The following article is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast:
New Democracy Corps Survey of the Battleground House Districts
The final Democracy Corps battleground survey of 2013 fielded just days after the ACA website fixes were launched–and in the midst of a serious debate in Washington and among pundits about the viability of the President’s signature healthcare law and what it might mean for 2014. However, even as pundits and politicians determined that the ACA website spelled disaster for Democrats in 2014, voters determined that they were unwilling to reward Republicans. Instead, the latest survey of the 50 most competitive Republican house districts and the 30 most competitive Democratic districts should provide a warning to pundits that it is the voters who will ultimately decide the balance of the House next November.
Key Points:
This poll is in the congressional battleground looking at named incumbents and is virtually the only window into what is really happening.
Yes, the health care roll-out and reduced presidential standing has hurt Democrats, but keep it in perspective:

Voters evenly divided on this issue; the big debate ends in a draw. Not a wedge issue.

Majority want to implement in Dem districts and plurality in Republicans

It is hurting the GOP image and re-enforcing that members are part of partisan battle

Keeps Republicans on their weakest case for their role

Setting up strong Democratic attack on Speaker Boehner’s failure to focus on economy and jobs

Gives Democrats opportunity to use to reach affected groups, particularly unmarried women

The big structural forces that leave the Tea Party Republican brand deeply tarnished are undiminished:

All incumbents damaged but Republicans even more so

Republicans at lowest point ever on all key metrics — compared to any prior election

Democrats have continuing brand advantage in these districts

Want members to work with Obama, not to keep stopping agenda

Serious plurality now ready to vote against member because they support Speaker Boehner and the impact on economy and jobs.

Two big demographic dynamics that will determine what happens:

Seniors. Republicans trail their challenger among seniors in the Republican districts.

Unmarried women. If they turn out and vote as in 2012 and in Virginia in 2013, Democrats make major gains. They are underperforming now at 52 percent in Republican districts, but shift 9 points after health care debate and the race overall moves to even. That puts one-half of these 50 seats really at risk.

See the presentation here
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Democracy Corps is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people. It was founded in 1999 by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg. Democracy Corps provides public opinion research and strategic advice to those dedicated to a more responsive Congress and Presidency. Learn more at www.democracycorps.com.
Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund (WVWVAF) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501 (c)(4) organization founded in 2005 and dedicated to increasing the voting participation and issue advocacy of unmarried women. Learn more at www.wvwvaf.org.
Public Campaign Action Fund (PCAF) works to hold politicians who are against comprehensive campaign finance reform accountable for where they get their political donations. Learn more at www.campaignmoney.org.

