A Tale of Two Stories.

Tale #1: Kamala Harris overused the word "story" and looked ridiculous in the Fox News edit.

Tale #2: J.D. Vance said, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do" and gave his antagonists great material for characterizing him as a fabulist.

***

What's the story with "story"? Is there some reason for this word to become more useful than "narrative" or "framing" in speaking about how politicians communicate with the people?

Advisers, behind the scenes, may be saying "story" because they think the voters are rather stupid and childlike and a "story" sounds easier than a "narrative." But "narrative," like "framing," seems to refer to the overall structure of the message, while "story" works better to refer to more specific anecdotes, such as the dog-eating incident.

"Ms. Warren’s plan, the Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act, would create a network of government-funded care centers based partly on the existing Head Start network..."

"... with employees paid comparably to public-school teachers. Families earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level would be able to send their children to these centers for free. Families earning more than that would be charged on a sliding scale, up to a maximum of 7 percent of their income. The plan would be funded by Ms. Warren’s proposed wealth tax on households with more than $50 million in assets, her campaign said. 'The guarantee is about what each of our children is entitled to,' Ms. Warren said at a campaign rally in Los Angeles on Monday, announcing her plans to introduce the bill. 'Not just the children of the wealthy, not just the children of the well-connected, but every one of our children is entitled to good child care.'"

The NYT reports.

Of course, "the children of the wealthy" and "the well-connected" won't be in the government-funded care centers, but you get the rhetoric. The money is supposed to come from the rich — and only the rich — so in the abstract, it sounds logical.

Mark Zandi and Sophia Koropeckyj, economists at Moody’s Analytics, estimated that the plan would cost the federal government $70 billion per year more than it currently spends on child care programs, but would be fully covered by revenue from Ms. Warren’s wealth tax. Their cost estimate was based on the assumption that the plan would produce economic growth by giving lower- and middle-class families more spending money, allowing parents to work longer hours, and creating more and higher-paying jobs for child care workers....

Ms. Warren framed the issue... as a means to promote economic growth and address gender inequality in the work force.....  In a post on Medium on Tuesday, Ms. Warren repeated a personal story she has often told before: that if it hadn’t been for her Aunt Bee, who helped care for her children, she would have had to quit her job as a law school instructor.

A "law school instructor" can't afford to pay for childcare? I'm a tad wary of oft-told "personal stories" from Elizabeth Warren. And much as I do think finding and affording childcare is serious problem, I don't trust the federal government to take over the whole thing, and I don't believe that federal wealth tax is ever going to happen. (Doesn't it violate the Constitution?) And yet, I'm open to the argument that Head Start has been a good program, and it sounds like the expansion of Head Start to bring in more and more people. Warren has reason to make it sound innovative, but maybe it's just more money for the same old program.

Katie Hamm, vice president for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal think tank, said that framing was significant. “It reflects the fact that the issue has clearly grown into the public policy sphere and the economic policy sphere, where before it had been relegated to a family policy issue or an education issue,” she said.

So...  more money for the same old program, but let's talk about it in a new way. Let's do framing.

I tried to watch Trump's CPAC speech. I'll just read the transcript and blog it, beginning at the place where I clicked it off and said "It's a white power speech."

The video is embedded in the previous post, along with some comments from last night's open thread. I watched a little, thought Trump looked a lot better than usual, theorized that he'd used that classic beauty trick to reduce puffiness, then clicked it off when he said:

Year after year, leaders have stood on this stage to discuss what we can do together to protect our heritage, to promote our culture, and to defend our freedom.

Here's what I said out loud (to my audience of one): "That's a dog whistle. White power." Questioned, I said, "heritage... culture... freedom..." Even freedom? "Yes, in context with our heritage, our culture, and then our freedom. Our freedom."

I switched to the transcript (here, at Vox). I'll live-blog my reading of it, with excerpts and commentary. Trump forefronts his judicial appointments, presumably because this is the place where he can claim and successfully vaunt* conservative credentials:

We have confirmed a record number, so important, of circuit court judges and we’re going to be putting in a lot more. And they will interpret the law as written and we have confirmed an incredible new Supreme Court justice, a great man, Neil Gorsuch. Right. 

He admits no doubt here. Conservative = doing it right = Gorsuch. I won't slow this post down to lawprofsplain what's specious about all that.

Trump himself swiftly moves on to his second-best accomplishment, taxes:

We have passed massive, biggest in history, tax cuts and reforms. I don’t use the word reform...

I didn't just say what I said.

