Somewhere down there, substance does too. One can hope.

Lakoff’s major advance was revealing that bit of common sense along with a framework and a language to discuss it.

In any case, you can use framing all you want – if you don’t have the capability to drive attention where you want it to – so that your efforts reach those you need to reach – it means little.

McCain/Palin over the past few weeks have been an exercise in attention driving that is hard to imagine any more effective. Obama had it going on during his run against Clinton. Now McCain/Palin are moving the conversation where they want it.

This election will be debated for a long, long time.

Who is best at utilizing the attention economy to their advantage?

Graham, that’s the other piece to this. We are more easily manipulated because those that seek to market something to us – in this case those running for national office – have woken up to the attention economy and are using it to the fullest.

Thanks for your comment! I’m very familiar with George Lakoff’s work, and have read a good portion of it. I admire him and agree that good framing makes a difference. My point was really that when a population becomes so easily influenced by trivia and lies and seems unable to distinguish fact from fiction, framing by a party that wants to maintain some semblance of dignity becomes increasingly difficult. The population becomes easy to manipulate by FUD, which I believe is very hard to fight back at even with the best possible framing.

That being said, I definitely agree that framing as a part of a strategy is vitally important. You do the best that you can and hope that the population makes a good choice.

Cheers,
Graham

George Lakoff is the guy who came up with framing, and he did it as one of the world’s leading cognitive linguists. The concept is now part of political punditry, but it does go deeper than that. George’s book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, makes that pretty clear.

While I agree that the VP picks make little difference in most cases, I think McCain’s makes a huge difference. And strategies matter too. Else why have them?

On the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out that the polls were all rigged because of some massive Karl Rove scam in bed with corporate America.

I think the bigger issue is that the US public no longer has the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. So pundits can come up with all kinds of elaborate theories about framing, VP picks, strategies, etc. and I doubt it would really make any difference in the end.

Cheers,
Graham

The point here is that the McCain camp is attempting to make it look like Obama is

a. about “more of the same” and not change.
b. turn Obama into someone who talks about both sides of his mouth… a liar.

What McCain is doing (saying that the Republican ticket is about change) is really an attack, it just does not look like one.

@Karl — I totally agree! Right now McCain stands to gain NOTHING by talking about issues. When it makes sense for him and his party to talk about issues again they will, unless Obama can somehow force issues into the public / political discourse.

-N

Capturing and directing attention is what wins.

Obama had the edge in that department until Palin was added to the McCain ticket.

Now McCain is playing the media – both mass *and* independent as the perfect tools to keep voters attention from the issues – which they would lose if they were kept front and center.