after all, it's that nations and families are not analogous.

It would be interesting to see some real research on the relationship between political and family values, and perhaps some day some admirer of Lakoff will confirm, refute, or complicate the correlations the linguist has extrapolated from James Dobson's childrearing manuals. For now, we're left with an elaborate variation on the ancient libertarian joke that Republicans want the government to be your father, Democrats want the government to be your mother, and libertarians want to treat you as an adult. Except that Lakoff's frame doesn't have room for the third option, or for any variations of the left or right that call the parental metaphor into question. (This may be related to his apparent inability to reconcile social justice with low taxes.)

If Lakoff's frame is limited, then so are his rhetorical skills. One reason to understand an opponent's frame, after all, is not to overthrow it but to hijack it—to make a case for your policies in the language of the opposition. The liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias, for example, has suggested that opponents of Bush's Social Security plan should reject the phrase "private accounts" in favor of "forced savings," a clever bit of rhetorical ju-jitsu that might have traction with conservatives skeptical of government requirements. (Of course, "forced savings" describes the status quo as well, except perhaps the "savings" part.) Lakoff himself notes that conservatives have learned to dress up unpopular proposals in liberal lingo, but he doesn't seem interested in teaching transvestism to the left.

Instead he proposes a full-fledged reorientation of the language, a project he is somewhat ill-suited to lead. Near the end of Don't Think of an Elephant!, he writes that conservatives "have figured out their own values, principles, and directions, and have gotten them out in the public mind so effectively over the past thirty years that they can evoke them all in a ten-word philosophy: Strong Defense, Free Markets, Lower Taxes, Smaller Government, Family Values." He proposes a similar ten-word philosophy for liberals: "Stronger America, Broad Prosperity, Better Future, Effective Government, Mutual Responsibility." Maybe I'm just missing the frame, but that sure sounds like mush to me.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).
This Reason article is printed from: http://www.reason.com/links/links011205.shtml | January 12, 2005 |
Top
"There’s nothing profound going on," Gunther insists. "You don’t need to read George Lakoff, or be Karl Rove, to understand it. Just read Machiavelli’s The Prince to see all the tactics that have worked for every society, including America.... We don’t need more politicians who are carefully framing their positions," Gunther concludes. "We need activists who are willing to make some enemies."
Frame This!
Will George Lakoff’s linguistic ideas help Democrats regain the White House . . .
or are they just the progressive flip side to conservative Luntzspeak?
by Judith Lewis Los Angeles Weekly January 21-27, 2005

"I don’t have time for George Lakoff," says Herb Chao Gunther, executive director of the Public Media Center in San Francisco, the nonprofit media-relations company that helped Greenpeace save whales in the 1980s and has represented Planned Parenthood and NARAL in public-service announcements through two decades of onslaught. "If he really wants to be helpful, he should go canvass houses instead of trying to convince people there’s a magic key to people’s hearts and minds. Because there isn’t."

If you’re a progressive who’s scoured the media or attended activist debriefings after November’s election in search of ways to shift political power to the left, chances are good you’ve heard of George Lakoff and his ideas on framing. Simply put, framing means that how you phrase an idea shapes the response to it. His most cited negative example is "tax relief." "For there to be relief," Lakoff told NPR back in the fall, "there has to be an affliction and an afflicted party who’s harmed by it, a reliever who takes the affliction away, who’s a hero, and if anybody tries to stop them, they’re a bad guy."

A year ago, Lakoff, who has been a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1972, spoke and wrote in relative obscurity. Most people on the left, let alone mainstream America, had not heard of him. His books, including Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t (1996), were selling at the rate of other respectable academic books, right along with the book Lakoff wrote with Rafael Nuñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being, which held firm for three months in 2001 on New Scientist’s best-seller list but didn’t register much elsewhere. Part of Lakoff’s problem was timing: Moral Politics, meant to address Newt Gingrich’s "Contract With America," landed smack in the middle of the Clinton revolution (the book was reissued in 2002 with the new tag line How Liberals and Conservatives Think). And Lakoff, who now has a think tank behind him called the Rockridge Institute, had yet to learn how to reduce his rich brew of cognitive linguistics down to an easily digestible form. Despite his clear, often lightly funny prose, Moral Politics was not a book to devour on the redeye.

On the other hand, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, with its foreword by Governor Howard Dean, verges on the tone of an instructional manual, the kind that might teach single women how to manage their money and snag a spouse. Among its guidelines for battling conservatives: "Never act like a victim" and "Stay away from set-ups." It’s written in the comforting language of what Lakoff would call the "nurturant parent" — his metaphor for the liberal politician (as opposed to the conservative’s "strict parent" model). It’s framing made easy for the frustrated and righteous.

