Fighting Values With Values

From the tone of righteous indignation expressed in blogs like womenagainstpalin.blogspot.com and in all of the emails my friends and acquaintances are sending me, there is a mixture of fury and fear that the McCain-Palin ticket has stolen the paradigm of the strong, independent working mother and morphed it into an anti-choice, fundamentalist who believes that Creationism should be taught in the schools, that we should drill ourselves dry, that her daughter's pregnancy remains because she has a choice that she wants to take away from my daughter... . Need I say more?

George Lakoff, the guru of messaging and framing, has published an open letter to Barack Obama that I think all of us should read and heed. It's posted on truthout.org and it's called "Don't Think of a Maverick." For those of you unfamiliar with George Lakoff, he is a linguist who has spent the last five books trying to get the left to use messaging and framing as effectively as the right has been doing since Richard Nixon created something called the "Silent Majority."

Although we might think this election is about the issues, according to Lakoff, it's about values, not personality, but values. He commends Obama for his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, because he used his story and his lack of Washington experience to illustrate why his presidency would more likely bring about "Change We Can Believe In."

Now, however, Obama has started sounding more like Gore - Kerry - Hillary Clinton --resorting to policy discussions and statistics, which can't compete against the vital, looks-great-on-television untrue but compelling archetypal rhetoric of the old man and the hockey mom whether with or without lipstick.

When we rebut the idea that McCain is a maverick, we are reinforcing the definition of McCain that he has invented for himself. That's the problem with Obama's new ad, which accepts McCain's definition of himself and goes from there. It sounds defensive and doesn't accomplish anything, says Lakoff. Instead, Obama needs to reactivate his "American Dream" story, which gives hope to those of us who have suffered during the last seven years, whether economically, by living in a state of fear, or seeing a future for our children that has less promise than our parents saw for us.

Rather than seeing the campaign as a battle about issues, which I certainly do, Lakoff urges us to see the campaign in terms of five factors: values; authenticity; communication and connection; trust; and identity. That's why so many working folks voted for Ronald Reagan although his position on the issues hardly favored them. We are back to 2000 when people claimed they preferred to have a beer with George W.,not Al Gore.

Lakoff cautions Obama to end the statistics, even though they are true, and to return to his compelling portrayal of a young man who rose from adversity to become a healer of our divides.

Because let's face it: between the two archetypes, I would rather elect a healer than another cardboard warrior.