Catch the Red Bat: How Democrats Will Win

Tonight, I wandered through many progressive news outlits, blogs, and campaign websites looking for answers on how we can win... and I have a confession: I'm on the verge of losing my mind. Over here, I read another de-construction of Lakoff's "nurturing" theme, and over there I read another call to "brand" our political cause; however, I'll be frank about my opinion: Lakoff, Brand Democrat, and all other efforts to repackage our message will lose. Now, my reader might be wondering, "what evidence do you have to say that?" Good question reader, let me explain:

George Lakoff has given us a much needed gift. During the fall of late 2003, he introduced many of us to the concept of cognitive frames; he educated us on how Republican think tanks had used framing to capture the congress in 94, and eventually the White House in 00' and 04'. However, there are two pink elephants in regards to Lakoff's theory:

1. While he cracked the code to the Republican "strict father" frame, his "nurturant family" frame lacks vitality and substance. For a cognitive linguist, one would have expected a better word for our frame than "nurture" -- a positivelty pink word that evokes images of lactating nipples, infants, and pregnant women. Don't misread that criticism, I'm simply saying that an overtly femine frame is disagreeable considering we need male votes as well as female votes.
2. The strict father frame developed by Republican think tanks took decades to pull off. They started with Reagan (about two years before I was born), and now, 24 years later, it is giving the Republicans their full returns. First off, we don't have 24 years to allow our seeds to grow in the public mind. Second off, the idea of crafting unified messages arose in an era of TV-age politics. Our success, if it is ever possible, is not going to come through televised sound bytes. We need to be thinking ahead of the Republicans: let them have there talk radio, and fox news. Let's get to work on using the next generation of communcation tools (hey guess what: we're using the prototypes of those tools right now)

Now in regards to "branding democrats". For Christ's sake: first off, 'Democrat' is a brand that is associated with losing. Second off, lets stop look at voters as consumers, or demographs. There is no lower form of looking at human beings than as mere demographs of religion, sex, race, age, and income. Perhaps we might begin by respecting our voters as being something more than empty consumer vessals; mere brains that deserve a good washing by method of incessent televised advertising. So, I have a frame, its simple, its too the point, and it will work.

Its called fixing a broken system. It means our canidates advocate more than campaign finance reform, or empty promises of "holding our government accountable". Rather, it means acknowleding that perhaps our founding fathers had not created our system of government for an era of highways, telephones, Boeing 777s, Hydrogen bombs, and the Internet. Infact, they devised a system of government for an era where mail arrived by horse and buggy, and the most feared weapon was the cannon. Do we really believe that we reached the zenith of Democratic engineering in 1792? We'll win when our canidates dare to speak of Progress; with a Roman P.

We'll win by finding ways to open dialogues between voters and the candiates. Those who participated in the Dean campaign, might remember a Red Bat. Joe Trippi recalled the incident shortly after he stepped down as the Dean campaign manager:

Nick O'Malley, our webmaster, calls me up and says, "Joe, there's this cool idea on the blog. They want…if we hit a million dollars by the time the governor goes on stage, they want him to carry a red bat on stage and say, 'You did it,' because on the web we'll be hitting a million and he'll be on the stage and he'll carry the red bat up." And I thought that was a pretty cool idea so I turned to the poor hapless staffer who happened to be standing next to me and said the simple words, "Go get a red bat." And it's night in Manhattan... ... we go back and we're behind the stage waiting and as I hear whoever is on the stage saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States, Howard Dean," out of my peripheral vision, I see this kid -- red bat in hand -- running down the sidewalk like a crazy person. Just as the governor is hitting the top of that stage, he throws the bat up, the governor catches it with one hand, walks up on stage and says, "You did it."

And its not just Joe Trippi or Zephyr or Nicco, it's the governor himself saying, "Look, you did it, and I know you told me to do this and you know you told me to do this." And that is a totally different thing. This campaign was the first campaign owned, really owned, by the American people and now what we have to do is to build a movement that's owned by them.

So folks, we have a lot of time between now and the next congressional elections. How are we going to spend it? Crafting brands? Constructing cognitive frames? Or perhaps... are we going to get serious about building a true democracy, and making our voice heard. Perhaps, we shoudl concentrate less on how to seduce voters, and more on how to get them involved; how to make our cause different from that of the Republicans. It means we may have to compromise our political principles in the beginning as we open our arms to our fellow Americans. However, what could be more worth while of a goal then bulding a true, participatory Democracy that is about us, not about campaign strategists, and marketers. So I feel sanity has returned to my brain now. Thanks for listening. Take these words as food for thought. Don't think about pink elephants, think about Red Bats.