The "Freeze": Shoving the Overton Window rightward

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday January 26, 2010 · 7:39 PM PST

2010/01/26 · 19:39

Aside from furthering (intentionally or not) the DLC's and Blue Dogs' apparent goal of trashing a once-noble brand, the Obama "freeze" proposal didn't do very much good. If Obama'd hoped to woo Mitch McConnell, that certainly didn't succeed:

"Freezing non-defense domestic discretionary spending would be a good idea," McConnell said. "However, if you put into the baseline the stimulus, the TARP, and you account for inflation, it’s not nearly as big a step as the American people are asking us to take."

"I think any indication the administration is trying to reduce spending is a good thing, but we’ve been on quite a binge over the last 12 months, and it’s going to take a lot more than just this kind of modest freeze to get us back on the right track," McConnell said.

Ol' Mitch's reaction will now set the stage for the media's framing of this issue -- a framing that will shove perception of it hard to the right. (More past the jump.)

Here's what's going to happen now, being that our media is obsessed with finding a "center" that always seems to be several notches rightwards of where the American people are at any given moment:

The corporate media will now pin the "center" -- the all-important "center" -- of the debate right smack in the middle between Obama and McConnell, thus splitting the difference between a pander that was already pushing to the right so much it's won praise from John Sidney McCain III himself (you know, the guy who made a similar budget "freeze" a centerpiece of his campaign? And who took grief from it from a certain fellow presidential candidate named Barack Obama?) and an even worse proposal from Mitch McConnell.

Everyone remember how dragging the Overton window in one direction or another makes the unthinkable not only thinkable, but eventually policy if done persistently?

Overton described a method for moving that window, thereby including previously excluded ideas, while excluding previously acceptable ideas. The technique relies on people promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas. That makes those old fringe ideas look less extreme, and thereby acceptable. The idea is that priming the public with fringe ideas intended to be and remain unacceptable, will make the real target ideas seem more acceptable by comparison.

The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:

* Unthinkable
* Radical
* Acceptable
* Sensible
* Popular
* Policy

What we've just seen with Obama's "freeze" is unthinkable right-wing dogma (as espoused by Mitch McConnell) just made acceptable -- and the already-acceptable right-wing dogma (as espoused by Barack Obama) being brought closer to becoming policy.

Dog help us all.

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

Comments are closed on this story.