Lakoff's advice springs from his rethinking of how American voters operate and from a few ideas borrowed from cognitive science, an approach to language conservatives found years ago "by the seat of their pants."
His book "Don't Think of an Elephant," with a foreword by Howard Dean, came out on Sept. 15 and quickly made a cameo among Amazon's bestselling books. What's surprising about Lakoff's analysis is how it can be used to make sense of otherwise conflicting ideas. His theory of political preferences, taken on its merits, offers insights into the Zell Miller enigma and might explain the mystery of why people don't vote in their self-interest.
In the reality show called American politics, you don't need to master the issues to take the White House. In fact, Lakoff and many others now argue, a stance on an issue matters less than the candidate's "values," a recognizable moral system. Many Democrats don't vote for their self-interests, and, as Thomas Frank pointed out in his recent book "What's the Matter with Kansas," most poor Kansans don't either.
"People always vote their values," Lakoff said. Democrats and liberals always assume people vote their self-interests, he said, like shoppers with a grocery list. "Polls and focus groups are based on this metaphor of a political campaign as a marketing campaign. That's just wrong. Cognitive science shows us that's not how people work."
How voters' minds work is, like the study of decision making, a source of endless debate. Political scientists assume that most people skip the hard work of immersing themselves in the issues before picking a candidate and look for shortcuts instead. But what are they, and which come first?
Lakoff's hypothesis is that political allegiances reflect two worldviews everybody shares. In his book "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," he labeled them the Nurturant Parent and Strict Father models, "frames" that provide a structure for thinking about everything else.
In the Nurturant Parent model both parents share responsibility for raising a basically good-natured child to become "a happy, fulfilled person." To cooperate, both parents must find a consensus, built on honesty and open communication. The Strict Father assumes that the world is a dangerous place, a setting for constant competition and the battleground between right and wrong.
"If you've seen a John Wayne movie and understood it," Lakoff said, "if the narrative made sense, then you have the Strict Father frame." In this world the father's role is God-given, not based on consensus. Children lack a moral compass so he must protect them, teach them right from wrong and punish them when they go astray. This teaches children self-discipline, required for success. Punishment acts as a lesson. The moral road to prosperity goes through self-reliance, and there are no shortcuts.
"That is why [conservatives] are not merely a bunch of crazies or mean and greedy -- or stupid -- people, as many liberals believe," Lakoff writes in his new book. "People who have strict father morality and apply it to politics are going to believe this is the right way to govern."
Take conservative Georgia Democrat Zell Miller's speech at the GOP convention -- which all makes sense, in a way, when Lakoff's frame theory is applied. If you think of most Democrats as Nurturant Parents concerned with honest, open communication and consensus, it's only natural that they would criticize the country's father figure if they think they were misled or duped by him. Miller's choice of words at the convention and his fierce scowl seemed to reflect a strict-father follower, furious at what sounds, to him, like betrayal from his own party. He characterized Kerry's criticism of Bush as a "manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief," weakening and tearing apart the country. He told the audience Kerry was "faint-hearted" while Bush had "a spine of tempered steel" and "the backbone to best protect my family."
Republicans have succeeded, Lakoff argues, by getting people in the middle -- erstwhile swing voters, the Reagan Democrats -- to apply the Strict Father worldview to politics and by finding ways to frame the issues on their terms, with their choice of language. United Nations approval becomes "a permission slip." A tax on estates becomes a taxing of the dead, a "death tax."
Next page: Instead of saying Bush lied about the Iraq war, Kerry should talk about "a betrayal of trust"