Another Presidential candidate debate down, one more to go. I'm left without sharp edges or persistently lingering points of exceptional import.

Living in the age of opinionators rather than analyzers, factoid reporters rather than fact checkers, we are left without clear understanding of truth. Claims are presented without contrast, without context, leaving loudness and aggression as the clearest memory.

I look for follow-up analysis and find only partisan cheerleading or carefully balanced gray reportage. All this is carefully choreographed to create the iconic representations of the candidates. War hero maverick. Calm assured diplomat. Rainbow Brite frontier woman w/ maverick highlights. (I've got nothing for Biden except experienced but occasionally gaffe-prone white guy which seems thin even to me.)

Winners of a particular debate are variously declared using specific or specious criteria: polls, style, audience, expectations. Because there has to be a winner and a loser. There are no stark contradictions. There are no lies, no misrepresentations in the mainstream reports. They leave those to be presented by the campaigns.

What would it be like if every campaign claim and counterclaim were strictly analyzed for verifiable facts? For a candidate's historical positions? Deconstruct the assertions with clarity and without bias and see what comes out the other end.

Instead we are tribes battling, shouting taunts and incoherent epithets back and forth, caught up in the identity politics and issues cleaving the body politic.

Color me blank.

Labels: debates, Dems, dog pound of daddies (and mommies now), politics, Presidential race 2008, republicans

My other commitments have been sucking at my time so I admit my reading of blogs has been severely limited over the last year or two. I'm trying to sample some of my old favorites as well as reach out to some new ones.

This has brought me back to Frameshop and a renewed appreciation of the analysis provided there. I never leave Frameshop without substance to chew over. Some may find it a little abstract but I never do. For example, his recent post Frameshop: The Winning Frame has Emerged examines the various frames used by various candidates in the campaign.

Here's his take on the Democrats' frames:

Opening Frames: 'American Dream' and 'Hope'
The 2008 election started out with multiple competing frames from Democrats and Republicans. The largest opening frames, however, came from the Clinton campaign and the Obama Campaign.

From the start, Clinton set the idea of restoring the 'American Dream,' and idea that was fundamentally economic. During the course of the primary, Clinton arrived at a new way to express her opening frame by talking about 'the invisible.' It was a very convincing idea, particularly as the economy went south. Despite the ideological statements of the Republicans, a majority of Americans felt that the economy had left them behind and that nobody cared about their troubles. The 'American Dream' frame became 'the invisible' and Hillary Clinton won millions of votes as a result.

The Obama campaign offered a different opening frame in the idea of 'Hope.' In many ways, 'Hope' was a much stronger frame than 'American dream' because it spoke to larger questions about the future of the country as a whole. By talking about 'Hope,' Obama was talking about American idealism beyond the mechanics of building family wealth. 'Hope' was also a more forward looking frame because it implicitly acknowledged new challenges that Americans face--such as global warming, conservation, technology, international interdependence, and so forth. The 'American Dream,' was more nostalgic. The problem with 'Hope' as we discovered in the primary, was that it was difficult to re-emphasize in terms of the economy when that became the key issue in the primaries. The middle ground framing of 'more people participating' that was so successful for Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, became less successful for his campaign in Pennsylvania. The better frame in idealistic terms, 'Hope' did not readily present a way to ground that idealism in the concrete issues that contingency was forcing into the election.

Obama won the nomination, but the sense coming out of that long contest was that he was left with a very big challenge of finding an economic foundation for his 'hope' frame. And even by the time of the DNC, it did not seem like that new frame had emerged quite yet.

Labels: analysis, blogs, Dems, frames, Hillary, Obama

Visiting Frameshop is always an educational experience. While I'm a little less of a George Lakoff fan than I used to be, I do believe much can be learned by examining the ways news and information is framed.

One recent story is about FOX Using Bush's Phrase For Terrorists--On Democrats. The turn of phrase ("Democrats and those who support them") is possibly intended to address all the people who don't identify as Democrats but still think the Dems are the closest mainstream option available. Still, it's a remarkably identical construction and doesn't strike me as coincidental.

(Soundtrack: The First Cut is the Deepest by The Koobas)

Labels: deconstruction, Dems, frames