Framing, the President, AIG "bonuses"

[drwex]

What do all these things have in common? Not much, and everything.

See, I've been reading Don't Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, a book about mental framing. On its surface, the book is a guide for progressives in understanding why we got our asses kicked in national politics. At a deeper level the book is about Lakoff's theories of mental frames - super-structures that all people use to organize ideas about the world and how we present or relate to presented information. It's got the clearest explanation I've ever read about how conservative thinking works and why people are resistant to facts (e.g. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11).

I think Lakoff has real flashes of brilliance - his Metaphors We Live By was very influential for me in conceptualizing how people use language to organize our thoughts around our temporo-spatial existence. So now I'm seeing frames and framing everywhere I go.

For example, the AIG payout situation has been framed in terms of "bonuses" and the associated ideas of performance, and additions to salary. However, that's not really what's going on. What AIG is paying is deferred compensation, as we're starting to see. FiveThirtyEight has a very good summary of what's known to date. However, based on what Lakoff argues I believe that these actual real facts aren't going to influence the outcome. Once the debate has been framed in a certain way, arguing on the basis of facts won't be persuasive.

Then this morning, I heard what Obama had to say about the AIG situation. In a talk in California, he deviated from his prepared remarks to say this:

For everyone in D.C. scrambling how to blame someone else, just go ahead and talk to me, because it's my job to make sure we fix these messes, even if I don't make them.

This is a brilliant act of framing. The situation is framed as a "mess" and the President "takes responsibility" to "fix things" even when he didn't make the mess. This promotes his image as a problem-solver and continues his framing of "personal responsibility" that he used in his speech to Congress. He could also have gone for frames of "greed" or "excess" or "deception" but those frames make it harder to associate a fixer, except in a punitive model. This latter frame is being used by New York's Attorney General, I think, but it's not in the President's interest to frame himself that way.

In being mindful of own emotional response, I found that listening to Obama triggered many positive emotions in me. I want someone to step up and take responsibility for messes and for fixing them. This is very much in contrast to the way the people at AIG only want responsibility when things are going well, which evokes a much more negative emotional response from me.

Comments

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

thank you for this post.
good data/links to chew on.

[catya.livejournal.com]

Yes, all of what you said. *nodnod* I jumped right to "What a great way of framing that" myself, as well.

[c1.livejournal.com]

It's useful to note, though, that Obama's comments aren't entirely his. We've heard "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and "the buck stops here" from other presidents.
But at least he isn't sticking his head in the sand.

[cos]

You might want to re-watch Obama's inauguration speech now, thinking about it in these terms. He's brilliant at reframing. My favorite was the way he reframes the former "war on terror".

If you'd like to read more about this, I recommend Jeffrey Feldman's blog Frameshop and his excellent book Framing the Debate, which analyzes famous presidential speeches throughout US history in terms of framing.

Lakoff's theories, however, go far deeper than framing. "Don't Think of an Elephant" was intended as a quick, easy to read advice book for progressives in the Bush era. If you want to see his full analysis of how Americans talk and think about politics, go for Moral Politics, which IMO is one of the most brilliant worldview-changing books I've read, along with ones like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Rise of the Creative Class, and Godel, Escher, Bach.