The following article by TPM editor and publisher Josh Marshall, is cross-posted from Talking Points Memo:
Very interesting discussion here at The Hive of what TPM Readers think of the group ‘Third Way’ (sub req). I think I’ll jump in myself. But just speaking for myself, it’s not so much that I disagree with most of the group’s positions (though I do) as I see them as sort of irrelevant to most current policy discussions.
Obviously, calling a group ‘irrelevant’ can simply be the harshest sort of swipe. And in a sense it is. But I mean it more specifically. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Leadership Council (which, not coincidentally, went out of business two years ago), definitely had a constituency in right-leaning Democrats from the South and Midwest. It had a policy-political constituency in the widespread belief that the national Democratic party had discredited with the public on issues like national security, welfare, crime, etc.
There’s no point in rehearsing the discussion of whether that was accurate or not: it was the baseline question around which a lot of campaigns and policy debates were argued during that period. The Democrats did lose 5 out of 6 consecutive national elections (1968-1988). And its one-time Southern base appeared to be (and was) in permanent decline.
It is fascinating to remember that one of the high profile ‘victims’ of the 1994 Republican landslide was David McCurdy, then a member of the House trying to make his jump to the Senate and a man very much with national political ambitions. And he was from Oklahoma. It’s hard to imagine any Democrat trying to build a national political career from Oklahoma today.
Things look very different now. Republicans have won the popular vote only once since 1992 and a fairly progressive Democratic President was just reelected during a period of slow growth and high unemployment. It’s just hard to make any credible argument that the Democratic party, either objectively or subjectively, has drifted outside the mainstream of American political life. Nor is it easy to argue that both parties are captive to their extremes and a ‘third way’ is necessary. Certainly, it’s hard to make that case to Democrats, whereas there was a decent constituency of Democrats who very much did believe that twenty and thirty years ago.
The key policy question facing Democrats today is whether there is any credible or viable policy prescription to arrest the trend toward a winner take all society in which the top 10% or 15% do better and better and the rest stagnate or lose ground. In other words, the question of the day is inequality and whether we can act collectively to do anything about it. In that context, cutting taxes for high-income earners and retrenching social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare is a pretty tough sell.
Back during the time he was in the House and angling for promotion to the Senate, Harold Ford used to say, “I didn’t leave my party; my party left me.” Of course, that’s an old line told by countless Democrats in the post-60s era. But it perfectly captured Ford’s ridiculousness in the post-Clinton era since for most people who used to say that, the time when the Democratic party ‘left them’ was in the 60s or early 70s. That is to say, around the time Ford was born.
That captures a lot of what the ‘Third Way’ is about: a sort of fossilized throwback to a period in the late 20th century when there was a market for groups trying to pull the Democrats ‘back to the center and away from the ideological extreme’ in an era when Democrats are the fairly non-ideological party and have a pretty decent record of winning elections in which most people vote.

In his latest New York Times op-ed, Thomas B. Edsall addresses a weighty question at the intersection of policy and conscience, which is likely to be repeatedly raised throughout 2014, “Does Rising Inequality Make Us Hardhearted?” Edsall explains:

…A 2008 study of public attitudes during periods of mounting inequality found that “when inequality in America rises, the public responds with increased conservative sentiment.” This conservative shift applies to all income groups, including the poor, according to the political scientists Nathan Kelly of the University of Tennessee and Peter Enns of Cornell. “Rather than generating opinion shifts that would make redistributive policies more likely,” Kelly and Enns write, “increased economic inequality produces a conservative response in public sentiment.”
The Kelly-Enns study examines poll data and inequality trends between 1952 and 2006. In an email Enns wrote earlier this week, he added that more recent data shows a continuation of the trend: “between 2006 and 2011 (when the most recent data are available) inequality has mostly continued to increase and the public has shifted in a more conservative direction — especially since 2008. This relationship is consistent with our previous findings.”
A key tool Kelly and Enns use for their work is a statistical analysis of the policy mood of the country developed by James Stimson of the University of North Carolina…From 1992 to 2012, according to Stimson’s analysis, overall support for liberal, pro-government initiatives has declined. These results suggest that President Obama’s plan to dedicate the remainder of his term to reducing inequality, to which he devoted a major speech last week, will face significant political opposition inside and outside of Congress.

Edsall adds that a 2011 Pew Research Center survey “found that among all voters capitalism (a rough proxy for deregulated markets) is viewed favorably by a 50-40 margin and socialism (a rough proxy for interventionist government) negatively by 60-31.” Edsall notes the exception of African and Latino American voters, who feel otherwise. Other polls have indicated surprisingly small opposition to an expanded role for government and even “socialistic” policies.
On the question of “whether a voter believes that people are poor because of their own bad choices or thinks that poverty is the result of what pollsters call “circumstances,” Edsall adds:

A Pew survey, conducted in 2012, produced results that demonstrated the nation’s ambivalence on this question. The more voters blame poverty on a lack of effort by the poor themselves, the more inclined they are to say that there are legions of “undeserving” poor for whom taxpayer-funded government programs are not warranted. The more a respondent blames poverty on external circumstances, the more likely he or she is to support government action to remedy those circumstances.
Overall, according to Pew, 46 percent of the public does not fault the poor, agreeing that their plight is the outcome of unfavorable circumstances, while 38 percent are more judgmental, declaring that poverty stems from a lack of individual effort.
This relatively modest 8-point difference among all voters masks very large partisan — and significant racial and ethnic — divisions. A decisive majority of Republicans (see Figure 3), 57-27, say that people are poor because of a lack of effort, while an even larger majority of Democrats, 61-24, say “circumstances” are the cause of poverty. Whites are split, 41-41, while blacks back circumstances 62-28, as do Hispanics, 59-27.

