Needlenose

Amid the general concern over John McCain’s post-Palin boost in the polls, framing guru George Lakoff weighed in with a diary at Daily Kos last Friday about what he thought Barack Obama was doing wrong. Agreeing with “the statement by Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, that the campaign is ‘not about the issues’,” Lakoff writes:

The Obama-Biden campaign seems to have become the Gore-Kerry-Hillary campaign. They are running on 18th Century theory of Enlightenment reason: If you just tell people the facts, they will follow their self-interest and reason to the right conclusion. . . . What Republican marketers have known for decades is that the Enlightenment theory of reason doesn’t describe how people actually work. People think primarily in terms of cultural narratives, stereotypes, frames, and metaphors.

. . . The job for the Obama campaign is to reverse the present mindset that the Republicans have constructed, to reveal the conservatives as elitist Washington insiders who cynically manipulate them, to get conservative populists to identify with Obama and Biden on the basis of values and character, and to have them see realities through Obama’s leadership capacities.

I think what Lakoff doesn’t see is that Obama is using the “issues” argument to set up exactly the contrast he recommends. The recent ad above, where Obama defines “real change” based on taxes and health care, isn’t really about the issues so much as positioning Obama as a straight talker who respects the viewer and shares their concerns.

Compare that with a new ad today that defines McCain:

Enough of a contrast there for you? As with the pro-Barack ad, this one connects policies/issues with character — Obama will bring policy changes because he’s honest and shares middle-class American values, while McCain has become an ugly liar to cover up his desire to keep Bush’s programs in place.

Seen in this light, caring about the problems that affect voters’ lives isn’t ignoring the need for “authenticity” — it’s a way of demonstrating authenticity, even to people who don’t read the policy details.