And unlike Moral Politics and Where Mathematics Comes From, Elephant became an instant best-seller, soaring to No. 8 on Amazon.com a week after its release. Inspired by an e-mail from MoveOn.com, readers downloaded 12,000 copies of the book’s first chapter from the Web site of its publisher, Chelsea Green. By November, the man who last May asked a group assembled at the Berkeley Congregational Church to pardon his nervousness — "I’m used to a little seminar room," he told the unexpectedly large crowd — turned up on Now With Bill Moyers, Good Morning America, CNN and even Fox News. His book and his ideas have since replaced rigged voting machines as the topic of discussion at progressive house parties, which recently convened across the country to watch the new DVD How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions From George Lakoff.

"Progressives are constantly put in positions where they are expected to respond to conservative arguments," writes Lakoff. "But because conservatives have commandeered so much of the language, progressives are often put on the defensive with little or nothing to say in response."

"We understand the world in terms of frames, in terms of conceptual structures," he explains, "and if the facts don’t fit the frame, the facts . . . bounce off. Think of all those people who still believe that Saddam Hussein was part of al Qaeda." He exhorts liberals to talk about their values, back up their arguments with personal stories, use rhetorical questions and words like accountability, responsibility and common sense. "Once your frame is accepted into the discourse," he writes, "everything you say is just common sense. Why? Because that’s what common sense is: reasoning within a commonplace, accepted frame." Never let yourself be put on the defensive, and "never answer a question framed from your opponent’s point of view." If someone asks how you feel about the "Healthy Forests Initiative," re-frame: "You mean ‘No Tree Left Behind’?" The other side wants to stereotype you as a wimp, he cautions. Don’t let them.

For progressives, liberals, lefties — whatever you choose to call us — this is all useful advice. But Elephant might just as well be titled Don’t Think of Frank Luntz, because it’s impossible to read it and not think of the pollster and de facto Republican Party linguist, who advised conservatives in a string of public memos. In one called "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America," circulated just before the 2002 congressional race, Luntz warned conservatives they were vulnerable on the environment unless they learned to frame the argument. "Facts only become relevant when the public is receptive and willing to listen to them," he wrote by way of explaining why environmentalists had, in the spring of 2001, so successfully convinced America that the Bush administration was tainting their drinking water with arsenic. "You must explain how it is possible to pursue a commonsense or sensible environmental policy," he said. He encouraged Republicans to talk about their values, back up their arguments with personal stories, use rhetorical questions and words like accountability and responsibility.

"A caricature has taken hold in the public imagination: Republicans seemingly in the pockets of corporate fat cats who rub their hands together and chuckle maniacally as they plot to pollute American for fun and profit," Luntz cautioned. George Lakoff, in essence, has retooled Frank Luntz.

The problem isn’t just that Lakoff’s linguistic theories so closely mirror Luntz’s chirpy playbook in substance and tone. That’s annoying, but not reprehensible. The real problem is that Lakoff has, in the last few months, used those ideas to manufacture a self-help franchise for people who need him about as much as single women need self-help books. He offers comforting solutions to problems that don’t necessarily exist. Because if the Democrats failed — and you could argue that losing by 3 percent of the vote to an incumbent president at war was not really such a resounding defeat — they didn’t fail because they failed to frame the debate. They more likely failed because they didn’t even raise a debate. Not, at any rate, one that mattered to the 55 million voters who picked Bush, sometimes with serious reservations.

Luntz wrote his memos to the congressional Republicans because he needed to keep 2002’s crop of candidates from coming off like the greedy corporate toadies who were occupying the White House. Since then, things have only gotten worse. During the Bush administration’s first four years, the National Park Service’s maintenance budget has been slashed, development-friendly federal judges have been ushered into office, and wilderness areas have been unceremoniously torn open to oil and gas development. The administration is now seeking to undo the good work of the Clean Air Act, dismantle endangered species protection and drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — despite the opposition of 55 percent of the American public. If Republicans were vulnerable on the environment in 2002, they remained so in 2004: In November’s local races around the country, from Colorado to Illinois, pro-environment, Democratic candidates like Ken Salazar and Barack Obama were sent to Washington by constituencies keenly aware of the ecological stakes. Before the election, when Newsweek asked readers which of the two major presidential candidates they most trusted on the environment, close to two-thirds of them picked Kerry. But the appeal of the environmental movement was hardly tested, because Kerry almost never brought it up.

Nevertheless, within the environmental movement itself, a framing revolution is under way, inspired by George Lakoff and instigated by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, two public-relations experts with credentials in the environmental movement, who recently published a controversial essay titled "The Death of Environmentalism."

