"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
John Kerry Needs a New Set of Frames
Posted 9:23 p.m., Sept. 9, 2004
|
Vote Bush, or die. This is not just a polemic. Fact is, you're being framed.
Vice President Dick Cheney last week rendered concrete that which was left thinly veiled during the GOP convention in August, telling an audience in Iowa that to "make the wrong choice" on Election Day would be to risk a terrorist attack of much greater magnitude than the horrors of Sept. 11.
"Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again. That we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war."-- Vice President Dick Cheney,
Des Moines, Iowa, Sept. 7, 2004
Vote wrong, in other words, and the terrorists will hurt you. Vote for the Democrats, and you will die.
This is rough stuff, but it's not quite new; it was the essence of the message throughout the GOP convention, though only Georgia Sen. Zell Miller came close to Dick Cheney in uttering such phrases concretely.
It may be disgusting, as former Vice President Al Gore said today when he lashed out at Cheney for a "sleazy and despicable effort to blackmail voters with fear." And nevermind that all evident indications are that a Kerry administration would conduct at least as tough a foreign policy as that of Bush I.
The Republicans have been doing this sort of stuff--spinning hyperbolic messages that stick in voters' brains--with remarkable effectiveness for some time, dating back at least to the Newt Gingrich/Vin Weber axis of the late '80s and early '90s. The people surrounding President Bush are to the art of this sort of political instant messaging what the Beatles were to pop music, and what Babe Ruth was to baseball. They are outdistancing the competition by light years.
These folks have figured out what liberals and, I'd say even centrists, can't quite understand--that when it comes to making people see things the way you want them to, facts simply don't matter. What matters is emotional resonance. Emotion is not logical.
This idea first came to me back in July, when I watched an intriguing interview with the linguist George Lakoff on PBS' "NOW with Bill Moyers" show. In it, Lakoff made a compelling case for the genius of the Republicans in literally hijacking language in ways that often render Democrats arguments feeble, if not irrelevant to many minds.
Lakoff explained that Bush will frame a theme with a key phrase--for example, on his first day in office he issued a press release promising "tax relief," a phrase that he has been trotting out again since the convention. When he finds a phrase with the right kind of resonance, he repeats it and repeats it, making sure everyone hears the message.
It can take as many as 20 repetitions for voters to hear such a political message before it sinks in, according to a recent story by Joshua Micah Marshall in The Atlantic magazine, but the president has an unchallenged level of media access and can, either himself or through his surrogates, make sure that happens.
Framing the concept is the key, Lakoff says. Take the concept of "tax relief":
Now, a linguist who looks at the word 'relief' would say, 'Ah-ha! There's a frame in which there is an affliction--an afflicted party who's harmed ... [and] a reliever, who takes away this affliction. And if anybody tries to stop them, they're a bad guy. You add 'tax' to that, and you get taxation is an affliction. And if the Democrats oppose the President's tax relief plan, they're bad guys. ... So the words 'tax relief' go out to every radio station, every TV station, every newspaper, day after day after day. Soon, everybody's thinking 'tax relief' with the idea that taxation is an affliction unconsciously, automatically.
-- George Lakoff,
"NOW with Bill Moyers,"
July 23, 2004
Interestingly, if not hauntingly, there are suggestions that this effect might occur independent of a person's conscious ability to choose.
Speaking specifically of campaign advertising--a slightly different topic than the message spin that we're talking about here--Lynda Lee Kaid, a telecommunications professor at the University of Florida, tells the Atantic's Marshall that because political ads fill the airwaves during election seasons, there is no escaping them if you watch TV at all. And even if you don't care, they may be achieving their objective. "The research tends to show that people are persuaded even without cognitively or openly choosing to be," Kaid says.
Lakoff proclaims that liberals--I would again add centrists--make a profound mistake in believing that facts are the final arbiter of what people believe. This concept is the entire reason that Al Franken does a radio show--the idea that if people just have the facts before them, they will fall into line behind a liberal viewpoint.
But that's not how Lakoff sees it.
A lot of liberals believe that the facts will set you free, [that] everybody is a rational person and all you have to do is just tell them the facts, they'll reason to the right conclusion. It's false. And the Republicans have learned that it's false. They've set up a frame, they set up a narrative, and they set it up in terms of their values. And they get it as part of normal, everyday language and normal everyday thought. Once they've done that, the facts are irrelevant--unless the Democrats can learn to re-frame the issues from their point of view, and then make the facts fit other frames.
-- George Lakoff,
"NOW with Bill Moyers,"
July 23, 2004
John Kerry has made some moves in this direction, making some effort to co-opt words like "strength" and "values" in an attempt to bring people's thinking in line with the Democrats' on traditionally Republican-controlled concepts. But they've been fairly weak efforts. His most recent efforts to wrestle the "W" from the president's name ("W is for wrong") have been a step in the Republicans' direction, but don't quite have the panache of "tax relief."
Kerry probably does need to do this to win. The problem, of course, is that if he finds the right formula and actually succeeds, it will set a precedent for campaigning that could have the kind of lingering impact that the first TV campaign ads of the 1950s had--changing the tenor of political discussion and debate for generations, if not forever.
The problem, of course, is what will be left of our political discourse if both sides become masters of this art of framing? It's hard to see, whatever its successes, how such a development will improve the national conversation.
-- Kevin Featherly
George Lakoff has recently written a short book, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives," which discusses his idea of "framing," which can be found at at Amazon.com.
