The Lakoff Effect
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Even if you ignore the Mark Foley Frolic — which they emphatically don’t want you to do — it’s no wonder Democrats are so giddy as the midterm elections approach.
Some have leapfrogged the conventional wisdom altogether. Not only will they win a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 14 years, a few happy Democrats declare that they will take control of the Senate to boot.
I’m not sure I’d go so far, but there’s no denying the hopeful signs for Democrats. The polls, with occasional wobbles, are trending their way.
Republican efforts to recast the “issue environment” toward national security and away from issues more favorable to Democrats have failed, thanks in part to Rep. Mark Foley.
And most significant of all — or so I like to think — Democrats are at last making fun of George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and, until recently, one of their party’s chief philosophical gurus.
It should have been apparent early on that Mr. Lakoff occupies the furthest ideological frontiers.
A disciple of the notoriously anti-American Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky, Mr. Lakoff first earned a wide public audience — inadvertently — with his essay “Metaphors of Terror,” published a few days after September 11, 2001.
In it, he explored why the terrorist attacks affected so many so profoundly.
“Towers are symbols of phallic power,” Mr. Lakoff explained, “and their collapse reinforces the idea of loss of power.”
And if you think the twin towers were symbolically profound, wait till you get a load of the Pentagon: “Another kind of phallic imagery was more central here,” Mr. Lakoff wrote. “The Pentagon, a vaginal image from the air, was penetrated by the plane as missile.”
A man who could write such things may be suited to many tasks, but “counselor to a major political party trying to win elections” is not one of them.
Yet that is what Mr. Lakoff became before the 2004 elections. He spoke at conclaves of Democratic candidates, and the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee bought boxes of his book on political strategy (“Don’t Think of an Elephant”) and passed them out like party favors.
The book sold a quarter million copies — not, presumably, to Republicans — and Democratic Committee Chairman Howard Dean christened Mr. Lakoff “one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement.”
Like any bunco artist, Mr. Lakoff wowed his audience by telling them what they thought they wanted to hear. According to Mr. Lakoff, Republicans owed their electoral victories to “framing,” the psychological manipulation of voters through the clever use of words — describing tax cuts, for example, as “tax relief.”
“What conservatives have learned about winning elections is that they have to activate the ‘strict father model’ in more than half the electorate — either by fear or by other means,” Mr. Lakoff wrote.
The key to Democratic victory thus lay in an alternative manipulation of images — for example, by referring to trial lawyers, a favorite Republican whipping boy and a major Democratic constituency, as “public protection attorneys.”
Mr. Lakoff’s view of electoral politics was not only superficial but cynical — a kind of graduate-school version of the worldview of filmmaker Michael Moore, another Democratic pontificator. Both Messrs. Moore and Lakoff viewed the public as bovine, unsophisticated, and easily duped.
Which explained, for Democrats, why evil Republicans kept winning.
But Democrats lost elections listening to Mr. Lakoff, just as they’d lost elections before he became their swami. Now the more respectable elements in the party are giving him the heave-ho.
The liberal New Republic magazine trashed his newest book in a brutal review two weeks ago. “If Democrats take the ideas of George Lakoff seriously,” the reviewer wrote, “they just might succeed” in losing the election.
Mr. Lakoff has become a stock figure of fun in the pages of the progressive magazine the American Prospect. His invitations to speak before the Democratic caucus have dried up.
And in their new book “The Plan,” Democratic strategist Bruce Reed and Rep. Rahm Emanuel hold up Mr. Lakoff as an exemplar of how not to win elections.
“If we believed in conspiracy theories, we’d think that only Karl Rove could dream up the idea of a linguistic professor from Berkeley urging Democrats to ‘practice reframing every day, on every issue.'”
Instead of reframing, the authors of “The Plan” offer something revolutionary for Democratic activists — an agenda of plausible policy ideas that candidates can run on. These include mandatory public service for Americans under 25, a ceiling on middle-class tax rates, a vast expansion of the Army, and mandatory, portable 401(k)s.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has embraced some of these proposals and added others in a latter-day “Contract with America”: cutting the interest rate on student loans by 50%, raising the minimum wage, and — here’s a surprise — raising tax rates on incomes above $250,000.
Whatever the merits of these ideas, they do have the virtue of being ideas and not slogans. And they might disenthrall the party from its obsession with “framing.”
The Lakoff infatuation was a symptom of electoral desperation and philosophical confusion; the Lakoff brush-off shows a party getting serious at last.
Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.