"We are especially grateful to George Lakoff," it says in the essay’s acknowledgments, and, in the footnotes, claims: "The work of linguist George Lakoff on how conservatives more effectively frame public debates than liberals is being badly misinterpreted . . . The key to applying Lakoff’s analysis is to see vision, values, policy, and politics all as extensions of language." (The authors could have just as easily credited Luntz’s memo, from which at least one of their subheadings has been lifted, nearly verbatim: "Getting Back on the Offensive.") Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ thesis, based on interviews with 25 environmental leaders (some of whom are now complaining about being misinterpreted), is predicated on the notion that the environmental movement needs to re-frame its issues to reflect alliances with business and industry. "Environmentalists are putting the technical policy cart before the vision-and-values horse," they write. "Investments in cleaner coal should be framed as part of an overall vision for creating jobs in the energy industries of the future, not just a technical fix."

In a similar vein, the authors argue that environmentalists should promote more fuel-efficient cars, not because they’re better for the environment, but because the U.S. auto industry can’t compete with the Japanese unless it develops a cleaner fleet. "That was the right framing [in 1975, when the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards were crafted], and it’s the right framing now."

There’s nothing wrong with couching your arguments and principles in non-defensive language the general public can understand — no one could argue that liberals in general and environmentalists in specific need to whine more. But learning to use constructive language is a debating tactic, not a political strategy, easily mastered in an afternoon seminar. What Lakoff, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are all pushing for is something much grander: the use of "framing" to solve all our current crises, from poverty to oil dependence to global warming. In making their cases, they imply that progressive values and environmentalism are terribly unpopular — so unpopular that we need to somehow euphemize all progressive ideals to shove them down people’s throats.

But Bush didn’t win by a landslide, fuel-efficient vehicles are in ever-higher demand (the waiting list for a Prius is many months long), and a lot of people are frightened about the now obvious changing of the climate — which includes not just higher overall temperatures but an increase in precipitation, without a corresponding relief from drought (with the higher temperatures, the snowpack that feeds reservoirs evaporates too quickly).

What’s more, throughout history, public policy has not changed radically because this or that person put this or that argument in a palatable frame, but because someone sounded an unmistakable alarm. Society has moved forward because somebody — Martin Luther King Jr., Betty Friedan, David Brower, Rachel Carson — had the courage to stand for something that at the time seemed radical, unequivocally and without any linguistic trick but with sheer eloquence and truth.

The Public Media Center has been around for 30 years, and many of the ideas in its "10-point guide to social change," such as "communicate values" and "act like a winner," presaged Lakoff. But the 10 points also include more radical lessons, such as "be oppositional," "be diverse" and "make enemies, not friends." To get the media’s attention, PMC advises activists to be "responsible extremists," not "reasonable moderates," because "extremism sets the agenda." If no one is willing to occupy the extremist positions on the left, or if establishment liberals distance themselves too far from the fringe, the far right will come to seem as though it represents mainstream values. And to PMC executive director Herb Chao Gunther, the problem with the environmental movement is not that it’s incorrectly framing the debate so it comes off as too radical. "Mainstream environmental groups are getting millions of dollars from corporations," he gripes. "There are people sitting on their boards from Waste Management Inc. Tell me they’re making environmentally sound decisions about landfills."

In the summer of 2003, the San Francisco–based Bluewater Network launched a searing campaign against Ford Motor Co. for presenting itself as environmentally sensitive even as it rolled out the least fuel-efficient fleet in the industry. Two years later, Ford has announced four more hybrid-electric vehicles to be developed in the next three calendar years and is outfitting the state of Florida with new Ford E-450 hydrogen buses next year. The campaign against Ford has begun to work, says Gunther, "not because anybody ‘framed’ the debate so Ford could understand, but because Bill Ford, who will only book a hotel room if the windows open, thinks of himself as an environmentalist, and it hurts him when he sees a picture of himself in the Detroit News being described as a liar. It worked because the ads held him accountable in a public way for two years."

And that, after all, is the beauty of being American. "You can speak out against a corporation and not be taken to a wall and shot in the head."

As for the Democrats in general, Gunther believes it’s wrong to see the last election as historic. "George Bush’s legacy will be how he contributed to the burning of the planet with his limited vision or empathy or learning or knowledge. He really is Nero [fiddling] while the planet burned." And Democrats should stop responding as though the Republicans are succeeding mightily in winning over the country.

