Communications

When reframing anti-poverty work comes up, I often hear reservations about taking the word "poverty" out of our vocabulary. Lots of people think you can't address the issues if you can't speak about them directly. While I think they're wrong, the point gets at a deeper debate about how to talk to an American public that seems like it just doesn't care about poverty.

The first couple of times I heard this question raised, I thought it was easily resolved. There's a million and one ways to talk about poverty in different terms. Phrases like "low-wage work" have the benefit of being more specific (about jobs for low-income people) and get people focused on the structural causes of poverty. Maybe I'm being stubborn, but I just don't think this is an arguable point.

But if the debate was about words and not ideas, it would have ended long ago. Rather, I think the real debate is over what to do about American values. As you may know, it's been a while since Americans have done much to reduce poverty. Does that mean our values need to be overhauled? Or can we emphasize some part of American culture and deemphasize the rest?

I believe that all we really need is a change of priorities. Lots of public opinion surveys show that Americans believe "we're all in this together." That belief, however, must compete with individualism, the other major current in American political culture. Individualism may have been dominant recently, but in the not-too-distant past, Americans weren't quite so individualistic. Public-spiritedness once trumped individualism, and it can again. This is the idea behind the Demos Center for the Public Sector's work on framing government, EPI's work on framing the economy, and Inclusion's work on framing low-wage work.

Now, the folks who want to use the word "poverty" have legitimate concerns. One of those is that poor people will be framed out of the policy agenda, a la Clinton-style triangulation, if you don't talk about poverty. Sometimes I hear communications experts do this- they say, "forget about poor people, nobody will ever go for that. You gotta focus on the middle class." So their concerns are warranted, but they're being too cautious. Not all communications folks agree on everything, and there are ways of including low-income folks in effective frames.

Another concern: who's excluded from the "we" in "we're all in this together"- that is, the "other"- racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, rural folks, to name a few. Many Americans still have not embraced stigmatized populations, so frames rooted in a vision of an "us" could exclude them. It follows, then, that the poverty frame must be redefined and the lens through which Americans understand it changed fundamentally. If certain groups are always going to be excluded, then the only alternative is to get people to value poverty reduction per se.

There's also truth to this point, but it's too pessimistic. Far more folks are included in the national "we" than they think. Granted, much more could be done to get folks to see marginalized populations as "one of them." This is vital, but long-term, work. Indeed, much of it began in the '60s, and I think it's now paying dividends. While we still haven't destigmatized poverty, America has become a far more inclusive society since 1968. In today's environment, we will get results if we put our ideas into a frame that's tied to a vision of an expansive "us."

But a debate needs to happen over how to prioritize both the long-term work of broadening the "us" and the short-term work of building a frame for inclusive policy. This debate hasn't been happening, but it could help move things forward.

In a previous post, I noted that the Half in Ten Campaign's website was, well, not so hot—particularly its use of images that seem likely to reinforce popular stereotypes and misconceptions about poverty (no white men, mostly African-Americans, etc). They've recently added some new images, including a white male construction worker, but I still end up being decidedly non-enthusiastic about the site.

The fact that the newly added white dude is the only person clearly presented as a worker is part of the problem—why not a white guy protesting in favor of increasing the minimum wage and a black guy in a hard hard? they do exist, after all—but even if the images accurately represented poverty in the United States, they might not help Half in Ten's case.

To see why, compare Half in Ten's site with the site for ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History. ONE avoids using any of the standard images used to depict global poverty in developing countries. My guess is that they made a very conscious choice to avoid using images that evoke a sympathy/charity frame, or what's been called an "individual victim" frame. Instead what you get are images (and text) that position ONE as a public campaign, one that calls on public leaders to do more to fight the social phenomenon of global poverty. Most of the photographs on the ONE site are of people in the United States campaigning to end global poverty. (I think the photos are mostly submitted by visitors—the site makes great use of flickr, facebook and other social networking sites). By contrast, the bulk of images used on the Half in Ten site seem likely to evoke sympathy, charity, and the individual frame, rather than public action.