"Only morons pay the estate tax" is a reason (if it's true) to get rid of the estate tax.

It may sound rude, but it's memorable, and it makes a point. Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser, said it and also resaid it more politely: The estate tax is only paid by “rich people with really bad tax planning.”

The NYT has an editorial about it, in which it uses the word "loopholes" to refer to the provisions of the tax code that allow for the avoidance of the estate tax, and "windfall" for what Cohn's "morons" would get if the estate tax were repealed.

I'm tempted to ask Why doesn't the NYT care about morons? Shouldn't the law protect those who lack the intelligence to take steps to protect themselves? But I guess the NYT would say that the rich who are doing intelligent tax planning are bad people, and the rich who are exposing themselves to the estate tax are good people. No need to give a "windfall" to the good rich people who decline to use the tax avoidance provisions (the "loopholes"). Let's just give them a pat on the head and move on to denouncing the bad rich, the ones who aren't paying their fair share.

On the other side of the argument are Republicans who call the estate tax the "death tax" and stress that it hurts small businesses and farmers — including businesses owned by women and minorities.

The NYT says this characterization of who pays is wrong. It says (and see if you find this as hard to follow as I did):

So who actually does pay estate tax?... A few dozen farmers, and even fewer minority business owners. About 80 family farmers or small-business people would be subject to the estate tax this year, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center — a far cry from the “millions” Mr. Trump wrongly claims. The biggest winners in an estate tax repeal wouldn’t be struggling ranchers, minority contractors or mom-and-pop grocers. They’d be people like Mr. Trump’s kids, unless they’re …

Morons. “Only morons pay the estate tax,” Gary Cohn, Mr. Trump’s chief economic adviser, told Senate Democrats, meaning, it was later explained, “rich people with really bad tax planning.” Many of the very wealthy use loopholes, like trusts, to avoid paying inheritance tax. We don’t know where Mr. Trump’s kids would stand because Mr. Trump has never fulfilled his promise to publicly release his tax information.

First, how would "people like Mr. Trump's kids" be the "biggest winners in an estate tax repeal... unless they're morons"? Shouldn't it be the biggest winners will be people like Mr. Trump's kids only if they're morons? If they're not morons, they're already using the "loopholes." They have good tax planning. They don't need the repeal. The repeal is only needed by those who are too moronic to get tax planning. (Actually, it's not the heirs who do the tax planning. The question isn't whether Trump's kids are morons, but whether Trump is a moron.)

I guess that's just an editing screwup, where it seemed cute to connect those 2 paragraphs. The idea is: Don't think of anybody sympathetic. Exclude all the farmers and mom-and-pop people. Visualize those Trump kids. That's who you should think of the repeal as helping. Now, let's think about morons. The Trump kids, like a lot of rich kids, are probably protected by tax planning, but some of them are morons (or, really, have parents who are morons). Do you care? Trump-kid types sometimes get less money because of a moronic failure to do tax planning: Who wants to help them?! We're currently raking in revenue from these unsympathetic nitwits. Why is that a problem to be fixed? That's the argument that, I think, was intended.

Finally, let's look at the radical discrepancy between Trump's "millions" and the number 80 that the NYT used. The Times is referring (I'll assume correctly) to the number who become subject to the estate tax in a given year. Trump said he wanted "[t]o protect millions of small businesses and the American farmer." His set of persons is everyone who might ever be subject to the tax, dying over a period of many years, and including people who might not, in the end, have enough to be subject to the tax but just have to worry and make decisions under the influence of the tax and those who are under pressure to use the services of tax professionals because they've heard that to fail to do so is to be a moron. 

"As long as white children are constructed as innocent, we must continue to demand that children of color are as well."

"Because the idea of childhood innocence carries so much political force, we can’t allow it to be a whites-only club. The problem, however, is that every time we insist that the gates of innocence open to children of color, we limit ourselves by language, a 'frame,' as the linguist George Lakoff would say, that is embedded in racism. When we argue that black and brown children are as innocent as white children, and we must, we assume that childhood innocence is purely positive. But the idea of childhood innocence itself is not innocent: It’s part of a 200-year-old history of white supremacy.... All children deserve equal protection under the law not because they’re innocent, but because they’re people. By understanding children’s rights as human rights, we can begin to undermine the political power of childhood innocence, a cultural formation that has proved, over and over, to be one of white supremacy’s most potent weapons."

From "Let Black Kids Just Be Kids" by Harvard African-American Studies professor Robin Bernstein (in the NYT).

