But many political scientists spend their careers attempting to explain how voters come to their political preferences and aren't yet ready to embrace an outsider like Lakoff. Samuel Popkin, a professor of political science currently at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, dismissed Lakoff's ideas for making the voter's thinking process sound too simple.
Popkin has advised Democrats in presidential debates from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. He also wrote an influential book, "The Reasoning Voter, Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns," in which he looked at different shortcuts voters take to arrive at their decisions. He calls the process "low-information rationality."
Suppose your child has a mystifying, fatal disease and you're asked to choose between two physicians. "How do you deal with it?" he asked. "You have to find someone you trust." Some people might ask their friends or try to research the disease and the physicians' backgrounds, but the material is confusing and time is short. More likely than not the physician's bedside manner will play the lead role in your decision.
Popkin says there's no single satisfactory explanation for how voters come to their conclusions. Most people use a patchwork of methods "depending on what they're looking for and that depends on the times," he said.
To gauge what people want, campaigns turn to a polling firm, although people often tell pollsters one thing and do another. Cognitive scientists have named this "unconscious cognition." People say they dislike negative campaigning and attack ads but, as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth proved once again, going negative works wonders.
The job for progressives, Lakoff writes, is to forget the polls and reframe the debate along nurturant morality lines. Replace "lower taxes" with the words "better future." It isn't enough to counter with a list of facts, or knock a Republican argument, because that only reinforces the frame. That's the point of his book's title: When you "don't think of an elephant," you can't help but think of an elephant.
For instance, instead of saying Bush lied about the Iraq war, Kerry should talk about "a betrayal of trust," Lakoff argues. If faced with the "flip-flop" charge, Kerry's response, Lakoff said, should be to rattle off three examples in three short sentences -- "Here is the position I had and I was right" -- then shift to three examples of Bush's mistakes, pointing out, "He was wrong and he weakened the country."
That's the impression that sticks in people's minds after hearing it repeated enough. Lakoff is dismayed at the Kerry team's habit of finding a catchy slogan, using it a few times, then dropping it for a new one.
Though poll numbers consistently show that people are deeply dissatisfied with how Bush has handled the war in Iraq, many of these same people see the world as a threatening place.
"In times of conflict and crisis, people look for decisiveness and toughness," said Shanto Iyengar, director of the Political Communication Lab at Stanford. "They're not looking for someone to take care of everyone." Those dissatisfied with Bush's performance might be the most fearful, whose ideas run in the opposite direction of Kerry's "more sensitive," "smarter" foreign policy.
"Right now," Popkin said, "people are afraid. And a lot of [Americans] have very strong ideas, some of them we might find repugnant, like hitting first is good, we can do whatever we want whenever we want."
This, at least, is one area where Lakoff and the political scientists agree. Call the ideas repugnant, part of a strict father morality or just plain conservative, but many Americans hold them, and come Nov. 2 they will step into voting booths and attempt to link these ideas to a candidate. Bush, a man with a "tempered-steel spine," has made it clear to them where he stands, even when he flip-flops.
About the writer
Matthew Craft is a freelance writer in New York.
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