7 Reasons Why Obama's Speeches Are So Powerful

By George Lakoff, AlterNet. Posted February 24, 2009.

But hard-core movement conservatives tend to be more ideological and less bi-conceptual than their constituents. In the recent stimulus vote, the hard-core movement conservatives kept party discipline (except for three Senate votes) by threatening to run opposition candidates against anyone who broke ranks.

They were able to enforce this because the conservative message machine is strong in their districts, and there is no nationwide progressive message machine operating in those districts. The effectiveness of the conservative message machine led to Obama making a rare mistake in communication, the mistake of saying out loud in Florida not to think of Rush Limbaugh, thus violating the first rule of framing and giving Limbaugh even greater power.

Bi-conceptual, partly progressive, Republicans do exist in Congress, and the president is not going to give up on them. But as long as the conservative message machine can activate its values virtually unopposed in conservative districts, movement conservatives can continue to pressure bi-conceptual Republicans and keep them from voting their conscience on many issues. This is why a nationwide progressive message machine needs to be organized if the president is to achieve unity through bi-conceptualism.

4. Protection and Empowerment

The fourth idea behind the Obama Code is the president's understanding of government -- "not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works." This depends on what "works" means. The word sounds purely pragmatic, but it is moral in operation.

The idea is that government has twin moral missions: protection and empowerment. Protection includes not just military and police protection, but protections for the environment, consumers, workers, pensioners, disaster victims and investors.

Empowerment is what his stimulus package is about. It includes education and other forms of infrastructure -- roads, bridges, communications, energy supply, the banking system and stock market. The moral mission of government is simple: no one can earn a living in America, or live an American life, without protection and empowerment by the government. The stimulus package is basically an empowerment package.

Taxes are what you pay for living in America, rather than in Congo or Bangladesh. And the more money you make from government protection and empowerment, the more you owe in return. Progressive taxation is a matter of moral accounting. Tax cuts for the middle class mean that the middle class hasn't been getting as much as it has been contributing to the nation's productivity for many years.

This view of government meshes with our national ideal of equality. There needs to be moral equality: equal protection and equal empowerment. We all deserve health care protection, retirement protection, worker protection, employment protection, protection of our civil liberties and investment protection. Protection and empowerment. That's what "works" means -- "whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified."

5. Morality and Economics Fit Together

Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues -- education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government's moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.

6. Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk

Conservatives tend to think in terms of direct causation. The overwhelming moral value of individual, not social, responsibility requires that causation be local and direct. For each individual to be entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions, those actions must be the direct causes of those consequences. If systemic causation is real, then the most fundamental of conservative moral -- and economic -- values is fallacious.

Global ecology and global economics are prime examples of systemic causation. Global warming is fundamentally a system phenomenon. That is why the very idea threatens conservative thinking. And the global economic collapse is also systemic in nature. That is at the heart of the death of the conservative principle of the laissez-faire free market, where individual, short-term self-interest was supposed to be natural, moral and the best for everybody. The reality of systemic causation has left conservatism without any real ideas to address global warming and the global economic crisis.

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George Lakoff is the author of Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Chelsea Green). He is professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and a senior fellow of the Rockridge Institute.

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