You might want to read that alongside this New Yorker article, which I happened to read earlier today, "The Life of a South Central Statistic/My cousin became a convicted felon in his teens. I tried to make sure he got a second chance. What went wrong?," by Danielle Allen. Excerpt:

A kid from a troubled home, trapped in poverty, without a stable world of adults coördinating care for him, starts pilfering, mostly out of an impatience to have things. In Michael’s first fourteen years, his story includes not a single incidence of violence, aside from the usual wrestling matches with siblings. It could have had any number of possible endings. But events unfold along a single track. As we make decisions, and decisions are made for us, we shed the lives that might have been. In Michael’s fifteenth year, his life accelerated, like a cylinder in one of those pneumatic tubes, whisking off your deposit at a drive-through bank. To understand how that acceleration could happen, though, another story is needed....

"Death" framing worked so well for Republicans, so Hillary Clinton tries to deploy it for the Democratic side.

Oh, Hillary. It seems so sad. She attempts a tweet:

Forget death panels. If Republicans pass this bill, they’re the death party.

Will DEATH!!!! work as a political message?

The Republicans famously, successfully used "death" to reframe political issues: death tax, death panels. But those were more precise issues that really had to do with death. "Death tax" was a reframing of "estate tax," and "death panels" had to do with end-of-life medical decisionmaking.

"Death party" asks us to believe the Republican Party is happy to let us die.

I would think that crudely shouting DEATH!!!! would cause many people to turn away from the whole discussion. And for many others — especially people facing life-threatening conditions or with family members who are dying or have died — the harping on death causes pain and anxiety.

Is this the right way to try to talk to people?

"My mother, who is a Tea Party person, started saying ‘government schools’ all the time... I remember thinking, ‘Wow.’”

Said a woman in Kansas, quoted in a NYT article called "Public Schools? To Kansas Conservatives, They’re ‘Government Schools.'"

Experts are also quoted, including linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, who was reminded of Ronald Reagan's famous line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’”:

“People tend to trace the demonization of government to Reagan,” Dr. Tannen said. “That’s kind of iconic, how he was using it. He set the government up as the enemy.”

And I'm reminded of the 1923 Supreme Court case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, that said:

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.

"Lazy Men Are Responsible for the Great Orgasm Deficit."

A headline at Cosmopolitan. Excerpt:

These days, it feels like men are letting themselves off the hook for one-sided orgasms a little too easily.... "I know some women don't have orgasms every time. Don't worry about it." Now that he's framed it like you're the one who's being forgiven for your tricky, finicky genitals...

Framing. It's not just for politics.

Rush Limbaugh on gay marriage: "This issue is lost."

Fascinating to hear it phrased that way by Rush Limbaugh, who for years — for mockery purposes — has played the audio clip of Harry Reid saying "This war is lost."

The Reid clip works as mockery because Reid was so wrong, wrong about the war being lost and wrong to express the demoralizing opinion. So in Rush's statement yesterday I hear a little nudge, a little cue that the issue isn't lost. Rush is answering an email from someone who feels that Rush has never expressed his opinion on gay marriage, and Rush begins with "Is my position on this really not known?"

This is a great teaser, keeping us listening at the end of the third hour of the show, which has already been full of talk about gay marriage. We're brought up short: Do we really not know what Rush thinks on the subject? He shifts away from that topic to a reverie about a conversation with a friend about "the left" and "the language game." We're looking at the show transcript here, but as a subscriber to the website, I'm hearing the audio as well, and it's slow and drawn out, like he's going to circle around before he gets to answering that emailed question, which nags me: I find myself assuming that Rush doesn't really care what gay people do in their private lives. He's not bound enough to tradition to have kept his own marriage vows, having divorced 3 times, and he hasn't put his life's energy into raising children. If gay people want to commit to monogamy, let them have their go at it. Good luck being better at it than I've been. That's what I think he thinks.

This is the week that the election got framed as capitalism versus socialism.

Did you notice? Did you pay attention to how it happened, who made it happen, and why?

Our mindsets have been subtly arranged, and what we think will build from this template. These moves have been made. The question now is, what are the next moves? There are different ways to play from this point, different ways to win.

I'm asking you to look backwards — how did we get here? — and forward — what should the opponents do from this point? Feel free to disagree with me about whether something big happened this week, and we can fight about that too.

ADDED:

If the 2012 election comes down to capitalism v. socialism...
	Americans will vote for capitalism.
	Americans might be tricked into picking socialism, but not if they think clearly.
	Americans will pick socialism as long as they don't see the label "socialism."
	Americans will vote for socialism.
pollcode.com free polls

"Be afraid. Be very afraid."

