Word games: George Lakoff, the Democrats' hottest new thinker, misses the meaning behind the message.

• Author: Baer, Kenneth S.
• Position: On Political Books - Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate - Book Review

Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate By George Lakoff Chelsea Green Publishing Company, $10.00

On a cold Sunday a few weeks I after the presidential election, I was sitting in one of those meetings that every politico hopes will turn out to be legendary. A young, promising candidate had gathered his consultants and closest advisers around his dining room table for a day-long conference to plot his run for higher office. It would be years until the next election day and longer still until the candidate's career would peak, but deep down in every political hack's heart lies the unstated hope that this will be the horse to go all the way--and that you will have been there when he got it all started.

In the middle of the discussion, the candidate's veteran media consultant pulled out a thin book--heavily underlined and annotated--and began reading passages from it as if it were the Bible. The book was George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, a volume that quickly has made its author one of the most sought-after speakers and advisers in Democratic circles and a cult figure among the liberal left. On the book's cover, Howard Dean touts Lakoff as "one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement;" Robert Reich hails the book as "essential reading;" and Don Hazen--the founder of the left-wing Web site Alternet.org--writes in the book's introduction that Lakoff was "like a great reserve of pinot noir that few people drank. But not anymore. George Lakoff is on the road to fame and renown."

So who is this new messiah? And how does he propose that a party of pinot noir drinkers win back the hearts and minds of those who would rather quaff Budweiser?

Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, uses linguistic analysis to diagnose Democrats' problems. He argues that all of us have, as part of our "cognitive unconscious," frames that shape how we see the world. These frames are profoundly powerful, influencing "the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions." We discover our frames through our language; if we change our language, we change our frames. "Reframing," Lakoff writes, "is social change."

Of course, Lakoff cautions that it's not just the language itself that matters: "[I]deas are primary--and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas." So, language reflects our mindset: If we change the language, then we can change how people think. This is where liberals and progressives have gotten in trouble, Lakoff argues. They make the mistake of sifting out the facts, while ignoring the reality that debating in a conservative frame only reinforces it. To change those red states to blue, then, progressives have to change minds by first reframing the debate. If, as Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "[T]he...