that there's a cautiousness bordering on paranoia in the Obama camp. Unsettled by the he's a Muslim emails campaign, Jeremiah Wright, the attacks on his patriotism, they place debunking these attacks above all else.
I hope he's right, and that I'm just being paranoid, too. But I think it's important to attempt a theoretical understanding of why Obama might be really committed to a path that repeatedly puts him sharply at odds with us. No one would be happier than me to discover that this analysis is not necessary. But the past two weeks argue fairly strongly that it is.
To that end, here I want to tighten up the analytical foundation behind an important link in this argument. In that diary, I quoted approvingly from a column by Arianna Huffington, on the practical folly of the direction that Obama was taking--a column that was attacked by one commentator, kanzeon, starting here with an ad hominem attack on her:
Obama hasn't shifted his strategy. Arianna is smart enough to understand that.
She's an old Republican who hated Clinton and wanted to exert her power. So she played along with Obama's game.
Despite his hamfisted approach, kanzeon is taking on a soft target, since Arriana is not fully articulating the background of her argument. Rather than get into an argument about she wrote, I want to go back to the underlying source, which I know that Huffington knows well, and that is the work of George Lakoff.
While Lakoff has repeatedly praised Obama for his intuitive understanding of framing, he has written analyses that can enable us to make our own judgments and analyses of how Obama may be failing in particular ways--particularly right now. That, in turn can help us refine our understanding of how Lakoff's analysis can both be refined and integrated into a broader framework of political analysis. All this I explain and explore on the flip....
As Lakoff explains in Don't Think of An Elephant, Democrats commonly make the mistake of thinking of a campaign in terms of marketing campaigns, with the candidate as product and issue positions product features. This is a losing approach, and it appears to be the logic that Obama has been following in his recent right turn.
It contrasts sharply with the very different approach he took during the primary, as Lakoff exaplained, precognitively, in this passage. The details are not the same, since Obama is actually embracing positions that do not necessarily poll well with the American people, but they are popular with Versailles, and his campaign appears to be operating as if they were poll-supported. (Emphasis is mine):
A third mistake is this: There is a metaphor that political campaigns are marketing campaigns where the candidate is the product and the candidate's positions on issues are the features and qualities of the product. This leads to the conclusion that polling should determine which issues a candidate should run on. Here's a list of issues. Which show the highest degree of support for a candidate's position? If it's prescription drugs, 78 percent, you run on a platform featuring prescription drugs. Is it keeping social security? You run ona platform featuring social security. You make a list of the top issues, and those are the issues you run on. You also do market segmentation: District by district, you find out the most important issues, and those are the ones you talk about when you go to that district.
It does not work. Sometimes it can be useful, and, in fact, the Republicans use it in addition to their real practice. But their real practice, and the real reason for their success, is this: They say what they idealistically believe. They say it; they talk to their base using the frames of their base. Liberal and progressive candidates tend to follow their polls and decide that they have to become more "centrist" by moving to the right. The conservatives do not move at all to the left, and yet they win!
Why? What is the electorate like from a cognitive point of view? Probably 35 to 40 percent of people-maybe more these days-have a strict father model governing their politics. Similarly, there are people who have a nurturant view governing their politics, probably another 35 to 40 percent. And then there are all the people in the "middle."
Notice that I said governing their politics. We all have both models, either actively or passively. Progressives see a John Wayne movie or an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and they can understand it. They do not say, "I don't know what's going on in this movie." They have a strict father model, at least passively. And if you are a conservative and you understand The Cosby Show, you have a nurturing parent model, at least passively. Everyone has both worldviews because both worldviews are widely present in our culture, but people do not necessarily live by one worldview all of the time.
So the question is, Are you living by one of the family-based models? But that question is not specific enough. There are many aspects of life, and many people live by one family-based model in one part of their lives and another in another part of their lives. I have colleagues who are nurturant parents at home and liberals in their politics, but strict fathers in their classrooms. Reagan knew that blue-collar workers who were nurturant in their union politics were often strict fathers at home. He used political metaphors that were based on the home and family, and got them to extend their strict father way of thinking from the home to politics.
This is very important to do. The goal is to activate your model in the people in the "middle." The people who are in the middle have both models, used regularly in different parts of their lives. What you want to do is to get them to use your model for politics -to activate your worldview and moral system in their political decisions. You do that by talking to people using frames based on your worldview.
While Huffington uses different terms, this is clearly what she's talking about in terms of Obama abandoning his brand. His brand is articulating a progressive worldview--which Lakoff has repeatedly praised him for--albeit in his own voice, and without explicitly identifying with other progressives. His shift now is not just to explicitly attacking progressives, but also to latching onto a set of specific issues employing the product placement mindset. It is a profound shift, and Lakoff's passage above explains why.
So how can someone who does such a good job of intuitively framing things in phase one, during the primary, revert so sharply in phase two, since the primary ended?
That's a big subject, but for the most part it can be summed up quite simply: For the past 40-odd years, the right has been engaged in an all-out Gramscian culture war/war of position--a battle to control our defining cultural institutions, while the left has not.
One result of this is that Obama himself is severely disoriented when it comes to the nature of what's meant by "left" and "right" and the relationship between them. He has, to a remarkable extent and apparently unconsciously, internalized a wide range of rightwing frames, including stereotypical images of a progressive fringe that is beyond the pale (1970s-style anti-military love-ins, anyone?) This is why, for example, he can defend the right to dissent in a speech about patriotism, while at the same time recycling rightwing myths about how the anti-war DFHs did things "that remain[s] a national shame to this day."
In short, there is a severe disconnect between whatever progressive heart Obama may possess, and a head that's grown up in a world dominated by rightwing ideological fantasies.
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