People Always Want You to, Like, Do Stuff

Part of a general trend in media coverage of politics over the last 25-30 years has been to cover the various salvos in the political battle rather than the substantive issues at stake. It's basically the collusion of beltway insiders who all agree that talking about what you should talk about if you want to win is more interesting than exercising actual leadership...words, in this world view, speak louder than actions. But George Lakoff, hero to many progressives for his books such as Moral Politics, has actually produced one of these pieces that is worth looking at.

As Jacobs and Shapiro chronicle in their book Politicians Don't Pander (which I understand to be considered a rather definitive tome on political discourse in general), at some point major news organizations really started focusing their coverage on the machinations between politicians and the ramifications of same on the eventual chances of a policy being enacted. While political junkies like me sometimes find this interesting, it is frustrating as it comes at the cost of covering the actual implications of policies. In essence, journalism has largely stopped being about providing information and context for responsible democratic citizens to make up their minds and started being mindless "he said-she said" stenography.

For me, this really hit a low point in the early days after 9/11 when the Republicans were ramming through the first of their ludicrous tax cuts. I remember news coverage of that process consisting of a recounting of each side's spin: "Democrats challenged the tax cuts on the basis that they were disproportionately weighted to favor the wealthiest 1% of Americans," a typical story might go. "Republicans then accused Democrats of class warfare and insisted that the majority of the benefit would go to the middle class." Then nothing. No mention of how, if you actually took two seconds to look at the bill, the tax burden was being shifted disproportionately off the super rich and onto everyone else, no mention of how how one side was actually right while the other one was just lying.

So, I would argue that as an outgrowth of this same trend, we are now subjected to unwanted advice on what steps we need to take at every turn. The DLC, for example, might was well change its mission statement to "Telling everyone what Democrats need to start doing" - to quote from an actual speech by their chair, Tom Vilsack, "In order for us to strengthen the American community, I think we...need a very compelling vision of a different America." OK, great Tom, how about you just skip the part about the purpose of the vision and get right to it. Then there are the non-partisan efforts to tell all comers which switches to throw in their quest to run the political machine, such as the new book by a couple national political editors for major news operations.

Then there is George Lakoff, who has produced a much more interesting piece, not coincidentally aimed much more squarely at actual people instead of wannabe beltway hacks.
Another key to this being more interesting is that he is not giving it as a policy address or an insider book, he is delivering it as a resource on a website for people who may be interested in taking a more active part in strategy. It is not, in other words, substituting for actual policy ideas. That's what really separates it from the DLC.
At any rate, I would especially like to draw attention to point #3, the Laundry List Trap. The idea here is that whenever anyone asks a Republican how to address a problem, she has some snarky three word answer. Whenever that same question is put to a Democrat, she has a ten sentence answer that revolves around nuance, caution, and incrementalism. (On a side note, I would assert that this pussyfooting is what makes Democrats look weak, not the substance of their policies.) So I would ask every Democrat out there to do one thing: come up with one sentence describing why you are a Democrat. If your answer involves any specific policy, you already got it wrong; we're focusing on values here. Got your answer yet? Here's mine: because Democrats get that we all need each other. That's it. That creates a whole narrative for any further depth you get into and an easy fall-back for anyone to remember. All the idiotic pundits who try to get Democrats to talk about values to recapture Republican "values voters" would do well to just concentrate on something like this. Our values are never going to be the same as Republican values, so it's time we establish ours firmly.