Who Will Create the Frame for the 2012 Election?

(So here's a post in which I try not to be Mr. Crankypants about politics, but instead try to share a look at politics in a way that may actually help some of you to see some of the same things I see when I look at the upcoming campaign.  Let me know if you find it helpful, and I may crank out a few more as November 2012 looms.)


You will often here political commentators talk about "framing the issues" but I don't know that they often do a good job of explaining what it is, or how it's done.  The reason framing of issues is especially important in an election campaign.

If the battle lines follow the framing of the current jobs and deficit debate, the Democrats might finally be on the winning side of the rhetorical frame for the first time in a long time.  The shape of what we'll likely see became a bit clearer to me as I read this story in the Sunday New York Times: Obama Offers Plan to Cut Deficit by Over $3 Trillion (New York Times, Sept. 18, 2011)

In particular, these two paragraphs struck me:

Mr. Obama’s proposal is certain to receive sharp criticism from Congressional Republicans, who on Sunday were already taking apart one element of the proposal that the administration let out early: the so-called Buffett Rule. The rule — named for the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, who has complained that he is taxed at a lower rate than his employees — calls for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers. 


That proposal, which was disclosed on Saturday, was met with derision Sunday by Republican lawmakers, who said it amounted to “class warfare” and a political tactic intended to portray his opponents as indifferent to the hardships facing middle-class Americans. 


If that's the framing for the 2012 election, the Democrats will win.  And the Republicans will have helped them by making such a huge screaming deal out of long-term deficits, and by then forcing the question of "tax cuts for billionaires" vs. "cut Grandma's Social Security check and take away her arthritis medication."

However, in terms of the linguistic battlefield for the 2012 election, I'm not sure it will play out that way. The GOP deserves credit for one of their great strengths, their ability to impose a verbal frame on an issue by repeating their preferred term in lockstep.  For example, this is how they brought us "the death tax" to replace "the estate tax" a change that worked to their great advantage in that debate.

Language provides a powerful frame for issues because the terms to discuss an issue often serve to define it in a voter's mind.  And the best way to get the media to adopt your preferred terminology is to repeat it incessantly.  Democrats are notoriously undisciplined on this front, which is why they keep debating Social Security "entitlements" instead of "earned benefits."

You'll also notice the GOP's talking-point discipline in the current tax debate as GOP pols and pundits focus exclusively on the income tax without including regressive federal taxes like payroll and excise taxes, or state or local taxes that also tend to be regressive.  It is simply not at all true that lower- and middle-income families don't pay federal taxes. In fact, they pay those other taxes as a much greater portion of their income than do the wealthy.  And so from the anti-income-tax crowd you will see a steady succession of charts showing only the income tax without ever discussing payroll, excise, state, or local taxes, or indeed the total tax burden.

Cutting out one piece of an issue from the broader debate also provides a frame.  If you can convince a lot of people that most of America is freeloading off a tax burden that goes only on a very few, that seems a lot more unfair than if you demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of Americans pay a greater percentage of their income in federal taxes to pay for Social Security and Medicare than do the wealthy.

(FWIW, here's a link to a pretty good analysis of total tax burden by income from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

One last thought about the linguistic framing we're seeing as we head into 2012.  One of the odder current verbal ticks of the GOP is their insistence on calling the wealthy "job creators."  I understand why they do it, but this one might come back to bite them because reality keeps demonstrating that showering the wealthy with tax cuts doesn't actually create any jobs. I sense increasing eye-rolling as that phrase gets thrown out there more and more often.  It just feels like rhetorical trickery taken that one step too far.  In an age of nearly 10% unemployment while we have the lowest tax burden on the wealthy and the highest corporate profits in 50 years, that gap between linguistic framing and reality starts to look pretty awkward.  We'll see how it plays out.

As the campaign cranks up over the next 14 months, don't just look at what the candidates are saying.  Look at how they're saying it.  That will tell you how they're framing their argument and their campaign.