His Rockridge Institute has no more funding. A large part of a chapter in a book by Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed nearly finished him among DC elites. Kind of sad...they have done a good job on others the last few years.
In this part they totally trash his ideas, misinterpret them, and twist them. Sorry about that, George Lakoff, they decided it was time for you to go...just like others.
The Planhe leading proponent of this reassurance is Professor George Lakoff, a University of California linguist and author of the best-selling tract Don't Think of an Elephant! Lakoff's book, a compilation of speeches on what he calls "Frame Semantics," has sold about one-quarter million copies since 2004.
Why have so many Democrats snapped up Lakoff's manual? Because it tells them exactly what they want to hear. As might be expected from a linguistics professor and self-proclaimed "metaphor analyst," the book contends that Democrats' biggest problem is the words we use. All progressives need to do to win the political debate, he argues, is to change the conceptual "frame" in which it takes place. According to Lakoff, Democratic arguments are bouncing off the electorate's collective subconscious because conservatives have set the frame and we haven't. To be fair, Lakoff isn't wrong about everything. He understands the importance of values and an agenda. He calls the lack of ideas "hypocognition" -- which he says was first discovered in a Tahitian tribe where suicide was rampant because it lacked the concept of grief. One man's frame is another man's pine box.
But Lakoff is flat-out wrong to suggest that Democrats are losing just because Republicans know all the right words. His favorite example is that conservatives learned to call tax cuts "tax relief." He's right that Republicans make a fetish out of using the most misleading, Orwellian words they can find. But let's be honest: Bush didn't manage to pass his tax cuts because he called them tax relief. (Most of the time, he called them tax cuts.) Bush got the chance to pass his disastrous tax cuts because Democrats were too slow to offer real tax reform proposals of our own. The tax debate illustrates what Al From, who founded the Democratic Leadership Council, has astutely observed: In a country with three self-identified conservatives for every two self-identified liberals, when neither side's agenda is sufficiently compelling, Republicans usually win by default.
The real danger of Lakoff 's analysis is that it reinforces Democrats' favorite excuse -- that Republicans have succeeded by pulling the wool over Americans' eyes, and that we'll start winning as soon as we learn the same dark arts.
Some Democrats want to believe that we can stand in front of the mirror and practice the words to win America back. "Ever wonder how the radical right has been able to convince average Americans to repeatedly vote against their own interests?" Ariana Huffington says in plugging Lakoff 's book, "It's the framing, stupid!" One glowing reviewer declared, "While Democrats were campaigning as if policy mattered, Republicans were waging their campaign on a far more fundamental, and more powerful, psychological level."
Uh Uh, Rahm, you really don't get it. You are siding with those Republicans to keep "liberals" at arms length. You have basically recruited candidates to run as Democrats who share Republican ideals.
Sorry, George, you and those you worked with were making too much of a progressive difference. It was time for you to go just like the others. And Rahm heads to the center of power, the White House.
It's easy when you have the media's attention, it's easy when have the power. Bye, George.
Rahm even called Lakoff a highbrow.
Highbrows like Lakoff and street fighters like Rove share the same Hack fallacy that we can game history to our advantage. In truth, we don't get to pick and choose between the great challenges the country faces. Even in calmer times, voters decided what was on their minds, not politicians. Today, we have no choice but to play the hand we're dealt: a long war against terrorism, a long struggle to compete economically, and a long way to go to build a culture of community here at home.
Rahm is Chief of Staff, a place of power. Further he praises Al From and Mark Penn in the same chapter in which he insults Lakoff. He ridicules those who think Democrats should "oppose.
"Giving an answer. The final myth that Democrats must leave behind is the idea that "oppose, oppose, oppose" is a successful formula for an opposition party to escape being in the opposition. A successful opposition must oppose and propose, and do both well. Democrats in Congress have an obligation to stand firm against the Republicans whenever they're wrong, which is all too often. At the same time, however, we have an obligation to ourselves and to the future to suggest a clear alternative path for the country to follow. As Mark Penn found in a survey for BLUEPRINT, three out of four Americans -- and five out of six rank-and-file Democrats -- are more interested in hearing Democrats' agenda than what's wrong with the Republicans' agenda (see Moment of Opportunity, by Al From, BLUEPRINT, Vol. 2006, No. 1).
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