I think the discussion about how Bush won on "values" is missing something: Rove's biggest move, and the one that paid off, was to isolate his opponent's biggest strength and knock it down. Rather than run from it, they ran right into it and turned it into a liability. On our side, we should've attacked the resoluteness of GWB on 9/11 itself and gone after it, showing footage of him reading My Pet Goat over and over and over.
By focusing the debate on GWB's policies, we played into their hands. People who liked GWB didn't like him because he was right, or because they'd thought about the issues and their ramifications--they liked him because he was certain, resolute. In a time of uncertainty, that was comforting.
Rove knew this. By hitting the flip-flopper theme, he isolated the key emotional point of the election season: people wanted someone with answers, no matter how wrong.
The debates proved something else: that framing the issues trumps the vessel. Kerry proved that he personally was stronger than Bush, but his message wasn't. So getting frustrated that people voted for a dumbass misses the point: they didn't vote for him, they voted for certainty.
In other words, we'll of course be frustrated in analyzing this election when we think about the quality of the opposing candidate versus ours. JFK was the clear winner. But the real secret here is that this wasn't actually about the candidates. It was about what they represented: certainty and resoluteness on the one hand, and irresoluteness on the other.
This points out the importance of framing in the Lakoff sense, but also in choosing what the frame was. People didn't want to know what the answer was and have to evaluate for themselves whether it was right--they just wanted to know that someone knew he had the right answer (even if it was wrong).
So let's take on morals. Let's take on values. Let's take on fiscal conservatism. Let's take on tax policy. Let's not read Lakoff's point about framing to mean that we concede areas to them--let's just put the debate on our own terms. And let's remember that having a good candidate is less important than how that candidate and his position are framed.