... to paraphrase Bill Clinton...

I've been reading reviews of Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant. So far, I've learned the reason Democrats keep losing elections is not because they tend to continually embrace failed solutions, but simply because they frame the issues wrong.

One of the most important contributions Lakoff makes in "Don't Think of an Elephant!" is the misinterpretation that conservatives don't think and don't have ideas. They certainly do. As he points out, they are well-financed and have been experts in getting their message across. As noted in the book, 80% of the talking heads on tv are conservatives and they are well trained in knowing what "language" to use to promote their ideas.... The Democrats, largely unknowledgeable about how to respond, have been emasculated. But it's more than language that needs to change for progressives... it is indeed, re-framing the debate to begin to change the thinking of Americans. After all, Lakoff says, the progressive values are the true values of our society.

Wow: Conservatives think, and have ideas? That that should come as a shock to their opponents is some slight indication of how degraded the American political dialog has become. On the left, you have a group of people who keep losing elections. Yet it apparently never occurs to a good number of them that perhaps their opponents think and have ideas.

What are vouchers? What is a personal social security account? What is mandatory health insurance? What about the generous handouts suggested by Charles Murray? What is (whether I think it's a good idea or not) NCLB? What is "broken window policing"?

Next, I suppose "framing" does matter somewhat. But there's an irony here: Everyone knows conservatives don't control the universities, and liberals have a low opinion of the intellectual abilities of their opponents. Yet here's a professional linguist hypothesizing that conservates are much better at writing, linguistics, and communication. Go figure.

Perhaps our low intelligence naturally helps us communicate more effectively with the vast, unthinking masses.

But is it just 'framing' which explains why conservative ideas tend to beat liberal ones? What about facts? Did Rudy Guiliani win New Yorkers over to voting Republican by "framing" the issues? Or did they actually notice what happened to the crime rate, and Times Square? Did Reagan merely frame issues well, or was there, in fact, a booming economy? And is Bush (I thought he was supposed to be illiterate) merely "framing" the debate about national security well, or have, in fact, avoided serious attacks (so far) since 9/11? (Or perhaps the idea that there are exteremists who want to kill us is just another deviously clever Republican "frame"? The irony is that it wouldn't be if the Democrats just stopped ceding the issue to them.)

An example of "framing" Lakoff gives is the term "tax relief". This is supposed to be some deceptive-yet-clever dodge by conservatives, which they employ with endless cunning and acumen.

But wait. When I look at my paycheck and notice about a third of it gone, and then notice there are rafts of "hidden taxes" in the price of every product I buy, I do feel like I'm losing a lot of money. I cannot imagine that it takes approximately a third to half my income to pay for roads, education, and defense.

So of course I'm going to "frame" that effectively. That's exactly how I see it. It's not some subtle ruse dreamed up in the Karl Rove Brainiac Think Tank. It's a genuine expression of our convictions. No wonder we're effective: we actually believe the drivel we write.

This never seems to occur to Lakoff, who apparently doesn't believe some of the drivel he writes:

[Lakoff] spends an entire page explaining how to "frame" taxes in terms of "paying your dues" for infrastructure: the roads, the judicial system, commerce departments, banking system. Fine. Then just a few pages later, he writes "The right is forcing the left to spend even more private money on what the government should be supporting." What is that? Social programs, funded by taxes in the form of income redistribution. And none of that, not one bit, was mentioned in his entire page on "why we pay taxes." Did he think we weren't going to notice?

And, similarly:

When he gets to talking about 9-11, he flip-flops again, and twice in one page. He starts off by listing six reasons why "they [Islamic radical terrorists] hate us so much", including cultural views of women, theocracy, holy sites, Western presence in Arab states, jihad, and martyrdom. No argument there. In the very next paragraph, however, he says that many would-be martyrs grew up in poverty, and have nothing to live for. "Eliminate such poverty and you eliminate the breeding ground for most terrorists." And in the very next sentence he flip-flops again, admitting that "though the Sept 11 terrorists were relatively well-to-do."

Rightio. Of course, all that resonates well in a closed audience of like minds. But it's danged easy to evicerate in a debate with real-live opponents who have, you know, examined the budget and concluded it's chock-full of pork -- or who can point out you can't decide whether poverty is or is not the cause of terrorism.

Facts do matter. (Or at least they would if the media printed them.) And Lakoff is doing Democrats no favors if he is deceiving them into thinking all they have to do is spin more.

Finally, I wanted to comment on this phrase: "Progressive values are the true values of our society."

At least in terms of the value progressives claim to embrace, I'd mostly have to agree: many progressives do indeed reflect or pay homage to the values of our society. But what "progressives" utterly fail to grasp, in my experience, is that conservatives don't primarily disagree with their (professed) values, they disagree with progressive solutions. There is a considerable debate as to whether the solutions being offered actually serve the purported values.

For example, if the question is how to help poor people, self-proclaimed "progressives" tend to argue in favor of welfare. We conservatives, on the other hand, are also concerned about poverty (why do you think our average charitable giving is higher than the left?) but think welfare has been damaging to the poor, trapping otherwise productive members of society is an endless cycle of poverty, dependence, and crime.

Until "progressives" actually engage that debate, and that response, they'll continue to lose debates in front of swing voters:

Progressive: We care for the poor! Thus we demand increased welfare benefits!

Conservative: Reams of evidence shows welfare hurts the poor, and that the Clinton/Gingrich welfare reforms actually decreased the numbers of adults and children living in poverty. Isn't that a good thing?

Progressive: [silence] Let's talk about Bush and WMD!

Supposedly Lakoff helped Kerry quite a lot with his election strategy. If so, that isn't necessarily a ringing endorsement.