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By Jeff Shesol October 31 at 2:07 PM

THE ALL NEW DONT THINK OF AN ELEPHANT!

Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

By George Lakoff

Chelsea Green. 168 pp. Paperback, $15

Progressives, as a rule, do not look back with nostalgia at 2004 a dismal, disempowering year, a time of swiftboating and flip-flopping and generally being left sputtering in the face of the Bush-Cheney barrage. One exception to that rule is Barack Obama, whose keynote address at that years Democratic National Convention launched him toward the office he now holds.

There is at least one other exception: George Lakoff, distinguished professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. For Lakoff, those were heady days. The election and its aftermath brought sold-out speaking gigs; invitations to dinner with Democratic strategists, Hollywood liberals and former president Bill Clinton; the label guru; and, at one memorable gathering of Senate Democrats, hugs.

In the wake of John Kerrys defeat, Democrats turned to Lakoff to teach them how to communicate, how to get and stay on message, how in Lakoffs semi-scientific parlance to frame. The professors calling card the one that earned him a seat at Democratic tables that year was a handbook titled Dont Think of an Elephant! In it, Lakoff set out, for a lay audience, his theory that physical structures within the brain, activated by the use of coded and morally loaded language, determine our responses to political stimuli. Put differently, framing is what Republicans were doing when they said, repeatedly, that John Kerry looked French. As your cognitive unconscious was well aware, this was not a compliment.

Ten years on, Lakoff is still a proponent of framing. He puts it to work in the title of his new book, The All New Dont Think of an Elephant! As readers of the previous edition will discover, this one is not all new; it is, in point of fact, only slightly new, but Lakoff has always held that progressives put too much stock in facts. He begins the book with a quick victory lap: In 2004, he tells us, hardly anyone had heard of or thought about ... how social and political issues were framed. Today, millions of people have. That, Lakoff notes, is a lot for one small book to have accomplished.

Nor is that all. The Elephant playbook, its author contends, helped Obama to win the White House and Senate Democrats to expand their majority in 2008. Hope, as we know, was the mantra that year, and Lakoffs hope was that the superior framing would continue. Well, it didnt. Within months of Obamas inauguration, Lakoff believes, the Democratic Party slid back into its mumbling, losing ways and the GOP regained framing superiority in public discourse at the national level. Now, having snatched back the ground they lost in 2008, the Republicans are setting their framing sights on the cities as well as the states. Republican metaphors know where you live.

Excerpt from:
Book review: The All New Dont Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff