Tell it like it is, George Lakoff.

From George Lakoff at Huffington Post today. He goes after the way the health care debate has been handled by this administration which ran such a brilliant campaign.

The PolicySpeak Disaster for Health Care



The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.



He defines PolicySpeak:



He is right. Those screamers at the town halls don't give a hoot and a holler about facts. They have been riled up by the right wing talkers and insurance so-called grass roots. Facts mean little.

A strong clear unified message would mean a lot.

He suggests: "At the very least, the old mistakes can be avoided, a clear and powerful narrative is still available and true, and some powerful, memorable, and accurate language should be substituted for PolicySpeak, or at least added and repeated by spokespeople nationwide."

He gives more suggestions in the long post.

A couple of years ago Lakoff had much to say about the way the DLC had defined "the center", and how it affected the base when they did that.



Lakoff's Rockridge Institute closed down after a book by Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed spent a chapter tearing him down. I wonder why.

"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.

Who framed George Lakoff

And they STILL can't get their effing message out effectively.

... just who the fuck is he working for, exactly? What an obstinate bastard!

I've long thought he was trying to build a faction of rahm loyalists at his old Job. His giant ego certainly showed up in his book "The Thumpin", where he tries to take credit for the 2006 Dem landslide victories.

We're now reaping the whirlwind of his Blue Dog strategy too.

The Chief of Staff position's importance depends on the President. Loosely, he controls who gets to see the President. It was very important under Reagan, since his opinion was that of whoever talked to him last. Not important under Clinton (he had a strong personality) or GWB (Cheney made sure he was always the last one to talk to him).

I can't figure out Obamba's choice, I suspect it was Rahm to be bad cop to Obamas good cop.

So Lakoff fought for true progressive moral ideals and Bill Clinton brushed that off in favor of slogans. Sad.

He was a victim in many ways of centrist politics and Rahm, just as most of us feel Dean was a victim.

Who defines right and left? Most see themselves as in the center. It's all a matter of perspective.
The news always labels Max Baucus as moderate. Who sees Max as moderate?
Dean was right and still is.
The base will stay home on 2010 if the public option is dropped. And if the base stays home the Republicans take charge.

It is not so much whether he is right center or middle. It is what he will do to win.

He has handpicked 3 races here in my state that were really disastrous. The people campaigned on being nice and not offending anyone. One was running against a Republican who had at least 8 court cases pending from his business connections. He still beat the Democrat hands down.

One race here a Democrat was pushed out by manipulating his donors, they even turned the teachers union against him if he would not get out of the race so Republican could run as a Democrat.

It was not just Florida. If you are interested here is one of many things I wrote about it.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/2921

With Rahm it is about winning, and winning at all costs. He told the candidates he controlled through the DCCC that they were NOT to talk about Iraq at all, they were go right on immigration to win.

has his finger on the wrong pulse.
He wants Democrats to be nice to Republicans and yet he makes demands of Democrats that cause defeat.
Rahm should be ignored. His narrow view of the political landscape should disqualify him from being anything other than an arm twister. Policy and strategy are not his strong suits.

and the, now, controlling DLC tells Lakoff to get lost. Go Figure. One of the reasons Howard Dean has been so successful in getting his message out is because he embraced Lakoff and allowed framing to carry his message. Hell, Dean, right now, is the single national voice carrying the public option message. I know there are others but Dean started the public option framing back in March, long before this issue moved to the front burner.

The article is from is now closed except to paid subscribers, so it is so good that a blogger captured the way that Democrats bring down their own.

http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2008/08/who-framed-george-lakoff.html

They did the same to Dean also. They used the media and bloggers and not a soul defended him.

"Just as quickly as lakoff's star rose, a backlash began. For a few years, "he was the man of the hour from top to bottom and bottom to top on the part of floundering Democrats," says Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and author, most recently, of The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals (John Wiley & Sons, 2007). "He was more than the flavor of the week. He was the messianic flavor, the flavor to end all flavors."

Gitlin recalls running into Lakoff at a progressive-policy conference in Washington in 2005, after not seeing him since their time as colleagues at Berkeley in the early 1990s. "He'd changed," Gitlin recalls. "He was very tense and embattled."

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."

http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2008/08/who-framed-george-lakoff.html

And the Atlantic is up to it again on health care:

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/08/forget_liberals_white_house_senate_double_down_onbipartisanship.php

"The White House and Senate Democrats won't buckle to demands from liberals that they revise their health care strategy, officials said today.