"There’s nothing profound going on," Gunther insists. "You don’t need to read George Lakoff, or be Karl Rove, to understand it. Just read Machiavelli’s The Prince to see all the tactics that have worked for every society, including America. That the Democratic candidate still got more votes [than Gore in 2000] and more people voted than ever before doesn’t mean we did something wrong. It means the other side had slightly more money and a war. If that only got them 3 million votes and the smallest margin of any president elected, it doesn’t mean it’s the time to watch our language. It means it’s the time to attack.

"We don’t need more politicians who are carefully framing their positions," Gunther concludes. "We need activists who are willing to make some enemies." It won’t necessarily guarantee a Democrat in the White House four years from now, he admits, but who knows for sure what will? "Being on the left isn’t about winning and dominating," he says. "It’s about aligning yourself with the values your culture holds dear; it’s about social justice. That’s not a fight that’s ever won for good, because there will always be bad, greedy people, and you will always have to fight them when they come to power." In the meantime, "You can teach new cultural habits to people." Energy conservation, for instance, is a goal that turns out to be wildly popular among Americans — in the summer of 2003, a full 86 percent of 1,500 respondents in a survey "somewhat" or "strongly" agreed with the statement that President Bush should come out and ask Americans to conserve energy.

The poll was conducted by Frank Luntz.
"In the long term, this is the way you win in politics. You plant the seeds of your ideas, and you effectively blockade the other side from advancing any of its ideas." -- Stephen Moore, President, Free Enterprise Fund"
Inside a Republican Brain
Commentary
By WILLIAM SAFIRE | New York Times | July 28, 2004
WASHINGTON — What holds the five Republican factions together? To find out, I depth-polled my own brain.

The economic conservative (I’m in the supply-side division) opposes the enforced redistribution of wealth, advocating lower taxes for all to stimulate growth with productivity, thereby to cut the deficit. Government should downhold nondefense spending, stop the litigation drain and reduce regulation but protect consumers from media and other monopolies.

My social conservative instinct wants to denounce the movie-and-TV treatment of violence and porno-sadism as entertainment; repeal state-sponsored gambling; slow the rush to same-sex marriage; oppose partial-birth abortion and resist genetic manipulation that goes beyond therapy. However, this conflicts with —

My libertarian impulse, which is pro-choice and anti-compulsion, wants to protect the right to counsel of all suspects and the right to privacy of the rest of us, likes quiet cars in trains and vouchers for education, and wants snoops out of bedrooms and fundamentalists out of schoolrooms.

The idealistic calling grabs me when it comes to America’s historic mission of extending freedom in the world. This brand of thinking is often called neoconservative. In defense against terror, I’m pre-emptive and unilateral rather than belated and musclebound, and would rather be ad hoc in forming alliances than permanently in hock to global bureaucrats.

Also rattling around my Republican mind is the cultural conservative. In today’s ever-fiercer kulturkampf, I identify with art forms more traditional than avant-garde, and language usage more standard than common. I prefer the canon to the fireworks and a speech that appeals to the brain’s reasoning facilities to a demidocumentary film arousing the amygdala.

Do these different streams of conservatism flow gently together to form a grand Republican river inside the head? “Do I contradict myself?” asked Walt Whitman, singing of himself and answering, “Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

If these different strains of thought were held by discrete groups of single-minded people, we would have a Republican Party of five warring bands. Social conservatives would fight libertarians over sex, who in turn would savage neocons over pre-emption, who in turn would hoot at the objections of economic conservatives (traditional division) to huge deficits.

But think of these internecine battles not as tugs of war among single-minded groups; instead, think of them as often-conflicting ideas held within the brain of an individual Republican. What goes on is “cognitive dissonance,” the jangling of competing inclinations, with the owner of the brain having to work out trade-offs, suppressions and compromises until he or she achieves a kind of puzzled tranquillity within.

What helps me work out that continual internal skirmishing is a mind-set. That brings us to those “values” that every candidate talks about. My values include self-reliance over community dependence, intervention over isolation, self-discipline over society’s regulation, finding pleasure in work rather than working to find pleasure. Principles like those help me gel a mind-set that reduces the loudest dissonances among my fistful of clanging conservatisms.

Another aid to resolve the dissonance is every partisan’s need for a political home. Independence is fine for the occasionally involved, but if influence as a participant or commentator is desired, one political side or the other must be taken.

The political brain doesn't have to go all the way to conform to either side because each side — Republican and its loyal opposition — contains this conglomeration of nonconformity. I’m a right-winger who is hot for gun control, dismaying all but the wishy-washies called “moderates,” but that specific dissent is made inside my Republican home. And home has been defined as the place where — when you have to go there — they have to take you in.

Finally, the dissonance inside my head will be forced into harmony by the need to choose one leader who reflects the preponderance of my views and my judgment of his character.