This discussion of Shanto Iyengar's research on media depictions of poverty, from a Frameworks brief, suggests that framing and images that reinforce an "individual victim" understanding of poverty will likely be counterproductive:

"To identify the frames in which television news embeds the issue of poverty," Shanto Iyengar reprised an earlier analysis of 191 poverty-related news reports. Using an experimental method that allows scholars to empirically compare the impact of specific news reports on political attitudes, Iyengar and his colleagues exposed viewers to poverty reporting that featured either societal frames or individual victim frames. After exposure to a newscast in which only one story addressed poverty, the informants were asked "In your opinion, what are the most important causes of poverty?" and "If you were asked to prescribe ways to reduce poverty, what would you suggest?"

The societal frames - which Iyengar also calls "thematic" - featured "information bearing on national trends (e.g., the poverty rate, the number of states experiencing significant increases in hunger, changes in the government's definition of poverty, etc.) or matters of public policy (the Reagan administration's proposals to curtail various social welfare programs, allegations of fraud in welfare programs, etc.) These are essentially...stories in which the object of the coverage is abstract and impersonal."

"In the individual-victim frame, by contrast, poverty is covered in terms of personal experience; the viewer is provided a particular instance of an individual or family living under economic duress." This type of coverage, which Iyengar has termed "episodic" is the dominant form of news coverage for most social issues. In fact, in a recent review of more than 10,000 stories of foreign affairs on five local television stations, a report for the FrameWorks Institute found episodic stories were 97% of the coverage. As Iyengar concludes, "poverty is clearly an individual-level rather than a societal phenomenon."

The problem with the over-representation of this kind of coverage is that episodic coverage tends to reinforce notions of individual responsibility. "When poverty was described in societal terms, individuals assigned responsibility to societal factors - failed government programs, the political climate, economic conditions, and so on. Conversely, when news coverage of poverty dwelled on particular instances of poor people, individuals were more apt to hold the poor causally responsible."

Iyengar also found that "race appears to be a meaningful contextual cue when Americans think about poverty....When the poor person was white, causal and treatment responsibility for poverty were predominantly societal; when the poor person was black, causal and treatment responsibility were more individual." Iyengar discounts the easy explanation that the informants were "anti-black"; rather, he suggests, "the observed racial differences fluctuated with the particular victim (suggesting) that race more effectively evoked stored knowledge concerning responsibility for poverty..."

Iyengar concludes that "the national debate over social welfare policy has traditionally been formulated in terms of specific beneficiary groups such as children, women, minorities, or the disabled. The results reported here suggest that framing welfare programs in terms of particular beneficiary groups will weaken rather than strengthen public support for welfare."

What Iyengar cautions against—formulating the national debate in terms of "specific beneficiary groups such as children, women, minorities, or the disabled"—isn't what CAP and Half in Ten intend, but the design of their website will leave many viewers with the impression that the debate is being formulating in that way.

Earlier this week, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, ACORN, the Coalition on Human Needs, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights kicked off the political arm of a campaign to expand the middle class by nearly 20 million people over the next decade. Well, they don't actually it that, but that's the basic idea.

The campaign's new website notes that the campaign "will focus on the issues facing the poor and middle class in America, building an effective constituency to advocate for specific policy changes." The part about focusing on issues facing the middle class is a notable addition and something that was lacking from CAP's earlier report on poverty.

It's a good sign that John Edwards is chairing the campaign. Edwards could bring the kind of partisan and populist voice to this work that has been lacking on the national level. As Larry Bartels' new book suggests, advancing the cause of economic justice in the next decade will require a Democrat in the White House and more partisanship rather than less.

Edwards should help ensure that the campaign doesn't become a kind of mushy attempt to find "common ground" between Republicans and Democrats on economic justice. The reality is that there really isn't any common ground on economic justice right now or in the near future at the national level given the conservative extremism of the national Republican party and their allies. (I say this as a matter of fact rather than advocacy—there are thoughtful efforts by progressive R's to change this, but it's a decades-long project, not a short-term one). The biggest challenge for the CAP campaign isn't finding common ground between Republicans and Democrats, it's making sure that conservative Democrats don't obstruct efforts to expand the middle class (which is one of the reasons, by the way, that this campaign needs to be framed as a campaign to expand the middle class).

