Framing is as framing does

It's taken me a few days to get round to writing about this, but I can't ignore or let pass last week's New York Times Magazine cover story, by Matt Bai: "The Framing Wars" (published July 17). The article focuses on George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, whom the author calls (inaccurately) "the father of framing." Anyway, Lakoff's how-to book on the subject, Don't Think of an Elephant!, has taken the Democrats by storm. And it's got everyone thinking about framing (a term I've brought up many times in this blog). After their shattering defeat in last November's presidential election, Democrats were desperate for an answer to what went wrong. It seems they've found their answer. Notes Bai, "Even before the election, a new political word had begun to take hold of the party, beginning on the West Coast and spreading like a virus all the way to the inner offices of the Capitol. That word was 'framing.'" So what is framing? Well, it can mean lots of things, but the article tries to define the term in the context of the current acrimonious political climate.

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, told [the author] in May.

Well, about flippin' time! There's a lot more I'd like to say about this piece, but I'll have to save the rest for another day.