RelentlesslyOptimistic

The Daisy Girl in the Atomic Spotlight

Conelrad, a site devoted to ATOMIC CULTURE, recently published a fascinating story about the notorious and iconic Daisy Girl ad. The ad, which was created for Lyndon Johnson's presidential campaign in 1964, is credited by some as the reason for Johnson's landslide win over Barry Goldwater.

It ran as a paid advertisement only once. It became the subject of TV news stories, was discussed in a Time magazine cover article, and was condemned on the floor of Congress. Theodore H. White, author of the landmark "Making of the President" series (the first of which won a Pulitzer Prize), said that "…the shriek of Republican indignation fastened the bomb message on them more tightly than any calculation could have expected."

Bill Moyers, one of the leaders of the Campaign, later regretted the ad's role in launching powerful political commercials, saying that "The Frankenstein we helped to build is loose in the world."

The story includes interviews with all the participants in the strategy, approval, creation and airing of the ad, a rare, almost-exclusive interview with the Daisy Girl herself, and a treasure trove of related documents, tape and video.

Via PCL LinkDump

Best response to attacks on Howard Dean

The Next Left: Not all Republicans, silly ... via Dadahead. Comedian David Cross responds to criticism of Howard Dean's characterization of Republicans:

"I'm not saying all Republicans are racist, sexist homophobes, just the people they elect into office to represent them."

Bush's Economic Report shows that Republicans are the party of big government and deficit spending

The Washington Post covers Michael Kinsley as he parses the 2005 Economic Report of the President and learns that "The party with the best record of serving Republican economic values is the Democrats. It isn't even close."

Taking into account who controls Congress and the White House, wars, inflation and every other possible mitigating factor, Kinsley shows that Federal spending grew by an average of $15-$25 billion more under Republican presidents than Democratic. This is true whether you count only the period from 1981 onward, or if you start in 1959. The only areas that grew more under Republicans than Democrats? Deficits (an average of $100 billion more), inflation (.2%-.5% higher) and unemployment (1+ points).

Kinsley did the same analysis last year with similar results, again on numbers developed and released by the Bush Administration.

Any questions?

Via Amygdala

Boxer For President!

 President Boxer

Sometimes courage better be its own reward, because that's all the reward it's going to get

This wonderful essay marks the passing of James Foreman with a great discussion about the difficulty of creating change, and questions whether simply recreating the Right's communication machinery is enough. Wonderful essay, wonderful thinking.

Body and Soul: "Walk together, children. Don't you get weary".

I also struggle against the simplified and non-threatening story of Rosa Parks she hears in school: One day Rosa Parks got tired of being demeaned -- or maybe her feet just hurt -- and she said no. She refused to budge. And that changed everything.

Girl power! Let's make a Disney movie starring Raven!

Oh, Lord, no. Not at all. In the first place, Rosa Parks wasn't even the first black person arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus. That act of defiance had to occur several times before anyone beyond the community where it happened heard about it. Sometimes courage better be its own reward, because that's all the reward it's going to get. Equally important, it's an insult to Rosa Parks, and a gross distortion of how much hard work and knowledge underlies change, to portray her as a simple seamstress suddenly moved by an instinct for self-actualization.

A single line in a tribute to James Forman in today's Washington Post haunts me:

You have to constantly think about what it is you are really fighting for, Jim taught us.

We still don't do enough of that.

Some of the smartest commentary I have read since the election has focused on the need to create an equivalent of the machine conservatives began to build after Goldwater's defeat in 1964. I more or less agree with that, but a couple of things about the idea nag me. The first is the assumption that you can tell the truth using the same techniques as a lie machine. I have my doubts. If we have a model, it's not the right-wing's method of perpetrating lies, it's the civil rights movement's methods of revealing the truth.

The second problem is more fundamental. I think there is too much concern with the machine, and not enough with what goes in the machine.

We need to think about, write about, talk about, what we're really fighting for. Not what scraps and compromises we can get. What we're fighting for.

I'd like to think that James Forman would have appreciated a good man's cri de coeur, and reminded us that the advantage of dealing with brutal people whose actions are completely indefensible is that we're constantly reminded of what we're fighting against.

That's not enough, but it's a start.

Beyond Lakoff

Frances Moore Lappe, author of "Diet For A Small Planet," has a new take on Lakoff's "Don't Think Of An Elephant" book on frames. From Guerrilla News Network via Joho The Blog, which has some interesting comments about frames growing out of this story. Two of Lappe's key points:

So here’s one point progressives might want to savor as they think about frames: A broad swath of the American people may share the “strict father” frame just enough to be vulnerable to manipulation; but this does not mean Americans broadly, deeply share the worldview of those in power. The Left must get much better, not just at placing its issues in a compelling moral frame, but at exposing and holding the radical Right accountable for its lies and deception – without, and here is the tricky part, making those who have been manipulated feel ridiculed and put down.

A New Frame: Strong Communities. Second, in a positive vein, progressives can show that the more engaged and just a community, the stronger and safer we all are. The more we know that we can count on our neighbors, our schools, our health care providers – because we know them and because they are adequately funded—the safer we feel. Immediately after 9/11, a public health expert pointed out an obvious link between fairness and community safety.

Jock Gill of Greater Democracy comments at Joho that

"A key thing is the realization that there are meta frames. So the Family is the meta frame that contains BOTH the strict and nurturing parents. Thus, if we are not careful, Lakoff's Nurturing Parent only serves to keep us trapped in the same meta frame with the GOP. Since they currently control that frame, we can not win unless we extract ourselves from an over dependence on the Family frame.