While I'm a fan of the policy ideas put forward by the campaign, I'm less enthusiastic about much of the communcations aspect of the campaign. The name of the campaign, "Half in Ten," while easy to remember, sounds more like a technocratic goal than a statement that combines vision and values. This can be demonstrated by comparing it with ONE: The Campaign to Make [Global] Poverty History and Green for All's goal to "build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

ONE is both a values statement (we're in this together, "united as ONE") and a true vision statement ("make poverty history"). Similarly, Green for All's goal combines vision and values—a strong and inclusive economy—in a slogan that clearly positions poverty as an economic issue. By contrast, "Half in Ten" has no obvious values content and will sound to some like "give us half a loaf in 10 years." This may be fine as a compromise governmental goal adopted by political leaders, but may be less effective as an advocacy slogan. I wish the wealthy backers of estate tax repeal had rallied under the banner of reducing the estate tax by 50 percent in 10 years, but unfortunately they went for the whole loaf and were much more successful as a result. Of course, a 50 percent reduction in poverty in ten years would be a fantastic accomplishment, but the slogan the campaign, like all good advertising, doesn't need to be so literal.

A related communications issue. Most of the images used on the campaign's website seem likely to reinforce popular stereotypes and misconceptions about people living below the poverty line. The banner of the site rotates a set of photographs that appear to be: a black child, a white mother hugging a child, an elderly white woman in a wheelchair, a black man, and a black woman (the classroom setting suggests that she may be an immigrant). None of the pictures portray people who are clearly at work or in work clothes.

A final point that involves framing in a deeper sense: while it's positive that the campaign "will focus on the issues facing the poor and middle class in America, building an effective constituency to advocate for specific policy changes", they need to go one step further and describe the cross-class constituency they're trying to build as "the working class and middle class." Where I grew up in the tundra of rural Minnesota, there were plenty of people living below the poverty line, but if you called one of them a "poor person" you would probably get either a punch in the face or an insulted glare. The same goes for the hundreds of clients I represented as a legal services attorney in west central Minnesota. Most people with incomes under even the miserly federal poverty line describe themselves as working class or middle class rather than "poor." The descriptions used to describe people—and how they describe themselves—change considerably over time. Negroes, paupers, and, increasingly, homosexual, are examples of terms that have been replaced in general public conversation or are in the process of being replaced. Poor people is another term in need of such evolution.

Jeffrey Feldman has a good review of Bernie Horne's Framing the Future: How Progressive Values Can Win Elections and Influence People, an excellent and very practical book on framing. (I stress practicality because it's not a particularly notable element of the rather voluminous literature on progressive-side framing that has emerged over the last five years or so.) An excerpt from Feldman's review:

The question brings us to the central challenge faced by the progressive movement: moving forward. The problem is not that Democrats discard the importance of persuasion--although some certainly do. Progressives simply have trouble taking the next step from diagnosis to improvement, from the realization that Democrats often talk in an alienating dialect of jargon-laden lists to the outcome of a new, effective form of expression that can carry the progressive movement into its next phase.

More than any book in recent memory, Bernie Horne's Framing the Future begins at this point in the discussion of framing and rockets things down the road. The end result is a book that not only brings readers into the conversation about, but puts tools into their hands for getting down to business. Framing the Future is not a book aimed at readers who want to talk about framing, but at activists, candidates and organizers who want to used framing right away to win elections and influence debates.

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The lesson of all that experience is that the best, progressive policies most often do not make sense to voters unless they are expressed in language that sounds somewhat foreign to Democratic policy makers. Progressives may think, for example, that critiquing 'corporate greed' is the best way phrasing to appeal to people who have been victimized by industry malfeasance. Testing shows, however, that talking about 'Wall Street' is actually a better way to speak to voters about setting rules for a fair marketplace.

The difference is much more than diction. Horne places these errant Democratic phrasings in the linguistic contexts of peoples lives and shows how common policy language often puts people in uncomfortable contradictions. Most Americans are against large companies taking advantage of people, but they also have jobs at firms they know to be 'corporations.' Choosing better words is not about embracing or abandoning progressive policies, but about recognizing that there are many different words that can express progressive values, but not all of them will appeal to the core group of voters that can be persuaded in a given campaign. In Horne's presentation, in other words, 'framing' is about listening before speaking.

....