White House advisers and Democratic strategists concede that President Obama's poll numbers are at post-inauguration lows, and that the public has grown queasy about the health care debate. But they insist that the discontent has its roots in disenchantment over Washington's ways. They note that large majorities of voters disapprove of how Republicans are handling health care in Congress and that President Obama remains the most popular active politician in the country.

n private, White House officials are selectively attending to threats that interest groups will work to defeat Democrats who oppose a "public option" in the House and Senate. RIchard Trumka, likely the next president of the AFL-CIO, threatened over the weekend to withhold union support from those politicians. The White House isn't scared. An AFL-CIO official close to Trumka said that no one from the administration has been in touch with him to protest his words or endorse him.

The president continues to operate under the belief that liberals will warm to the bill when presented with a goodybag that includes includes an individual mandate, community rating, guaranteed issue, and a minimum required package. There's no chance, really, that a bill WON'T feature these reforms. Quietly, to secure and keep Democrats on board, the White House is going to bargain, providing inducements, like more money for favored projects, etc., in order to secure individual votes."

showing how so many Dems have been gamed for quite awhile now. Hopefully "shining the light" will bring the true "change" we've been looking for.

Been gamed that is.

By the Republican wing of our party.

They are bought and paid for and they are joined by lots of other Democrats and most Re-thugs. No public option, no support. Good luck Democrats. Nice job Mad Fl.

Haven't seen you around the forums in a long time. :hi:

and co-author in DC (before election), and was 'greeted' with kind of sneer at end when I asked whether Dr. Dean's 50-State strategy would be part of Dems approach to election!

One thing I admire about the GOP is that they understand the value of creating synergy between emotion and policy. Sadly, they use this to promote policies that are batshit insane. But they're absolutely right about the synergy part.

Last week I was listening to some wonk on NPR supposedly advocating public health care, but falling all over herself to point out "Well, we certainly don't want to cast the insurance industry as the villains here."

Ah but madam, yes, yes we certainly do want to. First of all, they are villains. Secondly, if you want to generate public enthusiasm for a policy, you have to tap into people's emotions. If you can do this by directing their energy at a Villain, you should thank your lucky stars, not run away from it.

Also, where is the damned Elevator Pitch for universal health care? The GOP has an elevator pitch for the status quo.

:hi:

I just reread your rant, and that part jumped out at me. That is unfortunately the attitude our Democrats seem to have.

They MUST paint the insurance industry as the villains, because they ARE the villains.

There is no other way to look at it.

The GOP understands the value of working up a good head of righteous anger. People respond to this. And if we don't aim the righteous anger in a direction that works for us, the GOP will very cheerfully aim it at us. Like they're doing now.

You can't make people's emotions go away. It's always out there. A huge sea of potential energy. You can either aim it, or let your opponents aim it. But it won't go away. Especially in times of social upheaval and crisis, like now.

Closely related, we never want to make our opponents angry. There is just no way to enact something like Single Payer without enraging a large number of people. Just like there was never going to be a way to enact Civil Rights without enraging the bigots of the world. Tough cookies. The GOP doesn't ever care how many liberals they enrage. In fact, the prospect of enraging liberals energizes them. Small wonder they win.

It's like we can't help ourselves and I cringe every time it happens. In Lakoff's book, "Don't Think of an Elephant," one of the cardinal rules of framing a response is to not, that is *not* repeat the words of your opponent's argument in order to frame your own response.

E.g., as soon as Palin belched "death panels," that phrase was in almost every liberal/progressive blog and blog post headline for weeks, and DU wasn't exempt.

I also cringe when I hear Pres. Obama use it, K.O. use it, R.M. use it, senators and representatives use it, and every pundit from here to eternity use it -- I may have even thrown my own hands up and used it, too. It doesn't matter if it's being debunked, according to Lakoff the purpose of the GOP putting out phrases like these in the first place is to make them into household words that scare people. As soon as I heard that phrase being repeated over and over and over and over by the WH, the media, and the rest of us, I knew the GOP had already won in establishing absolute nonsense as something real to be feared. When it comes to this game, Democrats are mystifyingly still picking up the GOP's ball (in terms of language) and carrying it to our own goal line for them. Except for Barney Frank! His response to the whackadoodle at his town hall was a thing of beauty.

But overall, in the case of winning the battle of linguistics, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

We make it complicated and give them the upper hand even though they are wrong.

:hi:

.. "moron of the century" got almost all of his legislative agenda passed, even under adverse congressional conditions. Obama, who clearly has the political chops, is FLOUNDERING on his central aim.

How can this be? Obama doesn't really want real health care reform very badly, or he wouldn't be fucking it up so blatantly. Dean's rhetoric makes his sound like an amateur. It's pathetic.

"Fourth, the villainizing of real insurance company villains should have begun from the beginning. As it is, the right wing turned the tables. They attributed to government all the disasters of insurance company health care: rationing, long lines, waits for authorizations and visits to specialists, denial of care. The administration is trying to turn that around, but it is harder now, and they are trying it using PolicySpeak, which is the most ineffective of means."

