Language and Framing

One of my co-workers, who watched last night's Republican convention against his better judgment, was baffled by the constant jabs at Obama for being a "community organizer." (My co-worker remarked, "Wasn't Jesus Christ sort of a community organizer?") But, as we all know by now, if the Republicans seem inordinately fond of a certain phrase, there's a reason for it. And it won't be a nice reason.

A commenter at Daily Kos has found the explanation, and not surprisingly, it involves Rush Limbaugh:

I had the misfortunate to sit in a cab recently with Rush blaring on radio. I told driver switch the station or lose your tip after hearing Rush going off the wall screetch about community organizer = radicals.

They are reframing community organizing as VERY LEFT WING, filled with -gasp- RADICALS.

It's part of their "Obama's too radically liberal for [the] country" meme.

Billmon adds:

The pieces start to fit together a bit: Rush blasts out the message in its raw form to the true believers, and then they dog whistle back to it at the convention. Classic.

The two theories (race or radicalism?) aren't incompatible, of course: It looks like the game plan is to keep trying to paint Obama as the scary black radical[.]

Update: For the record, Paul Waldman (and others) predicted the GOP's Scary Radical Black Man strategy back in March.

Has someone been reading Paul Waldman? Here's Obama's statement yesterday on the 73-year anniversary of Social Security (barackobama.com):

The Bush privatization plan that Senator McCain now embraces would tell millions of elderly Americans that they're on their own, putting them at risk of falling into poverty. That's not what this country is about.

It's time to reclaim the idea that in this country, we're all in it together. That is America's very promise — and Social Security's very guarantee. And it requires a President who will change the ways of Washington, protect the people's interests, and bring Americans together to meet the great challenges of our time. That is exactly the sort of leadership I intend to offer.

Why is McCain still pushing the tire-gauge attack, even though Obama's right that inflating our tires properly will prevent the need for offshore drilling? Paul Waldman has a theory:

Though there was no particular evidence that the tire-gauge attack was having an effect, the McCain campaign's glee was evident. Just days before, they had alleged that Obama's criticisms of their tactics constituted "fussiness and hysteria," and now here they were brandishing small, phallic objects bearing their opponent's name.

Meanwhile, McCain himself was sent out to pose in front of working oil rigs, to testify to his thirst for pulling more black gold from the earth. The message couldn't be plainer: See that itty-bitty, little tire gauge? If you vote for Obama, that's how big your penis is. If you vote for McCain, on the other hand, your penis is as big as this rig, thrusting its gigantic shaft in and out of the ground! [...]

At 72, John McCain is himself not exactly a simmering pot of heterosexual energy, causing women to swoon at the first whiff of his man-musk. [...] So something tells me this won't be the last time we'll see the McCain campaign calling Barack Obama "fussy," or sending their candidate out to stand in front of big, manly machines. After all this time, it would be far more surprising if they didn't.

We all know that conservation is for wimps — real men drill.

Joseph Romm of the Center for American Progress explains why responding to political attacks is such a tricky business (Huffington Post):

While Obama is a terrific rhetorician, he and his ad team don't understand a core principle of rhetoric. Never repeat the word your opponent is trying to push. That is not just a basic tenet of the 25-century-old art of persuasion, but a well-demonstrated principle of modern psychology.

Never say things like, "They're going to say I'm a risky guy. What they're going to argue is I'm too risky." All that does is plant in the listener's mind the word "risky" associated directly with Obama. It's like saying, "I'm not a crook." [...]

This is not just a long-standing principle of rhetoric, but something demonstrated by numerous recent psychological studies. In one 1990 study, undergraduate students observed sugar from a labeled commercial container as it was poured into two bottles. They then labeled one bottle "sugar" and the other "Not Sodium Cyanide." Students avoided eating sugar from the second bottle even though they had watched it being poured and "even though they had arbitrarily placed that label on it" and knew the label was accurate — that it was not sodium cyanide. Such is the power of words or, rather, the insidious lack of power of the word 'not.'

George W. Bush has never ridden a horse in his life. His activities at his Crawford "ranch" consist of wrangling brush, fishing, and riding his bike. Yet the "liberal media" have always played along with Bush's faux cowboy persona.

Now McCain's doing it too, and once again the major news outlets are being good little enablers (The Washington Independent):

For months, the media has been reporting that Sen. John McCain spends weekends at his "Arizona ranch," where he can be with his family, visit with close friends or occasionally entertain possible vice presidential contenders.

The steady reference to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee's "Arizona ranch" projects a powerful image of the American cowboy that has long played an important role in presidential politics. The description of McCain's sliver of Arizona's outback as a "ranch," however, is misleading at best. And, perhaps inadvertently, it allows McCain to obscure his carpetbagger role in Arizona politics with a veneer of American mythology. [...]