When Horn suggests that Democrats adopt "freedom, opportunity, and security" as the broadest description of progressive philosophy, the data is there to show that it is better than the alternatives—even better than the Republican alternatives.

If only to avoid another debacle like "temporary, targeted, and timely", it might be a good idea for progressives to have their own handy, alliterative catchphrase to use to frame the second economic stimulus package and related measures, like responses to the foreclosure crisis, Democrats in Congress are calling for.

Here's my first crack at a catch phase: reform, relief, and recovery. That is, anything that Congress does on economic policy this year should be designed to: reform a broken economic system that has given us two asset bubbles in the last decade and a return to Gilded Age levels of inequality; relieve the economic distress and dislocation caused by the current downturn; and be of sufficient size to bring about a broad-based recovery from the current downturn.

Continuing on the theme of how to talk about taxes, here's Kwame Anthohy Appiah in Sunday's WaPo on why it's important to appeal to fairness:

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How, in the first Bush administration, did the movement to repeal the estate tax prevail? Not just because it was craftily renamed the "death tax." The number of Americans who told pollsters that they opposed the "death tax" was just a few percentage points higher than the number who said they opposed the "estate tax." As Yale scholars Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro have shown, it mattered more that proponents of repeal made a moral argument (however specious): that the tax was unfair because, for one thing, it involved taxing earnings twice.

Defenders of the tax typically countered with an appeal to self-interest: But you're not paying it, because it applies to just 2 percent of households. They didn't quite grasp how powerful appeals to fairness are. In fact, when the barnstorming Teddy Roosevelt proposed the tax a century ago, he made the case for it precisely in terms of fairness: He talked about what the wealthy owe to a nation that made their success possible.

Roosevelt, of course, was one of the great leather-lunged orators. This primary season has seen an ongoing dispute about whether soaring rhetoric of moral uplift has any relevance to the hard work of devising and implementing public policy. But once you start thinking about how powerfully affected we are by our sense of fairness -- and about how powerfully that sense can be affected by the way issues are described to us -- it's hard to dodge the fact that whiffy moral rhetoric can have practical consequences when April 15 rolls around.

At some level, we're those kids with the candy bars. We may change our minds about what's truly just, but not about how much fairness matters. As faltering as our intuitions about fairness in public policy are, success comes to the politician who can enlist them effectively. It's not enough to craft good policies, you have to convince people that they're wise and just. Some individuals, for reasons we grasp only dimly, are a lot better at that than others, however smart, engaged and sensible. Almost doesn't seem fair, does it?

A sensible proposal from Richard Conniff:

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It’s time to take a page from the conservative playbook, the one where they reframe the debate by changing the language — for instance, calling the “estate tax” a “death tax,” or making equal rights for same-sex partners a “protection of marriage” issue. I propose we stop saying “taxes” and start calling them “dues.”

Yes, this is a little sneaky. Some conservatives may even call it Orwellian, and they ought to know. But the word “dues” also plays into the psychology of group identity, and that can work to the benefit of conservatives and liberals alike. Consider that “tax” comes from the Latin for “appraise” with punitive overtones of “censure” or “fault,” as if wage-earners have done something wrong by their labors. “Dues,” in contrast, is rooted in social obligation and duty.

“Look,” I said to a conservative friend, “simply saying ‘hard earned’ every time you say ‘tax dollars’ doesn’t make bureaucrats think twice before spending. But spending other peoples’ dues, now that’s not so easy.” He muttered darkly. With a liberal friend, I mentioned a study showing that words like “social” and “contract” make people more willing to pay their share. “But I probably wouldn’t like paying dues either,” he replied. “The government isn’t my kind of club.”

So this will be an uphill struggle. But we need language to remind us that this is our government, and that we thrive because of the schools and transit systems and 10,000 other services that exist only because we have joined together. Instead of denouncing taxes, politicians would do better to appeal to the patriotic corners of our hearts that warm to phrases like “we the people.” “Taxation” is a throwback to the time when kings picked our pockets. “Paying my dues,” a phrase popularized in the jazz music world, is language by which we can stand together as Americans.