Edsall also notes that “Voters are notoriously conflicted in their ideological outlook — what Stimson, writing with Christopher Ellis of Bucknell, described in a 2009 paper on belief systems as “the contradiction in American ideologies, a contradiction often seen in joint preferences for both conservative symbols and liberal policy action.” It’s as if many voters are more comfortable calling themselves conservatives, even though they support progressive policies when offered the choice.
Citing Gallup data indicating that few voters are comfortable identifying themselves as “economic liberals,” Edsall wonders if “Obama risks activating voters’ “theoretical” conservatism, as opposed to a strategy that stresses specifics in non-ideological terms, a kind of practical liberalism: raising the minimum wage, raising tax rates on unearned income, job training, early education.
Readers won’t have much trouble finding other polls which indicate that substantial majorities support various populist economic proposals, regardless of how respondents describe their individual political beliefs. For now, at least, Edsall’s analysis suggests Dems should give as much thought to how they describe their economic ideology as they do to the policies they advocate.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
There has been a long-term intra-Democratic party battle between progressive populists and the more Wall Street-oriented wing of the party for 3 decades now, one that (full disclosure) I will admit to having been a happy warrior in on the side of the progressives for that entire time. This week has been a big moment in that battle, as the Third Way amusingly picked Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal as the place to launch an attack on progressives generally but most particularly against Elizabeth Warren. Jonathan Martin did a nice job of summarizing the back and forth in this article, where I am quoted a couple of times on why progressives would choose to defend Warren so strongly, which great leaders like PCCC and Markos Moulitsas at Dailykos did so well.
However this isn’t really mainly a battle between progressives and “centrists” for the soul of the Democratic party, although there is certainly an element of that, and it is certainly understandable for reporters to talk about it in those traditional political battle terms. But what this is more fundamentally about is a battle between the biggest special interest corporations in the world, who tend to have overwhelming sway over everything in Washington, and those of us who want to confront and rein in their power. Those interests know they control the Republicans, because Republicans answer to money first and foremost. But Democrats have DNA and ancient roots from ancestors like Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson, Andy Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, FDR, Harry Truman, and the Kennedys — people who distrusted the big financial firms based in New York, distrusted big corporate trusts in general — and that DNA is a continuing problem for these Wall Street conglomerates.
The think tanks and political committees they fund on the Democratic side — in the Clinton era their lead group was the DLC, now it’s Third Way — are asked by the big money guys to come to their defense when the populists start to rise up and upset their apple cart, and they do. Yes, this is undeniably a battle between 2 different wings of the Democratic party, the people wing and the money wing. But it is even more centrally a fight between Wall Street and big business on the one hand, and the politicians who might threaten them like Elizabeth Warren.
I actually feel kind of badly on one level for the leaders of these kinds of DC Centrist groups. Al From and Bruce Reed at the DLC, and Jon Cowan at Third Way, are smart policy wonks who are actually very thoughtful and engaging in the kind of policy discussions they enjoy having, and both groups have come up with some good policy ideas and analysis — the AmeriCorps idea, the Reinventing Government initiative, and the 100,000 cops on the street piece of the 1994 crime bill were all Third Way proposals, and all good ideas. But what happens to these kinds of groups is that because DC centrism has no broad appeal to regular folks who make the activist and small contributor base of the Democratic party (for some reason, it’s hard to raise money through email appeals that call for cutting your grandma’s Social Security benefits), these kinds of groups have to rely on corporate special interest contributions.
And as politicians who take a lot of money from them know, these special interests expect you to come through for them when they come calling for a favor. And boy do they hate the idea of so many people being excited about Elizabeth Warren’s common sense populism, so they really needed their friends at Third Way to try and take her down a couple of notches (and throwing in a shot across the bow at Wall Street’s new mayor was an important political message too.) Just like during last year’s campaign, when Wall Street was desperate to defeat Warren, so they got Third Way to issue a scathing statement against her that the Chamber of Commerce and other Republican hit groups immediately used against her, Wall Street needed Third Way to come through, and they did.

