In the spirit of Sunshine Week, I've decided to come out of my hidey-hole as regards domestic policy and recommend this piece by Josh Marshall. Reading it has left me with a palpable sense of disgust and powerlessness. What can I do about it? I'm pretty damn sure that destroying NPR is not the answer.

I can't help but think that MoveOn.org really ought to be training its guns on this broader issue rather than on the John Bolton nomination, as lousy a choice as he seems to be. Likewise, the ACLU is busy suing Donald Rumsfeld. I suppose it's not a question of either/or and Bolton and Rumsfeld are surely worthy of attention in many ways, but still, I find it odd that what seems to really animate both organizations is opposition to the Bush administration's foreign policy rather than the underlying culture that enables it--call it Pravdafication, Putinization, whatever. Maybe DailyKos will awaken from its self-indulgent navel-gazing and pitch in?

{update to fix typo & double-posting}

Mark Schmitt has a wonderful post that has an interesting set of comments (including from prak and Billmon). Although not explictly such, the post can be seen part of a related series The Decembrist has been publishing about how Democrats think and communicate policy.

The most recent installment is on the phenomenon of Democratic consultants and politicos of all ilks who are eagerly embracing the advice found in George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives.

You can get an idea of Mark's take on the Lakoff-phenomenon from the title of his Decembrist post: No Guru, No Method, No "DaVinci Code." Yet this post is as much a defense of Lakoff as a take-down. He puts primary blame for the epidemic of silliness on the people doing the embracing, rather on Lakoff himself.

My comment at The Decembrist was sufficiently lengthy and "standalone" that I republish it here [minor edits made only for readability]. I'm rather pleased with the title I've given these remarks, even if I do says so myself.

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My favorite Lakoff -- and where I think the best nuggets of insight are found -- are where he doesn't try to apply his cognitive approach to politics per se.

I'd reach even further back in time than Mark -- to the seminal Metaphors We Live By. It was one of the core applications of related ideas in Berger & Luckmann's equally seminal The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.

Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's "metaphors" were an epiphany. By now, the perspective they presented has been thoroughly incorporated into how Americans see things in their information marketplace, even if some of us aren't totally "fluent" yet in metaphors, narratives and frames. Certainly this stuff is mothers milk today for the successful marketing and advertising hacks Billmon's talking about, whether they work in the political sphere or are just flogging commercial products.

The research program of Lakoff and his co-authors over the past few decades, or of cognitionists (somebody help me out, what's the right term?) who are heavily influenced by his core ideas, is similarly rich with ways of understanding how the process of talking about what we think has such a reciprocal effect with the way we think, and even what we think/believe. Those concepts have endless application to politics.

The giant Lakoff-hug happening now just illustrates that we always need somebody to be the popularizer of these sorts of ideas. Most political hacks -- Democrats or Republicans -- aren't going to trawl through the rather dense pages of current debates on such relevant issues as epistemology, heuristics and decision-making in quick-time, and how all of that is being affected by the acceleration of the unintermediated horizontal flow of information and ideas represented by the internet.

We need the Malcolm Gladwells and James Surowieckis to do that for us, as in their week-long BookClub discussion in Slate earlier this month. But even that step isn't enough. We then we need another round of popularizing -- to take the concepts and insights that have been boiled down and reframed by the Gladwells et al and then show how they apply in a particular setting. In the case at hand, the realm of domestic politcs.

This process isn't somehow unique for the fighters and their managers in the arena of political combat. It's the same for the business managers and marketing professionals who apply new insights emerging from cognitive neuroscience and its various "liberal arts" counterparts -- whether linguistics, rhetoric, neuroeconomics, etc. The business-types have one big advantage over the political-types, however. The B-schools produce first-rate popularizers of these concepts. The B-school professors do the trawling for nuggets for the managers, and do the digesting, synthesizing and finding real-world case studies to apply these ideas.

