Imagine this:
You're watching Bush on TV. Suddenly, you can't take it any more. Reaching for the remote, you say, "Bush! He's so damn stupid."
I'll be the first to admit it: I'm addicted to calling Republicans 'stupid.' I can't help myself. I'm a junkie.
But are they 'stupid' or not?
The more I think about it, 'stupid' doesn't make much sense. None of the stupid people I know have gotten very far. George W. Bush--king of 'stupid'--yeah, he's done pretty well.
While there are many, many factors that contribute to Bush's electoral success, in the opening chapter of Don't Think of an Elephant!, George Lakoff argues that this knee-jerk habit of progressives to call Republicans 'stupid' is a big reason why Dems lose.
This is a hard habit to break, though, because it's based in core set of beliefs that all progressives hold.
So, if our goal is to take control of political debates through the power of framing, Lakoff says that we must stop calling Republicans stupid. Instead, we should ask:
"When Progressives call Republicans stupid, how does this help the GOP win?"
Real Time Sucker Punch
For Lakoff, the key to understanding how frames work is to first spend some time thinking about how we react when we listen to Republicans talk.
Immediately following the election, this Dem tendency to cry `stupid' when confronted with GOP talk, was brought to the fore.
On last week's edition of Real Time Allen Simpson and Andrew Sullivan both hit Bill Maher with a double punch on this issue that not only threw Bill off his game, but revealed exactly how deeply entrenched this problem is for progressives
When confronted with this idea that Dems should not call Republicans `stupid,' Maher like many progressives, immediately assumed that he was being told to embrace Evangelical ideas or move to the center on social policy.
This is absolutely wrong.
According to Lakoff, progressives don't need to accept right wing ideas, but unless we stop for a minute and understand what's happening when we pull out the `stupid' label, we won't understand why these accusations aren't persuasive in political debates, and why the `stupid' label reinforces our own misconception of how political ideas take hold.
The Truth Will Set Us Free
The problem, according to Lakoff is that Democrats don't understand the relationship beteen facts and frames.
Instead, our understanding of how political debate works is based on what he calls a core set of "Enlightenment Myths." Now, I'm pretty fond of the Enlightenment, so I wanted to make sure I understood what Lakoff was getting at here. Is he saying that we should reject rational thinking? No, not at all.
Here's his point:
"To be accepted, the truth must fit people's frames. If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off."
--Lakoff
Think for a minute of the great fact bouncers of recent politics. Al Gore comes to mind.
In the 2000 debates, Gore showed up with a massive quantity of facts to present to George W. Bush and to the American public.
Gore's startegy of pulling out these facts to convince the American public was based on what Lakoff calls this three step logic:
- The truth will set us free
- People are rational beings
- Present people with the facts and they will draw the right conclusion
I'll never forget that moment when Gore dangled the Dingle bill in front of Bush and the American people. Gore had an amazing control over legislative facts, but those facts just bounced off Bush and conservative voters because they did fit into the GOP frame of compassionate conservatism that Bush advanced relentlessly for the whole campaign.
Bouncing Off
The problem that we get to when we hold up accusations of 'stupid,' is that Dems tend to think of facts as witnesses of a universal truth. In this broad logic, we imagine all people as rational beings who naturally act in their best interest (read: acting on the universal truth).
So Dems don't so much make arguments or build frames as we confront Republicans with facts, whereupon we imagine them suddenly understanding the truth.
But facts bounce off, according to Lakoff, if they don't fit in to the concepts we have in our heads.
Lately, for example, the progressives haave started to throw around the numbers "over 1,000 dead" and "over 10,000 dead and maimed" to describe the situation in Iraq.
While I don't doubt that many, many Republicans are concerned about these statistics, by confronting the GOP with these facts, we have not been successful at taking control of the Iraq war debate.
Michael Moore's framing of the Iraq war was so successful precisely because he used the image of a horrific bomb exploding on a peaceful street, and the breakdown of a Republican mother of a dead soldier to frame Iraq.
But the meataphor of 'freedom on the march' and, more recently, Rumsfeld's metaphor of the 'situation tipping' in our favor, have dominated debate and tended to fend off the idea that casualty statistics equal trouble.
Moreover, while so many people accept the fact that Iraq did not cause 9/11, this GOP frame is so strong and so prominent that it has caused even the most daming facts from the heart of government itself to bounce off.
Self Interest vs. Self Identity
In thinking about this past election, two Dems emerged as radical alternatives to the habit of calling Republicans stupid.
John Edward's stump speech was a brilliant attempt to dominate the election by creating a kitchen table frame that would help GOP voters identify with the Democrats. I loved Edward's speech. Rather then taking numbers, he painted a picture of a single mom sitting in her kitchen, worrying about the bills, thinking about her family. You can bet that speech brought out tiny beads of sweat on Karl Rove's big fleshy forehead.
Ahh, but Edwards wasn't very good at putting out metaphors that held his frame in place. Instead, he stuck to the refrain "hope is on the way." To this day, I'm not really sure what that meant.
Then there is Barak Obama.
Obama's speech at the Democratic Convention demonstrated his deep understanding of Lakoff's ideas on how political debate works.
Obama used that platform to cast himself in the frame of a strong family. His candidacy was not about unemployment numbers, was not about deaths in Iraq, was not about tax breaks. It was about his values as a member of an American family. And it was in that frame of the family, that so many people see their own identity.
Kerry of course, for better or for worse, is the classic example of a Democratic fact bouncer.
When I read the contract of "understanding" which set out the rules for the debates, one clause stated that the candidates were not allowed to use charts.
Can you imagine George W. Bush pulling out a chart? Of course not. Apparently, Kerry had in mind that he could use facts and figures to make his case.
In one surreal moment during the campaign, I saw a clip of Kerry speaking to senior citizens about health care. There he was--our candidate--standing in front of a chart, confronting the elderly with the facts of how Geroge W. Bush had ruined healthcare. You could hear those facts bouncing off the audience.
Of course, whether or not Kerry lost or Bush stole the election, calling the GOP 'stupid' is a habit that we need to break--and which the young Turks of the Democratic party are already moving past.
Once we get this habit under control, we can turn to the critical task of getting back in touch with our core values, and finding the metaphors that frame events in our favor.