Frame Wars

By Michael Erard, Texas Observer. Posted November 18, 2004.

The conventional view of politics says that people are swayed by words, images, or facts. But that's false, according to Frank Luntz and George Lakoff, two of the most successful practitioners of political reality construction. They believe that increasingly political forces will clash less over reality than over how it's shaped.

At first glance, both men appear well equipped to deal with a complex world. They have doctorates (Luntz in political science and Lakoff in linguistics) and run consulting operations (the Luntz Research Companies and the Rockridge Institute, a think tank), and they're gurus to opposing political parties – the GOP and the Dems – to whom they push, as they've done for years, what is essentially the same idea about language in politics. The idea? That the basic building blocks of political communication are "frames" (as Lakoff calls them) or "context" (to use Luntz's word).

The most important resource that politicians have, they both argue, is the ways in which people understand the world. Their values. Their worldviews. (Lakoff adds to this: their brains.) If you tap into those values, inform them, tweak them, focus and reflect those values back at an electorate – that's the way to win power.

In this struggle to control political reality through language, you don't dispute specific words or rebut the facts; you don't even attack your opponents' frames. What you do is assert your side's frame, making it so big, so omnipresent, so unavoidable that it's as natural as talking about the roundness of the Earth. Disputing such a fact seems counterintuitive. Even heretical.

Lakoff says that we engage frames in the simplest acts of thinking or talking. "Framing is the most ordinary everyday thing," he says. "Every word we use comes with a frame, and the conventional frames are there in your brain." Take a more political example: the word "war." In the same way that the size of an SUV resonates safety, the word "war" evokes not only battles, but also sacrifice, martial glory, and an ultimate victory. It's not simply a figurative or a poetic connection – it attaches to the way people see reality and determines how they act. Every use of the word "war" ratifies this frame.

This is why the phrase "war on terror" has been so devastatingly effective. It's so engrained that it gathers conservatives and so effective at explaining the world that people who aren't conservatives find it appealing. The phrase can be strangely soothing. Clarity oozes from it. It subtly encodes a frame in which an intangible, terror, can be targeted and conquered, partly by recycling a Cold War frame in which we waged war on another intangible, Communism. And we won! The phrase offers the promise that we can win this one, too, because it invokes a history of military victories and strength. America, after all, wins its wars.

Of course, America doesn't win all of its wars. The conservative frame depends on the martial fantasy of inevitable victory, and that is why John Kerry's criticism of the Vietnam War angered Republicans. It also depends on the rush that absolute moral victory provides, which explains why the administration was able to both attack Kerry and shore up the common sense behind the "war on terror" frame when it criticized the senator for stating that the nation's goal should be to make terrorism a nuisance.

Kerry and his team could have done a better job of asserting their own frames, but fortunately for them, Bush let the conservative one slip. Frank Luntz says that invoking the "war on terror" set up the conditions for an electoral win by Bush. "If the public sees what the president's doing as a war on terror, he wins. If they see it as a war on Iraq, Kerry wins. What is the context of what the president is doing? Define it one way, you have one outcome; define it another way, you have a different outcome."

In the frame wars, the people who do the frame work are themselves framed, shaped, buffed, and branded. Lakoff is the "professor," an instant credibility that can work to his advantage, though it's also damaging – people immediately assume that what comes out of his mouth is too hard to understand, divorced from reality, impractical. (An interview in a recent Believer magazine labeled him a "mandarin.") In person, Lakoff is actually down to earth and will answer nearly any question clearly and succinctly. His political analysis is keen, his sentences brief. ("Deep but simple," observed Glenn Smith, a Democratic political consultant who was instrumental in bringing Lakoff to Texas in 2001).

How Lakoff got into politics is an odd story that properly starts with a rainstorm in 1978. One day in class, a young female student interrupted Lakoff, who was starting to discuss the assigned reading.

"I can't do this today," she said, "I've got a metaphor problem with my boyfriend." She'd come into class late, weeping and drenched from the rain. (The rain is salient, Lakoff says, because at first they tried to pretend that her tears were raindrops.) As everyone listened, she related how her boyfriend had told her that their relationship had "hit a dead end." Puzzled, she asked her classmates for help interpreting the comment.

Writer Michael Erard is currently writing a book about verbal blundering

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