Read more…

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
For many years the American Right — and many of the most powerful elements of corporate and Wall Street elite — have conducted a war on public employees.
Their campaign has taken many forms. They have tried to slash the number of public sector jobs, cut the pay and benefits of public sector workers, and do away with public employee rights to collective bargaining. They have discredited the value of the work performed by public employees — like teachers, police and firefighters — going so far as to argue that “real jobs” are created only by the private sector.
Last week a conservative court ruled that by going through bankruptcy the city of Detroit could rid itself of its obligation under the state constitution to make good on its pension commitments to its retirees.
It should surprise no one that the Republican Chairman of the U.S. House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, is demanding that a budget deal with the Democrats include a 350 percent increase in pension contribution by all civilian federal employees. That would effectively mean a pay cut of about 2 percent for every federal worker. And that cut would come after a three-year pay freeze and multiple furloughs caused by the Republican “sequester.”
Unbelievably, in Illinois the right wing Chicago Tribune and the state’s corporate elite snookered the Democratic-controlled legislature into passing changes in that state’s pension laws that slashed the pensions of its public employees. The changes affected all state employees and many of Illinois’ teachers. All of them had faithfully made their required contributions to the state’s pension funds for years, even though the legislature regularly failed to make its required payments so it could avoid raising taxes on the state’s wealthiest citizens.
Illinois cut teacher pensions, even though many do not participate in the Social Security system and the state pension is their only source of retirement income.
All of these attacks on public employees — and cuts in public sector expenditures in general — are premised on two myths that are simply untrue.
Myth number one. The Right claims we live in a period of scarcity that requires extreme public sector austerity. They claim “we just can’t afford” to pay people like teachers the pensions that we had agreed to in the past, because “America is broke.”
This, of course, is simply wrong. In spite of the hardships brought on by the Great Recession that resulted from the reckless speculation of Wall Street banks — and even though George Bush thrust our country into an unnecessary war that cost our economy a trillion plus dollars — America is wealthier today than ever before in its history.
Per capita income in America is at an all-time high because productivity per person has gone up 80 percent since 1979.
Of course the Right is able to make the case that “we can’t afford” to pay our teachers as much as we once did, because everyday Americans feel like they have been losing ground – which of course they have. That’s because virtually every dime of that increase in our per capita national income went to the top 1 percent.
The solution to this problem is, of course, to change the rules of the game that have been rigged over the last three decades to bring about this result. By cutting the incomes, pensions and collective bargaining rights of middle class public employees rather than raising taxes on the wealthy, we make the problem worse.
But from the standpoint of the corporate Wall Street elite, that is precisely the idea. They want to continue to siphon off more and more of America’s bounty. And they want to shrink the public sector, because they don’t want to pay taxes at rates like they did back in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s when the American middle class was born and the portion of our national income going to the top 1 percent actually dropped.
That gets us to myth number two.