I ended the previous post with that old sci-fi movie tag line.

I think what is going on right now is an effort to create a mindset, and emotional orientation toward Romney. Business is an alien entity. It's scary and mystifying, and Romney is part of that. You can't understand it, so don't even try. [NYT columnist Gail] Collins is planting the seed of fear. You laugh now. You won't even feel it. But it will grow. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Please pay attention to that. It's what's happening right now, and it is an effort to emotionally manipulate people in a way Obamans are counting on. It's The Framing.

But what is the source of "Be afraid, be very afraid"? I was thinking "Alien." But the original "Alien" tagline was "In space no one can hear you scream."

"Be afraid, be very afraid" came from... Googling... the 1986 version of "The Fly." I love that movie, the one with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.



Speaking of tags, this blog has long had a tag for "insect politics" — based on the line from "The Fly" "Have you heard of insect politics? Neither have I."

Full text: "Have you heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don't have politics.... they're very brutal. No compassion.... no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. I'd like to, but.... I'm an insect.... who dreamed he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake."

And speaking of Obama and "The Fly," remember Obama and the fly?



And speaking of dreams being over? Remember the dream?

"The Democratic Party has a good story to tell, but they don’t know how to tell it."

Says Robert Redford. Ironically, he is telling the story that Democrats keep telling: that they have a good story to tell, but they don’t know how to tell it.

I don't think that is a good story. If only we were better propagandists! It's the soothing, mind-numbing story that George Lakoff has been telling them for years.

Framefail in the "war on women" — reframed by Drudge.

This has been up all morning at Drudge:



Let's look at those links. 

The first small-print one — "Adviser to Obama, DNC Attacks Ann Romney" — goes to this video clip of DNC advisor Hilary Rosen, trying to say that Mitt Romney "doesn't connect" on the issue of women struggling economically: He's "running around the country, saying, well, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing." She pauses, then blurts out the unfortunate line, which she clearly thinks is a great zinger: "Guess what? His wife has actually not worked a day in her life." She ends with "He seems so old fashioned."

That's the framing of Mitt Romney that the Obama campaign wants: Who are these out of touch people? Ironically, it was profoundly out of touch with the many women who work in the home (and with the many women who've professed to respect the choice that some women make to devote themselves to homemaking). This is the problem with these framing efforts. You have to brainstorm, imagining all the ways in which your opponents can use it against you. Framefail.

"How children’s ‘play’ is being sneakily redefined."

Redefined? What is the right definition? It seems to me that the definition — for education policy discussion purposes — should embody our reasons for thinking that play is something we should care about children getting the chance to do.

"Gov. Scott Walker said... he should have done more to prepare the public for his plan to eliminate most collective bargaining for public employees."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

"We had not built enough of the case" for the sweeping plan, Walker said...

"What I should have done, from a political standpoint, was build that case sooner"....

"They defined it as a rights issue," Walker said. "It's not a rights issue. It's an expensive entitlement." 

He's saying he let the other side frame the issue, and he should have gotten out in front with his framing. I know conservatives love to read Saul Alinsky and appropriate advice that was originally written to further lefty causes. Now, it sounds like Walker has been reading George Lakoff stuff about "framing":

[T[he progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics.

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline - physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

Lakoff pushes liberals to get their "frame" into the public's head. Walker is saying he wishes he'd pushed the conservative frame. Walker seemed to assume that people understood the problem the way he did and would — after the election — trust him to do what he thought was needed. He wasn't sufficiently into propaganda, he's essentially saying. To say that, of course, is a form of propaganda (because he's subtly flattering himself). But if the other side is aggressively propagandizing, don't you have to enter the fray and counterpropagandize? You have to keep talking to people, even when you have the power to act quietly and industriously, getting things done.

Beware of the death unions.

Rush Limbaugh talked to Governor Scott Walker:

[W]e agreed that in terms of messaging, the whole term "collective bargaining rights" has somehow attached itself to people across the country as the essence of fairness such that if a state or an entity of some kind seeks to "deny citizens" -- union members -- their "collective bargaining rights," it is seen as an act of profound unfairness.

It's a messaging thing. Because, of course, "collective bargaining," when you're talking about a public union and public sector employees, who are they collectively bargaining against? Taxpayers. They're bargaining against the people as a whole....

