George Lakoff has advanced our discussion of political discourse quite a bit. The blogs are abuzz with talk of "frames", and "fixing broken political discourse." That’s good. The Dems need a good dose of clarity, brevity and conviction in how they communicate, because you’ve got to win the politics game in order to play the policy game. All talk of "moving to the left/right" in terms of policy is pretty much beside the point. We’ve got to move the goalposts; thanks to the Professor for getting us talking about that.
However, there’s a danger here: the last thing we need is a grassroots made up of amateur Cokie Robertses and Karl Roves, all calculating little consultants hoping for their terrific sound bite to bubble up to the big time. Oliver Willis and others think Lakoff is no big deal, and in a sense, they’re right: this ain’t rocket science if you’re used to saying what you think clearly and directly. If I were a big-time Democratic strategist, I might take the risk thatpeople are tired of being patronized, and give them the uncomfortable truth, all the time. (Call it the "Bulworth" strategy… but it was used by Ross Perot, JFK, Obama and countless others. In fact, Bush is trying to sound like a tough truth-teller with his Social Security "crisis" talk, but — surprise! — he’s lying through his teeth.)
The problem is that the Democrats need to stop being afraid of the truth, even if it’s unpalatable in the short term. Look, who wants to hear that the President was ignoring his chief terrorism expert, ignoring Al Qaeda, clearing brush the whole month before 9/11 — that doesn’t make one feel safe, does it? But how much did you hear from the Democratic candidates about that? If Iraq is to the US as Afghanistan was the to USSR, happy-talking the situation won’t do our troops any favors. And when Democrats worry too much about politics, they lose elections — Q.E.D.
"But of all things, truth beareth away the victory", says an engraving above the old Divinity School at my Alma Mater. So, in spite of our heading here at the ‘Group, let’s aim for "Truth-based" politics. We need to sharpen our message, but even more, we need moral courage.
There’s been a lot of debate about exactly what “reality-based” means, but to me, it means precisely what you’re after: truth-based, instead of scare-tactic-based, fake-crisis-based, or even faith-based (not in the religious sense, but in the sense of, say, going with a particular economic policy because it aligns with an ideological viewpoint, not because it might actually work). Let’s take the world as we find it (to paraphrase a certain Defense Secretary, the world we have, not the world we might want or wish to have), and devise policies to improve that world based on sound economics and sound science. Seems to me the sound politics will flow naturally.