From the New York Times:
If George Lakoff had his way, the Kerry campaign would have run a commercial attacking the “baby tax.” Dr. Lakoff, a Berkeley linguistics professor and Kerry campaign adviser, wanted to divide the interest on the national debt by the number of Americans born each year. The result, $85,000 per newborn, say, would have been handed to a baby in the form of a bill, and the baby would have started to cry. That, Dr. Lakoff says, “frames” the issue “in a way people can understand.“Framing” is a hot topic among political junkies and in the blogo-sphere right now, thanks to Dr. Lakoff. In “Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate,” his surprise best seller, Dr. Lakoff argues that Republicans have been winning elections because they have been better than Democrats at framing issues – from taxes, to abortion, to national security – in ways that resonate with core American values.
As I wrote today, you either have to be an idiot, a utopian socialist or a maleducated ur-idiot in order to actively support the modern Democratic party. Dr. Lakoff demonstrates this rather neatly with his example cited above. Does he really think that the “Baby Tax” is a winning frame for the party of big government and increased government spending? Where in the evil name of the GAO does he think that debt was acquired in the first place, at Neiman Marcus?