Politically active people aligned with a particular party live in a sort of self-created bubble. We engage daily, weekly, monthly, yearly in this ongoing process of making sense of the discrepency between our political ideals and our political representatives. Much as people complain about the complainers, it is always the fixers that win in the end. Not because they have the real answers, but because the outcome is written into the premises of the discussion. No matter how much the Democrats suck ass, this is a Democratic blog, and therefore it will always generate rationalizations to preserve some thread, however twisted, of faith in the party and its politicians.
And that makes us different from regular people, who don't submit themselves to such relentless maintenance of their political faith. These regular people just get angry, and if they stay angry long enough, they slide on into apathy, hopelessness and utter cynicism. They lose their religion, while we program ourselves to keep the faith.
George Lakoff was wrong. Or rather, in his recent diary, George Lakoff glossed over the elephant in the room. Of course he expertly described the weakness of PolicySpeak, but his answer to the question of why the Obama administration has suddenly lapsed into PolicySpeak, after running the most brilliant campaign narrative in history, was insubstantial. His answer, that highly-educated liberals have been indoctrinated into an incorrect classical philosophy of cognition, is a general truth not applicable to the specific example under consideration.
The Obama people have already demonstrated a mastery of framing. While a refresher course is good general medicine, it doesn't address the specific illness. The reason, in other words, behind the Obama admin's sudden stumbling at something they characteristically excelled at during the campaign.
To regular people who aren't so fortified with political wisdom, the answer is simple: campaigns are framed for the benefit of the people while laws are framed for the benefit of the dominant class. Being simple folk, they might just call them the rich.
The only thing keeping people from making this obvious observation, after such long and painful popular experience, is their faith in the moral character of the politicians they elect. This, of course, was the foundational narrative element of Obama, his basic frame. His touchstone: He's different. He's ethical. He'll negotiate publicly with the big drug companies; He'll end the unjust war; He'll stop the surveillance and detentions. He will, in short, be an ethical human acting in the public interest and not another instrument of the ruling elite.
It's really just a matter of faith. Because without that faith, as clear promises made openly devolve into murky policies crafted in secret, the bedrock cynicism as regards the United States government, both domestically and internationally, is revealed as certain truth. Regular people don't subject themselves to the Daily Programming that maintains faith by easing the collision of promise and reality. They need the narrative.
And as Lakoff knows, the Obama people are well-able to provide it. They know how, and the story line is no mystery. The question, again, is why don't they?
The more politically educated, or those of us who have access to the more politically educated through these blogs, understand, for example, that President Obama couldn't, technically, propose his own healthcare plan - the one we heard so much about during the primary and campaign - and that the real plan that comes up for vote in the House and Senate will come out of committees. That's the political reality. Problem is, the rhetorical reality of the campaign completely distorted this fact. We were consciously led to believe we were choosing between plans, as if the choice mattered. In the domain of common experience, that's a bait and switch.
So, we're left in the awkward place of having a set of natural emotional reactions that we must constantly find ways to disbelieve in... for our own good. That, i think, is one of the primary functions of Daily Kos: to talk people out of states of rage, despair and utter cynicism.
In my next diary, I'll explore one hypothesis of how this function is accomplished, both here and in politics generally, by stimulation of the brain's dopamine-based system of desire.