How can a party containing such principle-challenged people as Tom DeLay and Bill O'Reilly dominate the moral values discussion? How are Democrats castigated as "outside the mainstream" when President Bush is leading the charge to dismantle a hugely popular government program? It's all due to Republicans successfully and consistently framing their opposition. Communications expert Blackman has a strategy for fighting back.
Parker Blackman is deputy general manager and managing director of Fenton Communications' West Coast office. A longer version of this piece can be read on the Fenton Communications website.
We all know that the current leaders of the Republican party—be it President Bush, Tom Delay or Bill Frist – represent the extreme right wing of their party. But most of America doesn’t see them that way, because nobody has successfully framed them as such. It's time we start calling them what they are—irresponsible, reckless, extreme and radical. These are four adjectives that most accurately describe their agenda. More important still, these adjectives imply un-American values and speak to a flaw in their collective character.
This group of leaders is endangering our country's safety, our children’s future, our health and other things we hold close to our hearts. Most Americans are moderate in their views; extremism on either side of the political spectrum makes them uncomfortable. Reckless behavior makes them very uncomfortable. Americans would rather that their leaders be conservative in the true sense of the word. The majority of Americans don’t want Social Security dismantled. They don’t want us to fight an endless war in Iraq with more of their sons and daughters maimed or killed. They don’t want their air polluted and their water poisoned, and they don’t want their public school system destroyed.
Most Americans think of themselves as living responsibly, looking out for their children’s future and making good choices that will provide stability in their careers. Many of us give back to society, whether it’s at church, at school or through volunteering and charity work. If we frame the Republican leadership as extreme and reckless, we are painting a picture that contradicts how people behave in their own lives—and what they expect from their leaders.
This frame can be applied to any issue—health care, Iraq, Social Security, oil drilling in the Arctic—thereby allowing all progressive interest groups to repeat a singular theme as it applies to their particular issue.
A Functional Frame
An important reason this frame works is that, in the aftermath of the election, people who voted for George W. Bush don’t want to be told that they voted for the wrong guy. But if you can create space in some voters’ minds that the Bush administration’s current agenda isn’t the one they signed up for, you give those voters space to rationalize moving away from Bush and the Republican leadership.
By creating this wedge, we open the door for some Republicans and moderate Democrats who voted for Bush and the Congressional leadership to say, “Well I’m a Republican, but I can’t support a reckless agenda like this one.” Voters don’t have to repudiate their core beliefs or admit that they were wrong to vote for Bush.
Not Conservative, Not Neoconservative
In creating this frame, there’s a few terms progressives should not use: conservative and neoconservative. For many Americans, the word “conservative” has positive connotations beyond politics and in their own lives. A majority of Americans are conservative or cautious with their money and with the decisions they make about their children’s health and education. Being conservative implies saving something, thinking ahead, being safe, showing good judgment. “Neoconservative” doesn’t mean a damn thing to anyone living outside of the Beltway or not heavily involved in politics. By using these words, we either reinforce a positive framework for Republicans, or use language that is—at best—benign, because nobody knows what it means.
That’s why the progressive community must stop using either of these words to describe the Republican leadership and their agenda. So what specific phrase should we use instead? What phrase can we use to brand the Republican leadership and force them in the box we define? How about simply, “the reckless right wing of the Republican Party?”
With a label like this, we begin to drive a wedge deeper in the GOP, dividing those who follow right-wing radicals from those who are increasingly uncomfortable with their party’s leadership.
Attacking Their Morality
As the success of Jim Wallis’ best-selling book God’s Politics shows, millions of Americans do not believe being progressive and being an evangelical Christian are mutually exclusive. But progressives need to communicate their values and the Republican leadership’s pitfalls in ways that will really resonate with regular churchgoers, who already know that Christian values extend beyond the church doors. Progressives must emphasize that our elected leaders can’t just talk the talk—they have to walk the walk.
The concept of “walking the walk” provides a good opportunity to frame Republicans as immoral and hypocritical. They are masters at masking their agenda behind feel-good language. It’s our job to strip away the window dressing to expose the bleak agenda beneath the surface. So let’s start calling them on it.
If we can consistently apply this framework, Americans will stop seeing events like the Bush administration’s problems in Iraq as a disparate list of complaints by a disgruntled minority party. They’ll begin to see them as part of a pattern of reckless, irresponsible and ultimately unacceptable behavior. Repetition of this message will help progressives chip away at the far right’s perceived occupation of the moral high ground – a perception that has been a key to their electoral success.
Good Starting Points
U.C. Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff teaches us that people make sense of the world through metaphor and a limited number of overarching frameworks. The media is no exception. Two existing narratives provide progressives with opportunities to frame the Republican leadership in a negative way.
The first narrative holds that Republicans control everything, so they should have no reason to fight among themselves. When Sen. Arlen Specter was up for chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, reporters jumped on the fact that—even though the Republicans increased their majority in both the House and Senate—the party remains fractured by infighting. The mounting deficit, Social Security “reform,” depleted and despondent troops, and ongoing fighting in Iraq are other issues that provide openings to turn this narrative to progressives’ advantage. By demonstrating how the extreme right-wing faction of the party is clashing with Republican moderates, we can reinforce the fact that the party leadership is so extreme that even members of their own party —true fiscal conservatives and social moderates—are feeling uncomfortable with the agenda.
The second narrative progressives can use to their advantage is that it’s “payback time” for the Christian right. The Christian right has been widely credited for helping Bush win the election. Now there is the expectation that the Republican Party owes “payback” to the evangelical Christian community. There is widespread speculation, fueled by the media, that, when Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist steps down, President Bush will put forward an anti-choice nominee certain to tip the balance against Roe v. Wade . During the presidential debates, Bush repeatedly claimed he would put no judges to a litmus test on abortion. If and when the time comes, we need to use the right frame to call him on it.
Time to Turn the Tables
These narratives provide progressives with opportunities to advance our language about the Republicans’ reckless leadership and their agenda—and beat them at their own frame-game. There are many more such opportunities.
For too long, the Republican Party has been on the offensive, attacking Democrats and our programs, keeping us on our heels. The sports cliché, “The best defense is a good offense” is true here. We must go on the offensive, attack President Bush and the Republican leadership and put them on the defensive. Now is the time to turn the tables.