The property is located in a "subdivision" where there is no cattle roping, branding or herding of heifers. Far from a ranch, McCain's getaway is really nothing more than a retreat. But the retired Navy captain and surge advocate certainly doesn't want the media stating that McCain went to his "Arizona retreat" for the weekend, lest that conjure up images of French cowardice.

It's a $1.7-million house surrounded by 20 acres of land. I think that's called an "estate."

Everyone's got a theory about why Hillary Clinton lost (lack of money? ineffective strategy? wrong message?). Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, thinks voters' emotions did her in:

At base, Americans want to know three things about candidates: Do they share my values, do they care about people like me, and do I feel in my gut I can trust them to pursue those values and interests faithfully?

Hillary Clinton ran on issues and competence, focusing, like every Democrat who has failed to win the presidency in the last 40 years, on the factors least predictive of electoral success. She spent too little time creating a compelling, consistent personal narrative that could weave together her own life history with the state of a nation yearning for a different kind of leadership, and too little time attending to the negative stories told and retold about her during nearly two decades of savage Republican branding. [...]

The pundits and pollsters had it backwards. People didn't vote for Obama because they preferred his message of change to Hillary's message of experience. They preferred his message of change because in their gut they preferred Obama.

Ezra Klein:

[Jim] Webb represents something of almost transcendent importance to some post-Bush liberals: The opportunity to out-tough the GOP. A candidate who's not only a liberal, but in no way a sissy. He is the daywalker, combining a progressive's positions with a southern militarist's affectations.

But this is not a sustainable approach to politics. Democrats can't out-tough the GOP. It's possible that James Webb can do it. But he's sui generis; a Democrat who can win at politics when played under Republican rules. Democrats love those candidates, because they think of presidential elections as an away game, and they're endlessly hunting for the candidate who plays best under those conditions.

But Democrats can't win at politics when played under Republican rules. Progressivism can't prosper when politics is played under Republican rules. It needs to make its own rules.

Jim Matheson is another Democrat who's figured out how to win by playing the Republicans' game. (Earlier this year he sent out an e-mail promising his constituents "tax relief." Way to reinforce that conservative frame, Congressman.) Or a Democrat can be like Peter Corroon and champion government's ability to make people's lives better. Let's make Republicans fight on our turf for a change.

Digby says it's started, right on cue:

[In February] I wrote this:

It was only a matter of time before the media began to trivialize Obama and his campaign as a bunch of latte-sipping left-wing hippie elites. That's the 30-year conservative rap on liberals and it's been fully internalized by the MSM and a whole lot of Americans, including some Democrats. When you start to hear the pundits talking about "beer track/wine track" this isn't far behind...

[...] This is a Village meme that has been used over the course of thirty years.(Fifty, if you want to go back to Stevenson.) It has been so internalized among the media elites that the Republicans don't even have to say it out loud anymore. It was inevitable that it would happen. [...]

Nobody should be surprised or unprepared for this by now. I think Obama's campaign people underestimated how this label could be applied to their guy and they allowed it to play out in Pennsylvania in ways that should have been anticipated. But then I have always wondered why Democrats are always off guard every time this hits them.

Here's an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics in which Glenn explains how conservative boasting about "toughness" and "self-reliance" is a way for them to avoid looking at their own inadequacies (antiwar.org):

[Rush] Limbaugh is a physically weak individual, wallowing in a life of depraved hedonism, who has never displayed a single act of physical courage. He avoided combat in Vietnam by claiming that an anal boil rendered him unfit for service (and, once he became famous as an über-warrior, said nothing when a Limbaugh biographer falsely claimed it was due to a football injury). Thus, he takes pleasure in observing acts of American cruelty and barbarism. He finds "levity" in it and cheers it on. It makes him feel powerful and strong, feelings he — understandably — is unable to obtain from his own life and actions.

While the civilized world has recoiled in horror at the excesses and war-hungriness of the United States over the last six years, the only real complaint from our right-wing war cheerleaders about the commander in chief is that he has not given them enough torture, secret prisons, wars of aggression, barbaric slaughter, and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable, because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong. And nothing provides those feelings of strength better than revering a tough-guy male leader and mocking liberal males as weaklings and losers. [...]

It's rather ironic (and almost certainly not coincidental)

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Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, has a column in the Wall Street Journal, of all places:

Consider, for example, the one fateful charge that the punditry and the other candidates have fastened upon Mr. Obama — "elitism." No one means by this term that Mr. Obama is a wealthy person (he wasn't until last year), or even that he is an ally of the wealthy (although he might be that). What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market. [...]

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America — the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one — perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world — the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity — become jes' folks, the most populist fellows of them all.