The right wing are masters at messaging, and our side often marginalizes those who speak too firmly.

The narrative is simple:

Insurance company plans have failed to care for our people. They profit from denying care. Americans care about one another. An American plan is both the moral and practical alternative to provide care for our people.

The insurance companies are doing their worst, spreading lies in an attempt to maintain their profits and keep Americans from getting the care they so desperately need. You, our citizens, must be the heroes. Stand up, and speak up, for an American plan.

Language

As for language, the term “public option” is boring. Yes, it is public, and yes, it is an option, but it does not get to the moral and inspiring idea. Call it the American Plan, because that’s what it really is.

The American Plan. Health care is a patriotic issue. It is what your countrymen are engaged in because Americans care about each other. The right wing understands this well. It’s got conservative veterans at Town Hall meeting shouting things like, “I fought for this country in Vietnam, and I’m fight for it here.” Progressives should be stressing the patriotic nature of having our nation guaranteeing care for our people.

A Health Care Emergency. Americans are suffering and dying because of the failure of insurance company health care. 50 million have no insurance at all, and millions of those who do are denied necessary care or lose their insurance. We can’t wait any longer. It’s an emergency. We have to act now to end the suffering and death.

Doctor-Patient care. This is what the public plan is really about. Call it that. You have said it, buried in PolicySpeak. Use the slogan. Repeat it. Have every spokesperson repeat it.

Coverage is not care. You think you’re insured. You very well may not be, because insurance companies make money by denying you care.

Deny you care… Use the words. That’s what all the paperwork and administrative costs of insurance companies are about – denying you care if they can.
Insurance company profit-based plans. The bottom line is the bottom line for insurance companies. Say it.

Private Taxation. Insurance companies have the power to tax and they tax the public mightily. When 20% - 30% of payments do not go to health care, but to denying care and profiting from it, that constitutes a tax on the 96% of voters that have health care. But the tax does not go to benefit those who are taxed; it benefits managers and investors. And the people taxed have no representation. Insurance company health care is a huge example of taxation without representation. And you can’t vote out the people who have taxed you. The American Plan offers an alternative to private taxation.

Is it time for progressive tea parties at insurance company offices?

Doctors care; insurance companies don’t. A public plan aims to put care back into the hands of doctors.

Insurance company bureaucrats. Obama mentions them, but there is no consistent uproar about them. The term needs to come into common parlance.

Insurance companies ration care. Say it and ask the right questions: Have you ever had to wait more than a week for an authorization? Have you ever had an authorization turned down? Have you had to wait months to see a specialist? Does you primary care physician have to rush you through? Have your out-of-pocket costs gone up? Ask these questions. You know the answers. It’s because insurance companies have been rationing care. Say it.

Insurance companies are inefficient and wasteful. A large chunk of your health care dollar is not going for health care when you buy from insurance companies.
Insurance companies govern your lives. They have more power over you than even governments have. They make life and death decisions. And they are accountable only to profit, not to citizens.

The health care failure is an insurance company failure. Why keep a failing system? Augment it. Give an alternative.

The Needed Communication System

A progressive communication system should be started. It should go into every Congressional district. It should concentrate on general progressive ideas. President Obama has articulated what these are.
• The basic values are empathy (we care about people), responsibility for ourselves and others, and the ethic of excellence (making ourselves better and the world better).
• These values form the basis of democracy: It’s because we care about our fellow citizens that we have values like freedom and fairness, for everyone, not just the powerful.
• From that, it follows that government has two moral missions: protection (of consumers, workers, the environment, the old, the sick, the powerless; and empowerment through public works; communication, energy, and water systems; education; banks that work; a court system: and so on. Without them, no one makes it in America. Taxes are what you pay for protection and empowerment by the government, and the more you make the greater your responsibility to maintain the system.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/20/769743/-The-PolicySpeak-Disaster-for-Health-Care

I could not post anymore in my post, but there is so he has to say.

I read Don't Think of an Elephant. Still find myself not practicing his advice. I need to reread and study it. Just picked up a copy of his newer book as well. Ed Schultz once made a remark about Lakoff's advice being over-thinking the message. I am just too novice to understand why his work is ignored, maybe it will just take time before it is more widely appreciated and practiced.

I really expected Democrats to begin with the clear failures of the for-profit Pay-to-Play medical system we have and the best option to solve it -- Single Payer. Or at the least, Single Payer as the public option people could choose.

But they started off by removing the best option and talking compromise with people who didn't really care to offer any workable options. Republicans and their active right wing knew they didn't have any workable plans so they stirred up the anti-government storms to dominate the national dialogue with ridiculous but dangerous distractions.