Frances Moore Lappé is the author or co-author of 14 books, most recently You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear (Tarcher/Penguin 2004). Her books are widely used in college courses and have been translated into over a dozen languages. She’s now at work on a book about taking democracy to its next historical stage – democracy as a living practice that embraces economic and social as well as political life.

Guerilla News Network gets the prize for the best photo with a George Lakoff story. The photo above appears with their story, with the caption: "who's your daddy?"

Republicans Want To Destroy Social Security

From Digby:

The Republicans have been planting these seeds for a long, long time. They have been saying for decades that Social Security was going broke. This is what they do. They create a slogan then they wash rinse and repeat again and again if need be to instill a sense of CW about the issues they care about. They have slowly built the sense of crisis where one does not exist and now that they have President Reckless in the White House they are going to see if they can get away with taking action.

The main question that needs to be asked and answered is why and I think it's clear that they have sown the seed of "crisis" for many years simply because they want to destroy social security. And the good news for us is that that meme has been in the body politic for far longer than the social security "crisis," (which is why they were forced to dress this thing up as reform in the first place.)

They want to destroy social security. They voted against it in 1935 and they have been trying to figure out a way to get rid of it ever since. The Republicans do not believe that we should have a safety net for old people. They never have.

Don't get bogged down in details, just repeat, repeat, repeat. They do not believe that the government should provide all Americans with a small guaranteed income when they are unable to work due to old age or debilitating illness. They never have. The Republicans want to destroy social security.

Link: Hullabaloo.

Evolutionary Theology

 

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.Hullabaloo: Evolutionary Theology:  

Those of you who follow the religious beat more closely than I do have probably seen this article called The Fundamentalist Agenda, by Davidson Loehr. I may not have religious experiences, but I do have epiphanies and reading this was one.

From 1988 to 1993, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored an interdisciplinary study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest such study ever done. More than 100 scholars from all over the world took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism. And what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.

The five characteristics are

1) Men rule the roost and make the rules. Women are support staff and for reasons easy to imagine, homosexuality is intolerable.

2) all rules must apply to all people, no pluralism.

3) the rules must be precisely communicated to the next generation

4) "they spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed[...]

5) Fundamentalists deny history in a "radical and idiosyncratic way."

All of this is interesting and it's interesting because it crosses all religions, cultural and regional boundries.

The essay then goes on to relate the above to evolutionary psychology, and to make the case that the above shows that some elements of fundamentalism resonate with everyone because they link to behaviors that were programmed into us in the early days of humans, and that we need to include in our messages those conservative elements while reframing them as the basis for liberal programs. Interesting argument, fascinating study.

10 Ideas for 2008: The Concepts Progressives Need to Be Promoting

Daily Kos :: 10 Ideas for 2008.
Great essay and discussion on ten points to begin spreading so candidates can run on them in 2008. There's some recognition of Lakoff's principles, and lots of ideas about what will move people. Read it, leave comments, etc. Here are mine:
Are we creating the kind of community (world, country, people) we want?

I think the commons, and the community, are one of the points with the most resonance. As a central point, it allows us to ask whether we are building the kind of society that we want, which can be used to question any particular policy, from cutting taxes to allowing discrimination against gays. We can also tie social problems to existing policies - lack of police, pollution, etc. to the idea that Republican and conservative policies are hurting our communities.

People respond to what they see in their daily lives, and what strikes their emotions. We need a strategy that makes the Democrats the party of our homes and our neighborhoods, and the Republicans the party of the corporations and the rich.

Having said that, I can't resist sharing my alarm at the "trust the people" point. As an environmental activist, I see that argument used constantly by the Republicans to justify cutting regulation and oversight. What we really need is for people to trust the government, or at least recognize that it does play an important role in the communities we create. The most damaging thing Reagan did was to effectively de-legitimize government, and we'll be fighting from behind until we can re-legitimize it.

Making Legislation Accessible and Accountable

Public Access to Legislation: Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshall

 "[I]n the hundreds or often thousands of emails that come in every week there are many suggestions which can't but seem naive or unrealistic to a jaded Washington eye. Sometimes they're infected with blog triumphalism, an unrestrained belief that blogs or similarly-situated sites can and should revolutionize all politics and media (an attitude with which I have little patience.)

Last week, when news of the Istook Amendment first surfaced, I received several emails that seemed clearly to fall into this category … a number of TPM readers suggested that blogs and their readers be harnessed to comb through future bills…At first…I wasn't particularly impressed by this idea. But over a few days, as I considered it further, it occurred to me that maybe I was the one who wasn't being realistic or rather was too stuck in conventional ways of thinking."

What a terrific idea! Yes, it would result in delays sometimes. Yes, conservative and liberal groups would sometimes create a tsunami of emails and letter for or against some provision. Yes, it would create some fundamental shifts in how business is conducted in the legislature. But it's still worth doing.

We've seen the blogger communities that formed around the elections, and how people with expertise on particular aspects of certain issues weighed in, and created communities of informed people who could provide perspective on what was going on that was broader than what was offered in the traditional media.

This would (hopefully - I am an optimist, after all) result in similar opportunities for on-line groups to have truly engaged discussions about provisions of different bills and proposals. Right now, there's not much opportunity for anyone who isn't a staffer, a large donor, or a lobbyist to have such informed input. This would empower citizens to do so (and would provide another boost to blogging and on-line communities), and could revitalize the legislative process.

It might be fairly simple to test. It could begin with a few progressive legislators opening up the process for their committees, and helping to allow the communities of thoughtful conservatives and liberals to form around the discussions of their committees.

Let's do it!