Earlier in the week, in Quick Hits, Mark Matson drew attention to George Lakoff's recommended diary at DKos, "The Obama Code", presented in advance of Obama's address to Congress and the nation by way of an exlanation of how Obama approaches politics generally, and political communications in particular, in a distinctive manner.
In my view, Lakoff makes the best case for Obama of anyone I have read-far superior to the secret plan variants. And yet, I think his account falls short. But it does so in a way that nonetheless sheds a great deal of light. Lakoff's approach to analyzing Obama is based on his analysis of liberalism and conservatism in terms of contrasting family models-Strict Father and Nurturant Parent (SF/NP for short)-which he first described and explained in Moral Politics in 1996. While I believe this is an extremely important insight into the organizing structure of American politics, I do not see it as the whole story. Instead, I see Lakoff as providing one extremely important perspective which needs to be complimented with other perspectives, combined into a comprehensive model.
In this diary, I want to look at "The Obama Code" in terms of where some crucial problems emerge in terms of Lakoff's explanation, viewing them not as refutations of Lakoff's general theory, but as points where other explanatory mechanisms come into play, altering or mitigating the impact of the causal factors in Lakoff's theory. I will also point out an example where other explanatory mechanisms reinforce Lakoff's theory. I hope to have time to follow up with another diary describing the outlines of the more general structure. For now, I will simply reintroduce a key aspect of that more extensive model, which I have described before, the template provided by Sidanius and Pratto's Social Dominance Theory (SDT) the macro-structure of which can be seen in the chart that appears below the flip:
STATE BLOGS