And yes, I almost fell off my chair when I heard some Democrats say they wanted to be sure to make things fair for the insurance companies ! I'm thinking WHY ON EARTH would we want to make things fair for the folks who have robbed us blind? We made things fair for them last time-- they had over ten years to prove their case and failed miserably. We now have millions more uninsured, millions more bankrupt, while insurance industry profits have soared.

One of the reasons I voted for President Obama was his ability to talk to the American people and explain these things. He could have told people how we have tried, again and again, to make things easier for the private health insurance sector to finance healthcare but those attempts have failed. The private health insurance sector just hasn't proven its case.

I didn't expect President Obama to be a wild liberal. I expected him to be more pragmatic-- here is how our system is broken. Here is a plan that is a mixture of public and private strengths that seems best able to fix those problems. It covers everyone at a lower cost than we pay. Medical services are privately delivered, between you and the doctors of your choice; payments and cost controls are publicly administered and accountable to all. That system has high patient satisfaction ratings and covers everyone. In Canada they call it Single Payer. We are using that system for part of our population and call it Medicare. Our public option is to open up Medicare to all.

We're all political junkies, so we get a rush when somebody rattles off the important facts and statistics (PolicySpeak)

But the average person glazes over immediately. A bunch of stats isn't just boring and confusing, it's a turn-off. I sincerely believe that PolicySpeak is why Kerry and Gore both lost, even though they had the issues on their side, and were superior to Bush.

Liberals tend to disdain simplifying the issues as a "bumper sticker" approach to politics, but it is absolutely effective, and it can be used as a force for good. It's just a tactic, and is only as good or bad as the policies it represents.

I knew that the policy wonks had gotten hold of it, just as they got hold of Kerry's website in 2004, so that you had to go down through a bunch of links to find out what Kerry's positions on various issues were, as laid out in a series of nerdy essays.

In a campaign, you have to keep it simple. Have a few basic points that you keep hammering. The public has a short attention span and is not, by and large, made up of deep thinkers.

Obama should have started by devising a single payer plan but not revealed any details until he could distill it into five sentences.

(Try it. I can distill the Canadian and the British plans into five sentences, even though they are obviously more complicated. The current process, with five different versions of "reform" circulating, looks like floundering.)

Every time he spoke about health care, he should have repeated those five sentences.

Each Democratic spokesperson should have repeated those five sentences in every public appearance.

Any Dem who opposed health care reform should have been directed, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." There should have been an additional warning that any Dem who bad-mouthed the plan would face a well-funded primary challenger in the next election.

Once Obama had built up public support for single-payer, only then should he have started negotiating with the Republicans.

The insurance and drug companies should have had no part in the negotiations whatsoever. You don't ask someone what laws they are willing to abide by.

If the Republicans put up any resistance, Obama should have gone on TV and asked the public to pressure their Congress critters. (This was one of Reagan's favorite tactics, and it worked.)

"The very idea that there is a "center" marginalizes progressives, and sees them as extremists, when they simply share fundamental American values."

marginalize you? Don't you just love 'The left of the left'? what a fucked up frame THAT is. I am insulted by my own party.

responding to the needs of their constituents.

I guess that we need to show them which is really more important.

as it has been referred to so often by party centrists....implies we are neither. Sensible or rational that is.

Emmanuel has to go.

option is a strategy by Rahm to get the Progressive Caucus fired up and engaged.

The Progressive Caucus favors single payer. And the Congressional Black Caucus has also voiced support for single payer.

Excluding single payer from the outset in the committees did more than keeping it from discussions at first. It also left Progressives with not much to be energized about and actively support in the bill.

So, the fight at the table and in the media started out with the Republicans, the non-progressive Democrats and the insurance interests all staking out their positions and pushing back and forth over these.

But there wasn't that much beyond a muted ambivalance from progressive members of Congress toward the bill -lukewarm support at best along with a sense of missed opportunity and disappointment at single payer not being included.

The administration needed to rebalance the discussion and it needed the strength of both Congressional and public progressive voices and their pushback to bring the discussion back to something resembling what they want passed. Simply, they need progressive support to succeed.

How to get that done?

Rahm is someone who seems to me to operate most comfortably from an adversarial position (I keep thinking of that West Wing episode when they say they need an enemy) and he clearly doesn't want to encourage single payer, so why not start dropping hints that the public option - something very important to the progressives to include if they can't have their first choice - is now negotiable and thereby threatened.

That gave progressives something to fight for and actively support. Now you have progressives wading back into the fight and throwing and landing significant punches.

His insights on communication are about as spot as Howard Dean's are into Government.

That's probably why so many "establishment" politicians spend so much time trying to smash him down.
They prefer listening to Frank Luntz.

You've been posting some excellent threads - glad to rec this one.

:applause: