This is the week that the election got framed as capitalism versus socialism.

Did you notice? Did you pay attention to how it happened, who made it happen, and why?

Our mindsets have been subtly arranged, and what we think will build from this template. These moves have been made. The question now is, what are the next moves? There are different ways to play from this point, different ways to win.

I'm asking you to look backwards — how did we get here? — and forward — what should the opponents do from this point? Feel free to disagree with me about whether something big happened this week, and we can fight about that too.

ADDED:

If the 2012 election comes down to capitalism v. socialism...
	Americans will vote for capitalism.
	Americans might be tricked into picking socialism, but not if they think clearly.
	Americans will pick socialism as long as they don't see the label "socialism."
	Americans will vote for socialism.
pollcode.com free polls

"Be afraid. Be very afraid."

I ended the previous post with that old sci-fi movie tag line.

I think what is going on right now is an effort to create a mindset, and emotional orientation toward Romney. Business is an alien entity. It's scary and mystifying, and Romney is part of that. You can't understand it, so don't even try. [NYT columnist Gail] Collins is planting the seed of fear. You laugh now. You won't even feel it. But it will grow. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Please pay attention to that. It's what's happening right now, and it is an effort to emotionally manipulate people in a way Obamans are counting on. It's The Framing.

But what is the source of "Be afraid, be very afraid"? I was thinking "Alien." But the original "Alien" tagline was "In space no one can hear you scream."

"Be afraid, be very afraid" came from... Googling... the 1986 version of "The Fly." I love that movie, the one with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.



Speaking of tags, this blog has long had a tag for "insect politics" — based on the line from "The Fly" "Have you heard of insect politics? Neither have I."

Full text: "Have you heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don't have politics.... they're very brutal. No compassion.... no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. I'd like to, but.... I'm an insect.... who dreamed he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake."

And speaking of Obama and "The Fly," remember Obama and the fly?



And speaking of dreams being over? Remember the dream?

"The Democratic Party has a good story to tell, but they don’t know how to tell it."

Says Robert Redford. Ironically, he is telling the story that Democrats keep telling: that they have a good story to tell, but they don’t know how to tell it.

I don't think that is a good story. If only we were better propagandists! It's the soothing, mind-numbing story that George Lakoff has been telling them for years.

Framefail in the "war on women" — reframed by Drudge.

This has been up all morning at Drudge:



Let's look at those links. 

The first small-print one — "Adviser to Obama, DNC Attacks Ann Romney" — goes to this video clip of DNC advisor Hilary Rosen, trying to say that Mitt Romney "doesn't connect" on the issue of women struggling economically: He's "running around the country, saying, well, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing." She pauses, then blurts out the unfortunate line, which she clearly thinks is a great zinger: "Guess what? His wife has actually not worked a day in her life." She ends with "He seems so old fashioned."

That's the framing of Mitt Romney that the Obama campaign wants: Who are these out of touch people? Ironically, it was profoundly out of touch with the many women who work in the home (and with the many women who've professed to respect the choice that some women make to devote themselves to homemaking). This is the problem with these framing efforts. You have to brainstorm, imagining all the ways in which your opponents can use it against you. Framefail.



Drudge has done the obvious reframing. His large-print link goes to: "Ann Romney Fights Back: Debuts on Twitter to Counter DNC Advisor's Insult." Ann's first tweet is damned near perfect: "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work." Choice. She spoke their word. Hard work. Putting it simply. Who can argue? (Follow her here.)

Let's go to the rest of the Drudge links. The next one is "Rosen frequent White House visitor...," an item at NRO by Jim Geraghty, who's checked the White House logs and found "Hilary Rosen" there 35 times, much more often than, for example, Petraeus or Panetta.

