What I've been saying - it's about the SYMBOLS

[cilla4progress]

The sage Lakoff says essentially the same thing: Obama and the Dems should quit with the policy talk, and re-take the moral - or symbolic - high ground. It's the equivalent of sound bytes, and it's what people want to hear (and all they can really digest). If you look under the covers at Beck, Palin, Fox, the hypocrisy and lack of substance is eminently apparent. But that's not what the tea partiers and others of their ilk do - either due to lack of time or brainpower; they are responding to symbols...on both sides, e.g., Obama's "foreignness." It wouldn't be hard for Obama and the Dems to pivot to this, even at this late date, and it's what I plan to do in my work on the 2010 elections between now and 11/2.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/the-cry-for-democratic-mo_b_703227.html

This election is about more than just jobs, and mortgages, and adequate health care. All politics is moral. All political leaders say to do what they propose because it is right. No political leaders say to do what they say because it is wrong. Morality is behind everything in politics -- and progressives and conservatives have different moral systems.

In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system itself. That is why they keep saying no to Obama's proposals, even voting against their own ideas when Obama accepts them. To give Obama any victory at all would be a blow to their moral system. Their moral system requires non-co-operation. That is a major thing the Obama administration has not understood.

The conservatives understand the centrality of morality. They attacked the Obama health care plan as immoral, violating the moral principles of freedom ("government takeover") and reverence for life ("death panels.") The Obama administration made a policy case, not a moral case. The conservatives have characterized the bailouts as thievery and Obama's ties to Wall St. as immoral -- as being in bed with the thieves. The attacks on government are seen as moral attacks, with government seen as taking money out of working people's pockets and giving it to people who don't deserve it. Whether it is the birthers, or the anti-Muslims, or the anti-immigrants, of the pro-lifers, the attack is a moral attack. The Tea Party cry is moral -- for "freedom" (see my book Whose Freedom?), for God, for patriotism. Even jobless benefits are seen as giving money to people who are not working and don't deserve it. Even social security that workers have earned, that are deferred payments for work, are seen as undeserving people "sucking on the tits of the government."