There's gonna have to be something to replace "collective bargaining rights" here as a phrase to explain what's going on. You could say it's "money laundering;" you can say it's "usurpation of taxpayer dollars," 'cause that's what it is. 

Heh. This is like all that endless Democratic Party talk about how the Republicans are doing a better job of "framing" the issues — calling the estate tax the "death tax" and so on. "Death panels." Maybe something with "death"? That seems to work well for Republicans. Try railing against the "death unions" with their "death bargaining." That might scare everybody.

The Republican National Committee wants to rebrand the Democrats the "Democrat Socialist Party."

Politico reports.

Chairman Michael Steele has said that this "will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans," but the answer to that is — per Politico — "Who cares?"

"It is time to drop the term 'the environment' and talk about 'the air we breathe, the water our children drink.'"

Because we're dumb, and you need to manipulate us. More blather about "framing." Hey, maybe you need another word for "framing" — you need to reframe framing — because I think that’s a code word for progressive liberals...

"Framing."

Matt Bai has a new article in the NYT Magazine about Democratic Party politics. He wrote a terrific article in the magazine last October called "Kerry's Undeclared War." (The article can be read for a fee here, and my post about it here contains some substantial quotes.)

The new piece is called "The Framing Wars." Lots of Democrats these days trace their problems not to ideas or agendas but to "framing."

Exactly what it means to ''frame'' issues seems to depend on which Democrat you are talking to, but everyone agrees that it has to do with choosing the language to define a debate and, more important, with fitting individual issues into the contexts of broader story lines. In the months after the election, Democratic consultants and elected officials came to sound like creative-writing teachers, holding forth on the importance of metaphor and narrative.

Republicans, of course, were the ones who had always excelled at framing controversial issues, having invented and popularized loaded phrases like ''tax relief'' and ''partial-birth abortion'' and having achieved a kind of Pravda-esque discipline for disseminating them. But now Democrats said that they had learned to fight back. ''The Democrats have finally reached a level of outrage with what Republicans were doing to them with language,'' Geoff Garin, a leading Democratic pollster....

In January, Geoff Garin conducted a confidential poll on judicial nominations, paid for by a coalition of liberal advocacy groups. He was looking for a story -- a frame -- for the filibuster that would persuade voters that it should be preserved, and he tested four possible narratives. Democratic politicians assumed that voters saw the filibuster fight primarily as a campaign to stop radically conservative judges, as they themselves did. But to their surprise, Garin found that making the case on ideological grounds -- that is, that the filibuster prevented the appointment of judges who would roll back civil rights -- was the least effective approach. When, however, you told voters that the filibuster had been around for over 200 years, that Republicans were ''changing rules in the middle of the game'' and dismantling the ''checks and balances'' that protected us against one-party rule, almost half the voters strongly agreed, and 7 out of 10 were basically persuaded. It became, for them, an issue of fairness.

The amusing thing about that to a conlaw professor is that the sort of judges the Democrats try to appoint are the ones who don't bother to enforce structural safeguards (like checks and balances) and don't care whether something's been around a long time or not. So the successful framing, ironically, was to package the argument for liberal judges in the rhetoric of conservative judges.

Read the whole article. Most of it is about George Lakoff and his trendy book about political rhetoric called "Don't Think of an Elephant." I haven't read that book, but I've glanced at it long enough to see that it's a remix of his material from "Metaphors We Live By," -- an excellent book, which I have read -- and "Moral Politics" -- an okay book that classifies the rhetoric of the two parties (Democrats speak Mommy, and Republicans speak Daddy).

According to Lakoff, Democrats have been wrong to assume that people are rational actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says, cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds, and if the facts don't fit the frame, our brains simply reject them. Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be ''activated'' by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown at us.

Lakoff taps some subtle truths about how the mind works, but how do those minds taking in Lakoff's rhetoric work?

When I asked Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the minority whip and one of Lakoff's strongest supporters, whether Lakoff had talked to the caucus about this void of new ideas in the party, Durbin didn't hesitate. ''He doesn't ask us to change our views or change our philosophy,'' Durbin said. ''He tells us that we have to recommunicate.'' In fact, Durbin said he now understood, as a result of Lakoff's work, that the Republicans have triumphed ''by repackaging old ideas in all new wrapping,'' the implication being that this was not a war of ideas at all, but a contest of language.

Apparently, there are frames deeply embedded in the minds of Democratic politicos that "simply reject" the parts of Lakoff's message that don't fit.

And what of all the Americans who sit around watching the politicians on TV? I think their most basic frame is the one my father used in response to nearly any political argument: "It's all semantics!"