BERKELEY — Howard Dean is on the line, hailing the man who would be the savior of the Democratic Party.
"What Lakoff brings is a very practical way to talk about things," says Dean, his gravelly voice rasping via cellphone from Boston. "Why it's important to frame issues ... how to do it on specific issues."
Dean is speaking of George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, whose slender treatise on language, brain structure and politics has become a surprise bestseller, making "framing" the season's hot fashion and yielding a growing legion of followers -- as well as critics. (Last month, he addressed House Democrats in Washington at the invitation of their leader, San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi.) Put simply, Lakoff says conservatives have been winning elections -- along with hearts and minds -- through the strategic use of language over the last 30 years, to a point where central tenets of the Republican philosophy are not just common wisdom for millions of voters but, more, are a hard-wired part of their brains.
"People think in frames," Lakoff writes in the opening chapter of his new book, which credits a national network of conservative think tanks and sympathetic media outlets with abetting the GOP's neural conquest. "To be accepted, the truth must fit people's frames. If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off." The title of the book, "Don't Think of an Elephant!," reflects Lakoff's central thesis; naturally, when you read the words, you think of an elephant. His point is that by evoking certain images, or frames, Republicans have forced Democrats to fight elections on the GOP's terms. Two examples: the debate over "tax relief," which frames taxes as an affliction and Democrats as the defenders of an onerous burden. And the "war on terror," which conflates the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with the fighting in Iraq.
"Democrats have to learn how to stop making mistakes," Lakoff says over a turkey-and-avocado sandwich at, fittingly, Berkeley's Free Speech Cafe. A liberal (though "progressive" is his preferred frame), Lakoff is a large man with a small voice, which can make him hard to hear over the classroom hum of fluorescent lights and students rustling in their seats.
The first step for Democrats, he goes on, "is not using the other side's terms, or answering the questions posed by the other side. As soon as they set the topic ... you're dead."
