Democratic Party needs a new message

Centerfield links to this article in The Atlantic which discusses how the Democratic Party keeps trying to repackage old ideas by changing the language used to describe them, rather than actually come up with new ideas. The world is changing, but the Democratic Party has their heads stuck in the sand and is desperately fighting to maintain the status quo. The incredible irony here is that when I was a kid it was always the GOP that was called reactionary. Now it’s the Democrats that fit that category, while the GOP thinks “outside the box”. You might not care for the GOP’s ideas, but at least they’re trying.

Soon after the November elections leading Democrats agreed that the party was ailing and in dire need of a new direction, a new focus, new ideas to lead it forward. “It’s critical we realize why the electorate voted the way it did,” Representative Bob Menendez, of New Jersey, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said of the party’s devastating loss in the presidential election and its setbacks in both houses of Congress. In February, House Democratic lawmakers held a retreat in Virginia to hash out what to do next.

Something miraculous happened. They recovered—or at least they’re behaving that way. Setting aside all the frank talk about the need to re-examine fundamentals, they identified an altogether different sort of affliction. The Democrats returned from Virginia not with an exit strategy for Iraq or a national-security blueprint or an economic policy but with a book—Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, by George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley. Lakoff’s seductive thesis is that how you frame an idea largely determines the response to it. George Miller, a California congressman and an enthusiastic disciple, gave a copy to each member of the caucus, and the notion that “messaging” lies at the heart of the Democrats’ woes has had growing currency in the party ever since.

In essence, messaging (as described by Marc Cooper in last month’s Atlantic) is simply the process of selecting words that impart to voters whatever sentiment the author is pushing. One famous example is the Republican effort to recast the “estate tax”—with its implied application to landed aristocrats only—as the much more menacing (and less discriminating!) “death tax.” Lakoff offers no new policy ideas. Instead he suggests that the Democrats reposition the ones they already have, and spruce up some unpopular terminology while they’re at it. He advocates referring to “trial lawyers” as “public-protection attorneys,” replacing “taxes” with “membership fees,” and generally couching the entire Democratic message in palatable—even deceptive—language in order to simplify large ideas and disguise them behind innocent but powerful-sounding phrases.

Cognitive linguistics may not rate with Iraq, terrorism, and health care in surveys of voters’ concerns (it doesn’t rate at all, actually), but it has achieved that status among a surprising number of Democratic leaders. Lakoff has twice addressed the caucus on how to frame its policies, and his book is a surprise best seller in Washington; it has become as much a partisan totem as the lapel-pin flags worn by Republicans. Lakoff and a handful of other self-appointed gurus have raised tactical phrasing to something approaching a religion.

W ith “messaging efforts” under way throughout the party, more Democrats appear to be coming around to the belief that—election results be damned—what they stand for may not be the problem after all. One of the minor ridiculous figures in Washington these days is an Internet entrepreneur named Richard Yanowitch, who is pointing down another path to enlightenment. He has put together a jargony memo and a working group dedicated to “branding” the Democrats—the thought apparently being that, as if it were a flagging brand of soda, the party can be revived with snazzier packaging and a new sales pitch. And while Lakoff enjoys the sponsorship of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Yanowitch has set up shop under the auspices of her Senate counterpart, Harry Reid.

Yes, the problem really is what the Democrats stand for. The sooner they come to understand that, the sooner they can end the decline of the party. Unfortunately for them it doesn’t seem that their party leadership has come to grips with this idea yet.