Business types and politicos have this behavior in common: thinking they've found the guru and the silver bullet when all they've found is the "flavor of the month." A favorite object of B-school studies is the company that got screwed up by management's over-eager embrace of "lessons" taken out of context from the latest business-best-seller. So the fact that practitioners of Democratic strategy and communication think they have found the recipe for gold shouldn't come as a surprise.

I certainly agree with Mark that we need people who digest insights "...like Lakoff's, and some insight from a historian like Alan Brinkley or Kevin Mattson, and some insight from an economist like, say, Edward Wolff, and a sociologist here and a journalist or three, and put them in perspective and integrate them." I also think he makes a very important point that it takes an old-fashioned cross-disciplinary "liberal arts" mentality to do that. We all pay a price for the narrowing academic professionalization/specialization of the humanities and social sciences.

I'd add that it's not just a matter of finding people with the right breadth of mind to do the digesting and thinking for the vast majority of us who aren't going to do it ourselves. I'd suggest an equally important part of the overall problem is the absence of a group of competent popularizers who can do the same thing for politics as the B-school professors do for business and marketing.

As Mark points out, it's really rather unfair to Lakoff to expect him to be intellectual innovator, applied research scientist, and popularizer all in one. Unfortunately, I think Lakoff's not applied some lessons from his own important work to himself. But he's not the first intellectual to be blinded a bit by the bright lights of the public stage.

Maybe while we're talking about expanding Democratic-oriented policy centers and think tanks we should add a "Policy Center for Epsitemology and Rhetoric" to do the popularizing?

In the latest New Yorker, we learn that George Soros is in fact a proud member of the Reality-Based Community:

In May, 2003, Bush had what seemed like intimidatingly high popularity ratings, and there was overwhelming public support for the war. But Soros had one of his anticipatory hunches that the President’s support was a bubble that could burst. Moreover, he had the ego and the audacity to think that he could pop it. He commissioned two political researchers, Mark Steitz and Tom Novick, to determine whether it would be possible for Soros himself to exert political impact.

The following July, Soros invited a group of top Democratic activists to join him in the salmon-colored drawing room at El Mirador, his weekend estate in Southampton, Long Island, for the presentation of the consultants’ report. Steitz and Novick indicated that the 2004 election would probably be very close. The electorate was polarized, with only ten per cent of likely voters undecided. The best strategy, they said, would be to mobilize the Democratic base and persuade undecided voters with a state-of-the-art field operation. The plan was projected to cost at least seventy-five million dollars. As the researchers gave their presentation, Steitz recalled, “Soros was very engrossed. He leaned forward when we were talking about getting out the vote, and asked, ‘You mean you actually go door to door?’ All the practical aspects caught his imagination.”

Under the new campaign-finance law, supporters could no longer give unlimited funds directly to the Democratic Party—but according to the consultants’ interpretation of the law they could funnel private contributions into allied “independent” groups. As the discussion proceeded, it was proposed that Soros provide enough funds to these groups to pay for field operations in six or seven of the seventeen states that were expected to be the most contested. Soros, Steitz recalled, insisted that funds be offered for all seventeen. “He said, ‘I don’t want to build half a bridge! I want to do what’s necessary to effect the outcome!’”

Aha. So he wondered if he could have an impact, and then commissioned an expert study to find out whether that was true, and, if so, what was the best way to do it. He didn't just trust his "gut."

Incidentally, it just so happens that two Yale political scientists (who, by the way, are top-notch in their field) have just published a book examing the effectiveness of various approaches to organizing electoral campaigns. Here's what Donald Green and Alan Gerber concluded in Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout.

• Door-to-door canvassing, though expensive, yields the most votes. As a rule of thumb, one additional vote is cast from each 14 people contacted. That works out to somewhere between $7 and $19 a vote, depending on the pay of canvassers - not much different from the cost of that three-pack of underwear. Canvassers who matched the ethnic profile of their assigned neighborhoods were more successful.

Too bad the wrong George was in charge of postwar planning for Iraq.