Number of times that the words "chaos", "crisis", "disaster", "bombshell", and "salvo" appear in a recent Washington Times op-ed on Social Security and Medicare:

Chaos: 4
Crisis: 4
Disaster: 2
Bombshell: 1
Salvo: 1

While this kind of crisis rhetoric may be merited in an op-ed on the Iraq War or global climate change, it seems wildly inappropriate in an op-ed discussing Social Security and Medicare, especially since as Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution reminds us:

... anticipated budget problems are fully explained by projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid. But the same forces driving public-sector health care spending are also driving private spending. Sensible reforms of publicly financed health care require a systemwide approach. Apart from health care, currently legislated federal revenues suffice to cover all currently projected spending, including all Social Security and other entitlements. The United States confronts a public and private health care spending problem, not an entitlement crisis.

In the cases of Social Security and Medicare, crisis rhetoric is ill-advised not only because the "entitlement crisis" frame is a misleading description of the problem, but also because it feeds public cynicism and apathy. I commend to the op-ed's distinguished authors this short discussion of the pitfalls of crisis rhetoric in public discourse:

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The language of crisis rhetoric is used almost daily to grab our attention. Policy entrepreneurs fan the flames of crisis—failing public schools, terrorists in our subways and shopping malls, burgeoning government budget deficits, foreign takeovers of homegrown companies, skyrocketing medical costs, the breakdown of traditional family values, and on and on.

Cynics point out this is par for the course in policy debates. Indeed, surly exchanges on late-night news have become a staple of every American’s media diet.

Our politicians have become experts at using crisis-mode language to frame debate over Social Security’s long-term problems and call for reforms—even when the outlook is exceedingly good and Social Security benefits can continue to be paid in full until 2042 when 73 percent of benefits can be paid.

....

Forecasting is always risky business—especially in the case of Social Security where projections almost always understate long-term economic growth and exaggerate the system’s vulnerability.

So why do politicians and pundits continue to wave the crisis flag—not just for Social Security but a multitude of other equally complex and long-term structural problems in the United States?

To some extent, they do it because it does work. Psychologists know that panic negatively affects cognitive processing and decision-making. And so it is with the crisis rhetoric. We debate the terms of policy proposals differently and can more easily be persuaded that something must be done, whether we really need to or not.

The problem is that such distorted debate can lead to actions that are more often regrettable than not. Witness how the war on drugs, launched by President Reagan, led to policies that have America’s prisons overflowing at vast taxpayer and social expense. Yet 20 years later drug use remains virtually unchanged.

With regard to Social Security, the danger of crisis rhetoric is that it causes the public to lose faith in programs based on long-term expectations. From one generation to the next, we expect adjustments to be made in a fair and prudent manner. By chipping away at the public’s psychological sense of security and faith in these programs, exaggerated and misleading claims needlessly create a climate of “social insecurity.”

While a moratorium on the use of “crisis” in political rhetoric would be welcome, its use may simply be too tempting for enterprising reformers (of whatever ideological stripe) to give it up. But if citizens at least recognize such claims for what they are—manipulative rather than analytical—more informed, sober public debates might follow.

One final observation: the kind of proposal the op-ed's authors are pushing would appear less partisan and partial if it applied not solely to two progressive public programs—Social Security and Medicare—but also to regressive tax expenditures like the mortgage interest tax deductions and the exclusions of employer-provided health and pension benefits.

In a new paper, the Entitlement Crisis Crew uses an interesting metaphor—the federal budget as a plane on "autopilot":

The first step toward establishing budget responsibility is to reform the budget decision process so that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—the major drivers of escalating deficits—are no longer on auto-pilot.

Sunday's WaPo editorial on the report parrots this line with some extra screech added to make sure you're listening:

The federal budget is on an autopilot course to ruin[!] Spending on the three big entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- grows automatically, consuming a large and growing share of the budget with benefits that flow mostly to the elderly.

Not wanting to be left out, even the conservative Dems at PPI get into the act writing that "a prominent group of veteran budget and policy analysts today proposed a novel way to avoid a fiscal train wreck[!]: Take entitlement programs off auto pilot."

I'm not sure "auto-pilot" is an especially effective frame for the Entitlement Crisis Crew to use if they want to achieve their goal of convincing everybody that the fiscal sky is falling. Autopilot in the non-metaphorical sense is an incredibly sophisticated, entirely sensible, and, as far as I know, utterly uncontroversial element of modern aviation that reduces fuel usage, shortens flight times and has plenty of other benefits.

If you really want to scare people, it might be better to say that Social Security is like a plane full of explosives and rotten herring being flown by a bunch of Swedish terrorists into the heart of America. Or, if that's too extreme, you could compare it to a plane being flown by bunch of crazy monkeys on the lam. Most travelers don't worry too much when the pilot says she's putting the plane on autopilot, but if you see a bunch of insane monkeys heading into the cockpit, you know you're in trouble.

Talking about Social Security as a program on autopilot is another example of Third Way-types and conservative Dems adopting a conservative framing of a core progressive issue. The last time I saw auto-pilot used to refer to the budget was in an Wall Street Journal op-ed by conservative William Voegeli in November 2007 who claimed that Social Security and Medicaid will bring about "the Swedenization of America on autopilot[!]" Instead of copying conservatives, Entitlement-crisis centrists and conservative Dems should come up with something more original. They can even use my crazy monkeys on the lam framing without crediting me.

I wrote a while back agreeing with Chris Bowers that the term progressive is preferable to liberal moving forward (at least for the next 40 years or so) for historical and other reasons. According to recent survey, progressive also is the preferred term among the progressive/liberal/left activist types who attended the recent Take Back America conference here in DC. Progressive was preferred by 55 percent of conference attendees compared to 32 percent for liberal. Would be very interesting to see those numbers by age.

With all the blog commentary since yesterday about the Obama speech on race, I don't have much to add, but I did want to excerpt my favorite two paragraphs:

For the African-American community, that path [to a more perfect union] means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

....

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

I particularly like the line in the first paragraph about "binding our particular grievances ... to the larger aspirations of all Americans", and the line in the second paragraph about how "investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper." More than fine sentiments, these add up to a prescription for building community power.

Reporting from this week's Take Back America, Rick Perlstein tells the fantastic story of a successful effort to defeat an anti-domestic partnership ballot initiative in Arizona. In 2004, conservatives put anti-gay initiatives on the ballots in eleven states, but bypassed Arizona. While some activists sat by and hoped there'd be no such effort in 2006, Kyrsten Sinema was convinced otherwise; planning for the worst, she pushed for a retooled message that was designed to resonate with the public:

Sinema ... started gameplanning, so by the time the Arizona right moved for 2006, some pieces were in place. Old heads started talking strategy—the same old strategy anti-"hate" campaigns had hauled out in losing fight after losing fight after losing fight. Losing had even been institutionalized as a positive good in the gay human rights movement: it's called "losing forward"—losing yes, but losing while doing the right thing. Losing while "raising awareness." Winning if you lose, wen the theory, because at least you "fought," nobly, "energized" lots of people, made folks feel good about "participating in the process."

At the panel, Kyrsten Sinema told the story of how she called "bullshit." "I wanted to get more votes on election day."

For Kyrsten Sinema had learned something in 2004. While John Kerry, and elevent ineffectual progressive movements to beat back anti-gay ballot initiatives were losing, she became one of the few Democratic politicians besides Barack Obama to learn what it felt like to win.

She'd been a progressive organizer for ten years. Campaign after campaign after campaign. All followed by the same post-election postmortem: we really got our people energized. We really brought more people into the process. We fought nobly. We raised awareness. We did the right thing. We were "freedom fighters."

In other words: we lost.

Sinema thought: why not victory? Gay and lesbian folks, progressive folks, prefer to talk to each other. They use words, in their movement, like "hate," "bigotry," and fairness." But what did the electorate think of words like this?

They thought it was annoying. They thought they were being insulted for being bad people. Kyrsten's movement decided to do the research to decide what kind of words did did work. As an open bisexual, "I know I'm unusual.... We had to learn the terminology and argot of the regular community.

....

Folks got on message. Arizona's initiative would have stripped the rights from unmarried couples gay and straight alike. Take away their right to visit loved ones in the hospital. Take away employer-based healthcare. They found an elderly heterosexual couple Al and Maxine. They told their story, and asked the question: why are you taking away Al's right to visit Maxine in the hospital?

On election day, the anti-domestic partnership initiative went down to defeat. Just as importantly, polling conducted a year later found that Arizona were more accepting of gay marriage (not just domestic partnership) than before the campaign to defeat the ordinance.

Advice on talking about health care and progressivism, from Isaiah Poole's blog at Campaign for America's Future:

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When I suggest that progressives appear to have a mandate for radical change in how health care is delivered in this country, [pollster Celinda] Lake is quick to correct me. What we have, she says, is "a mandate for reform," not a mandate for sweeping change. "It's a mandate to fix the problem."

That's because a majority of people are personally happy with their own health insurance. They haven't come face to face with the struggles of the 47 million people who are uninsured, or the millions of others who find that their insurance leaves them in the lurch when it comes to a serious illness or a pre-existing condition.

But those voters know that something needs to be fixed, and "people do not want market solutions" offered by conservatives, Lake says. "They don't want to be left on their own" to deal with the insurance companies and other business interests involved with health care.

A winning message on health care with voters is choice, Lake says: "You have a choice of keeping what you have or moving to a new system."

That is the essence of the "Health Care for America" plan advanced by Yale University professor Jacob Hacker and backed by Campaign for America's Future. Elements of that plan are in the presidential campaign platforms of Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

The real threat on health care, Lake says, is that through a combination of scare-mongering by conservatives and imprecise framing by progressives, "voters might be convinced to do nothing."

When I asked Lake if she agreed that as far as the majority of the public was concerned, conservatism as an ideology was dead or dying, Lake said, "I think it's on the ropes, to be sure."

But she cautioned that "it's not as if we have an established brand" to replace conservatism.

The challenge is for progressives to respond today as conservatives did in 1980, with an ideological framework that not only diagnoses the problems the country faces but offers a coherent alternative that speaks to the concerns and aspirations of working-class people.

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Responding to Margy's case below, I think it's important to distinguish between 1) having an anti-poverty or poverty-reduction plan or platform as part of one's campaign; and 2) calling for the establishment, via an executive order, of an official federal poverty-reduction goal. Hillary Clinton needs to have the former as part of a competent and competitive campaign strategy, but she doesn't need to have the latter.

If Hillary and her advisers think they do need an official goal of some sort, my view is that it should be a goal to increase the share of families who are middle class (or, who are, at least, "within reach" of the middle class). Meeting this goal would entail reductions in poverty, while avoiding some of the public opinion and related pitfalls with the poverty frame that Margy describes.

One objection to this from the left might be that it would leave the most disadvantaged or the poorest of the poor behind because it's not realistic to ever expect them to join the middle class. This same objection, however, applies just as forcefully to the CAP and Clinton proposals to reduce poverty by 50 percent, since those plans acknowledge that millions of families would continue to experience poverty. One way to overcome this objection would be to adopt additional goals, such as: 1) a goal to reduce hunger and food insecurity (which Clinton proposes doing for children); 2) a goal to eliminate homelessness; and 3) a goal to eliminate poverty (or whatever word you want to use for economic deprivation) among persons with disabilities.

Matt rightly notes—and the recent stimulus debate supports his observation—that the progressive economic narrative needs work. I'm skeptical, however, that characterizing the progressive approach as hands-on and the conservative approach as hands-off will do the trick. As Dean Baker persuasively argues in The Conservative Nanny State, both progressives and conservatives are hands-on when it comes to the economy. The real difference involves who they want to give a hand to—progressives want to help ordinary people and promote an economy that works for all Americans, while conservatives are focused on regressive redistribution.

Political debates in the United States are routinely framed as a battle between conservatives who favor market outcomes, whatever they may be, against liberals who prefer government intervention to ensure that families have decent standards-of-living. This description of the two poles is inaccurate; both conservatives and liberals want government intervention. The difference between them is the goal of government intervention, and the fact that conservatives are smart enough to conceal their dependence on the government.

Conservatives want to use the government to distribute income upward to higher paid workers, business owners, and investors. They support the establishment of rules and structures that have this effect. First and foremost, conservatives support nanny state policies that have the effect of increasing the supply of less-skilled workers (thereby lowering their wages), while at the same time restricting the supply of more highly educated professional employees (thereby raising their wages).

This isn't inconsistent with the Wellstone/Bernstein "You're on Your Own" framing of conservative economics. Even though conservatives favor an interventionist approach, they're not all that interested in intervening on behalf of you.