Anyone active in Progressive politics knows George Lakoff as one of the main men who finally helped the Democrats understand how average voters think. Lakoff told Democrats to stop giving boring laundry lists of programs, and instead learn how to frame issues in terms of our values.
A lot of us listened to Lakoff, especially Howard Dean.
But it seems that a certain some one who has the presidents ear is telling Democrats to turn away from the guy with the proven method of winning votes.
You guessed it. Rahm Emmanuel, the man who tried to kill the 50 state strategy before it started, the man who insisted with the DLC that we should ignore the progressive base to try and win moderates, the man is probably the reason Dean got fired from the DNC... is yet again leading Democrats astray.
Why did Obama ever hire this guy?
Details below the fold.
When Obama was campaigning he was a brilliant and inspiring speaker, but when he got to the White House, something changed, almost instantly. Yes I was still supporting Obama (still do), but somehow he seemed different, less bold, not the same inspiring man he was on the campaign.
Well I think I know what caused the change. Rahm. Rahm was not part of the campaign, he wasn't there when Obama was on top of his game. The time when Rahm started giving Obama advice is exactly the time when Obama's star began to fall.
Today I discovered another piece of the puzzle. According to an article in the Chronicle review, Rahm spent an entire chapter of a book that he co-wrote attacking Lakoff.
This is very bad.
George Lakoff is the one guy who tells Democrats how to stop making one of the biggest mistakes they made for years. Lakoff taught Democrats how to not be boring. He taught them how to speak clearly and persuasively. And to shed the mistakes of horrid speakers like John Kerry.
And the Obama campaign used to listen to Lakoff. I know this for a fact because when I meet an Obama campaign staffer in 2008 I gave him Lakoff's book, and the staffer told me the campaign already had distributed Lakoff's materials.
So lets just summarize what we know so far:
Leaders like Howard Dean told the Democratic party to study Lakoff, we did, then we started winning. Whether Lakoff is one of the reasons we won or not is hard to prove, but those are the facts.
Then Obama's people studied Lakoff, again they started winning.
Then Obama won, and took office with one of the highest approval ratings ever.
Then, Obama hired Rahm Emmanuel, one of Lakoffs biggest critics, as chief of staff. And as soon as Rahm, the man who doesn't believe in framing started to give advice, Obama's approval started to drop and has so far not recovered.
Again this is only a correlation of data, I'll have to let you judge if it is good or bad to have a man who vehemently rejects George Lakoff in the White House.
But I think Rahm is the problem. I think Rahm has too much ego to admit that he didn't understand framing. I think rather than admit he had made some mistakes, and learn from Lakoff, Rahm decided he already knew everything he needed to know, and attacked Lakoff.
And I Rahm is the biggest thing holding Obama back from being the great leader he was on the campaign.
Food for thought. Here's the original article from the August 15th Chronicle review which made me think of this:
[Edited for copyright infringement - MB]
Shortly before the meeting, The Atlantic had run an article by Marc Cooper, a lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Titled "Thinking of Jackasses," the essay dismissed Lakoff's work as "psychobabble as electoral strategy." Next the magazine published an essay by Joshua Green, a senior editor, "It Isn't the Message, Stupid." Green derided Lakoff for offering no new ideas and questioned whether the Democratic Party could bring about its own reversal of fortune merely with "snazzier packaging and a new sales pitch."
Lakoff was particularly stung when Rahm Emanuel, an influential Democratic representative from Illinois, devoted an entire chapter of a book to attacking him. In The Plan: Big Ideas for America (PublicAffairs, 2006), Emanuel and his co-author Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, rejected the view that the Democrats' problems stemmed from an inability to get their message out; the problem was the substance of that message. Framing, the authors said, amounted to little more than slapping a new coat of paint on failed old ideas. Most cutting to Lakoff, they called him one of the "highbrows" who harbored the "fallacy that we can game history to our advantage." Although The Plan might not have been read much beyond the insulated world of political strategists and consultants, it made Lakoff a persona non grata on Capitol Hill. "All of a sudden I was controversial," Lakoff says.
Another intellectual blow was delivered by Steven Pinker, an evolutionary and cognitive psychologist at Harvard University. Writing in The New Republic in 2006, Pinker chastised Lakoff for his "cartoonish depiction of progressives as saintly sophisticates and conservatives as evil morons" and declared his political efforts "a train wreck" and "jejune nonsense." Lakoff blasted back with an essay-length reply on The New Republic's Web site. He accused Pinker of misrepresenting his ideas and falling prey to his own ideological blinders, such as the view that thought is universal and disembodied rather than an emotional process that relies on frames, image-schemas, and metaphors. The spat endured for another round, a distilled version of which appeared in the journal Public Policy Research (March-May, 2007).