The second small link is "ANN: 'She should have come to my house -- it wasn't so easy'...", which goes to an article summarizing Ann Romney's appearance on TV this morning. ("She should have come to my house when those five boys were causing so much trouble. It wasn't so easy.... Maybe I haven't struggled as much financially as some people have, but I can tell you, I've had struggles in my life. I would love to have people understand that Mitt and I have compassion for people that are struggling.") Also at that link, Rosen stands by her marginalization of Ann. ("Most women in America — let's face it — don't have that choice. They have to be working moms and home moms.")

Next: "POLL: Nearly 2 of 3 stand with wife..." This refers to a little poll they're doing at a WaPo blog:

Was Hilary Rosen out of line with her comments that Ann Romney "has never worked a day in her life."?

Yes, raising a family is a lot of work.

No, Ann Romney is out of touch with the economic issues facing working women.

It's not 2 out of 3 anymore. It's 96% calling out Rosen. Drudge-driven traffic, of course. But that's my point. Rosen's frame set up a reframe. Disastrous framefail.

This is creating so much interest in Ann Romney now, shining a sudden bright light on her, and she is so ready. She's a great persona, better than Mitt at talking to people and generating warmth.

The final link is: "OBAMA: 'We Didn't Have The Luxury For Michelle Not To Work'..." A Harvard Law graduate is going to position himself as empathetic, saying his wife had to work? Michelle didn't choose? That makes no sense. It's not that they "didn't have the luxury," it's that they wanted luxury. She worked to achieve greater wealth. That was not necessary. It wasn't wrong either, but own it.

Despite its appearance among the Drudge links, that was not an effort by Obama to fix the framefail. The linked article is from April 9. Now, I think in that clip Obama sounds nicely empathetic to the way working mothers feel:

"Once I was in the state legislature, I was teaching, I was practicing law, I'd be traveling... And we didn't have the luxury for her not to work. And I know when she was with the girls, she’d feel guilty that she wasn’t giving enough time to her work... And when she was at work, she was feeling guilty she wasn’t giving enough time to the girls. And like many of you, we both wished that there were a machine that could let us be in two places at once. And so she had to constantly juggle it, and carried an extraordinary burden for a long period of time."

I'm sure that was hard work. But Michelle was making $300,000+ doing "community affairs" at the University of Chicago Medical Center. That was no ordinary job, and that money bought a lot more luxury than most women have. Plus, there was choice. Obama didn't have to take the kind of work he did, making less money and traveling as he built his political career speedily, while the girls were still very young.

But let's keep following this "out of touch" meme. Who's really more out of touch with the likely voters of America?

"How children’s ‘play’ is being sneakily redefined."

Redefined? What is the right definition? It seems to me that the definition — for education policy discussion purposes — should embody our reasons for thinking that play is something we should care about children getting the chance to do.

"Gov. Scott Walker said... he should have done more to prepare the public for his plan to eliminate most collective bargaining for public employees."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

"We had not built enough of the case" for the sweeping plan, Walker said...

"What I should have done, from a political standpoint, was build that case sooner"....

"They defined it as a rights issue," Walker said. "It's not a rights issue. It's an expensive entitlement." 

He's saying he let the other side frame the issue, and he should have gotten out in front with his framing. I know conservatives love to read Saul Alinsky and appropriate advice that was originally written to further lefty causes. Now, it sounds like Walker has been reading George Lakoff stuff about "framing":

[T[he progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics.

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline - physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

Lakoff pushes liberals to get their "frame" into the public's head. Walker is saying he wishes he'd pushed the conservative frame. Walker seemed to assume that people understood the problem the way he did and would — after the election — trust him to do what he thought was needed. He wasn't sufficiently into propaganda, he's essentially saying. To say that, of course, is a form of propaganda (because he's subtly flattering himself). But if the other side is aggressively propagandizing, don't you have to enter the fray and counterpropagandize? You have to keep talking to people, even when you have the power to act quietly and industriously, getting things done.

The Republican National Committee wants to rebrand the Democrats the "Democrat Socialist Party."

Politico reports.

Chairman Michael Steele has said that this "will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans," but the answer to that is — per Politico — "Who cares?"

"It is time to drop the term 'the environment' and talk about 'the air we breathe, the water our children drink.'"

Because we're dumb, and you need to manipulate us. More blather about "framing." Hey, maybe you need another word for "framing" — you need to reframe framing — because I think that’s a code word for progressive liberals...

"Framing."

Matt Bai has a new article in the NYT Magazine about Democratic Party politics. He wrote a terrific article in the magazine last October called "Kerry's Undeclared War." (The article can be read for a fee here, and my post about it here contains some substantial quotes.)

The new piece is called "The Framing Wars." Lots of Democrats these days trace their problems not to ideas or agendas but to "framing."

Exactly what it means to ''frame'' issues seems to depend on which Democrat you are talking to, but everyone agrees that it has to do with choosing the language to define a debate and, more important, with fitting individual issues into the contexts of broader story lines. In the months after the election, Democratic consultants and elected officials came to sound like creative-writing teachers, holding forth on the importance of metaphor and narrative.

Republicans, of course, were the ones who had always excelled at framing controversial issues, having invented and popularized loaded phrases like ''tax relief'' and ''partial-birth abortion'' and having achieved a kind of Pravda-esque discipline for disseminating them. But now Democrats said that they had learned to fight back. ''The Democrats have finally reached a level of outrage with what Republicans were doing to them with language,'' Geoff Garin, a leading Democratic pollster....

In January, Geoff Garin conducted a confidential poll on judicial nominations, paid for by a coalition of liberal advocacy groups. He was looking for a story -- a frame -- for the filibuster that would persuade voters that it should be preserved, and he tested four possible narratives. Democratic politicians assumed that voters saw the filibuster fight primarily as a campaign to stop radically conservative judges, as they themselves did. But to their surprise, Garin found that making the case on ideological grounds -- that is, that the filibuster prevented the appointment of judges who would roll back civil rights -- was the least effective approach. When, however, you told voters that the filibuster had been around for over 200 years, that Republicans were ''changing rules in the middle of the game'' and dismantling the ''checks and balances'' that protected us against one-party rule, almost half the voters strongly agreed, and 7 out of 10 were basically persuaded. It became, for them, an issue of fairness.

The amusing thing about that to a conlaw professor is that the sort of judges the Democrats try to appoint are the ones who don't bother to enforce structural safeguards (like checks and balances) and don't care whether something's been around a long time or not. So the successful framing, ironically, was to package the argument for liberal judges in the rhetoric of conservative judges.

Read the whole article. Most of it is about George Lakoff and his trendy book about political rhetoric called "Don't Think of an Elephant." I haven't read that book, but I've glanced at it long enough to see that it's a remix of his material from "Metaphors We Live By," -- an excellent book, which I have read -- and "Moral Politics" -- an okay book that classifies the rhetoric of the two parties (Democrats speak Mommy, and Republicans speak Daddy).

According to Lakoff, Democrats have been wrong to assume that people are rational actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says, cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds, and if the facts don't fit the frame, our brains simply reject them. Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be ''activated'' by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown at us.

Lakoff taps some subtle truths about how the mind works, but how do those minds taking in Lakoff's rhetoric work?

When I asked Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the minority whip and one of Lakoff's strongest supporters, whether Lakoff had talked to the caucus about this void of new ideas in the party, Durbin didn't hesitate. ''He doesn't ask us to change our views or change our philosophy,'' Durbin said. ''He tells us that we have to recommunicate.'' In fact, Durbin said he now understood, as a result of Lakoff's work, that the Republicans have triumphed ''by repackaging old ideas in all new wrapping,'' the implication being that this was not a war of ideas at all, but a contest of language.

Apparently, there are frames deeply embedded in the minds of Democratic politicos that "simply reject" the parts of Lakoff's message that don't fit.

And what of all the Americans who sit around watching the politicians on TV? I think their most basic frame is the one my father used in response to nearly any political argument: "It's all semantics!"