I will take my teeming noggin to both conventions, watch all the debates and cast my vote — careful, in the tradition of Times columnists, not to endorse anyone. But now you know how one Republican mind will be made up. I presume the liberal brain works the same way.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2004 | The New York Times.
"Great, the ur-conservative pundit [Safire] has spelled out his worldview in detail. He greatly validates Lakoff's scheme.... Out of several 'personas' Safire describes, all but one belong to the core conservative mode. The one that does not, the one that creates his confusion, is 'libertarianism'.... Lakoff has a whole chapter on "radial deviations" from core models, libertarianism being one of them (an offshoot of the conservative model)." from DailyKos.com (12/31/04)

Despite big win, Dems’ message control still needs fine-tuning
By Aaron Blake | TheHill.com | November 15, 2006

Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday what the American public was trying to tell Republicans in last week’s election, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he believed the message was: “That we came to Washington to change government, and government changed us.”
If those words sound familiar, it’s because they might as well have been read straight off a Democratic talking-points memo. McCain’s choice of words was a near-verbatim pull from a slogan Democrats have been using for more than a year.
The phrase has long been a favorite of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) and also was used by the campaign of Ohio 1st District Democratic challenger John Cranley.
When a politician repeats an opponent’s slogans, that’s supposedly a positive sign for the opponent, an indication that the phrase has made its way into the political lexicon. But experts say Democrats made only marginal progress this cycle on their much-hyped goals of improving their message control and employing more effective language.
After the 2004 election, Democrats turned to University of California-Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff, whose guidance they hoped would help them frame messages better and elicit more favorable responses from the American public, much as Republicans did in 1994 with their Contract with America.
Yet even after the Democratic victories last Tuesday, Lakoff said Democrats are making fewer mistakes but still have yet to articulate a vision of what it means to be a Democrat, something they need to establish soon in preparation for 2008.
“The conservatives came in in 1994 with an understanding of who they were and what they were about and what their long-term vision was, and that’s not happening here,” Lakoff said, adding that individual Democratic candidates such as Montana Sen.-elect Jon Tester and North Carolina Rep.-elect Heath Shuler are exceptions.
“It’s not just a one-liner; it’s not just a slogan. There’s a set of principles, there’s an idea about the moral mission of a Democrat … that has to be put out there.”
Lakoff and others agree that the Republicans’ onetime strength in the messaging department fell apart this election, most notably when Democrats used President Bush’s “stay the course” mantra against him. Eventually, even Bush, who had used it for years, disavowed the phrase.
But whatever Republicans lost in this arena was almost exclusively a result of their own doing and the political realities that have emerged on issues like the war in Iraq, as opposed to Democratic progress on the message front, said Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information and author of “Talking Right,” a book about the Republicans’ linguistic dominance.
Nunberg said Democrats basically didn’t use language at all, instead simply recycling slogans that restated a “throw the bums out” theme. The results were slogans such as “Together, America Can Do Better,” “A New Direction for America,” and “Had Enough?”
Republicans, meanwhile, have tried for the last few years to float too many slogans about the war on terror, and “stay the course” fell flat because of the ongoing death tolls in Iraq, not Democrats’ strategic successes, he said.
Democrats did succeed in one major way: They made it clear they weren’t Republicans, Nunberg said, but that isn’t likely to work in 2008.
“It was the most successful exercise in negative self-identification since 7UP billed itself as the Un-cola,” Nunberg said. “And, at the same time, the linguistic machine of the Republicans had the ultimate unraveling.”
“The more pithy and memorable [the slogans] were, the more they come back to haunt Republicans when it turns out that language doesn’t correspond to reality,” he continued. “You can’t keep doing that.”
Emanuel echoed Nunberg the day after the election when talking about the Democrats’ national security strategy. He said Republican phrases like “they stand up, we stand down” and “cut and run” weren’t working and showed the American public that Republicans had slogans instead of strategies.
The DCCC chairman also said Republicans’ bid to associate Democratic challengers in conservative districts with soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) failed. The Democrats won in four districts where the Republicans ran ads invoking Pelosi and trumpeting her “San Francisco values,” by which they meant extreme liberalism.
Emanuel praised Democrats’ efforts to attach the adjective “rubberstamp” to many Republicans who were too closely aligned with Bush.
“It became a national identity for the Republican Party and the Republican Congress,” Emanuel said. “And they paid a price for their blind loyalty to the president.”
Nunberg said the “rubberstamp” strategy was another example of something that worked because of the current environment but can’t be counted on in the next election.
“None of that’s operative in 2008,” he said. “I don’t think any of that stuff is going to matter much from here on in.”

 

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