Read more…

The following article by TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from ThinkProgress:
As the Obamacare situation stabilizes, Democrats are starting to come to their strategic senses and realize their best course of action is to defend the program, not run away from it.
But that’s not enough. If Democrats want to maximize their chances of holding the Senate in 2014 and making at least some progress in the House, they need to go on the offensive on issues that will mobilize their base and split their opposition. A new poll from National Journal shows how.
In the poll, respondents were asked first about whether legislation would be passed in the next year to address various issues. Of the issues tested, three were deemed more likely than not to generate successful legislation: “Creating jobs by increasing federal spending on infrastructure projects like roads and bridges” (56 percent likely/39 percent not likely); “Requiring universal background checks on all gun sales” (53-43); and “Reforming the immigration system to increase border security and provide a pathway to citizenship for people in the U.S. illegally” (49-46).
This expectation is borne of desire, not fatalism. The poll followed up by asking respondents whether they’d be pleased or disappointed if legislation actually passed in these areas. The results were quite one-sided. By 77-21, Americans said they’d be pleased rather than disappointed if legislation was passed to create jobs through infrastructure spending. By 74-22, they said they’d be pleased to see universal background checks on gun sales (including an astonishing 56 percent who said they’d be “very” pleased, the highest of all the issues tested). And by 66-28, they said they’d be pleased to see a pathway to citizenship make it through Congress.
So the public wants and expects action in these three areas. Who’s standing in the way? Congressional Republicans, of course.
And here’s the beauty, tactically speaking: not only do these issues hugely appeal to the Democratic base, they also appeal to the majority of Republicans, thereby making these issues potential vehicles for splitting the GOP vote. A large majority of Republicans would be pleased to see more infrastructure spending to create jobs; 66 percent would be pleased to see universal background checks on gun sales and 57 percent of GOP identifiers would like to see immigration reform happen.
Mobilize the base, split the opposition — these issues are political gold for the Democrats. And while we’re speaking of political gold for the Democrats, it would be remiss not to mention raising the minimum wage, an issue not tested by the National Journal poll but likely to be voted on in the Senate shortly. This is also an issue that gets overwhelming public support, particularly from the Democratic base, but splits the Republican party. Moreover, this split in support has a very distinct class character. In a recent Pew Research poll, working class (non-college) Republicans supported the proposal by 58-40, while college-educated Republicans opposed it by 60-34. Similarly, low income Republicans (less than $30,000) supported raising the minimum wage by 68-31 while high income Republicans (over $75,000) opposed such a raise by 57-40.
Job creation through infrastructure spending. Universal background checks for gun sales. Immigration reform. Raising the minimum wage. Music to Democratic ears and a prescription for political success. Maybe Democrats should think about taking their medicine.

From a strategy memo entitled “The Polling Lay of the Land” by Obama pollster Joel Benenson:

Our data continues to show, unequivocally, that the nation’s economic health remains voters’ overriding priority.
Even amid a cascade of news cycles focused on the Affordable Care Act, Syria, the government shutdown and the NSA, voters’ primary focus has never shifted from their economic well-being and financial security.
While we have seen a marked increase in voters ‘ sense of financial stability throughout most of 2013 – worries about the immediate loss of jobs or homes had subsided – we have a long way to go before voters feel truly secure in their economic futures, and that of the nation.
Fully aware of the long road ahead, voters are extremely eager to see Washington once again put economic issues at the center of their attention.
Over the course of 2013, we have seen improvement in voters ‘ views of the economy. Four years of deeply entrenched pessimism around the economy has finally begun to give way to a brighter outlook.
After steadily improving since January, this June we reached high points on two key metrics we have been tracking since 2009:
68% of voters described the economy as “getting better”, a 9-point increase over our 2012 average. Just 29% – mostly Republicans – said the economy is “getting worse”.
21% of voters rated the economy as “excellent” or “good”. This number was in almost invariably in single digits from 2009 until 2012 , and averaged 13% throughout that year.
However, the government shutdown and debt ceiling fight all but wiped out this burgeoning optimism. We are starting to see these metrics slowly creep back up, but the shutdown and ongoing dysfunction have had a lingering effect on views of the economy.
The number saying the economy is getting better dropped to a shutdown low of 50% in mid-October…By last week, this figure had ticked back up to 56%, still well below the highs of the first and second quarters of this year.
Our guiding light needs to be our focus on creating a more secure economy for hard-working American families, with smart investments now and for the next generation.

Benenson has more so say on this topic of critical importance, and we urge Dems who want to win in 2014 to give it a thoughtful read.

For more video clip testimony showing how the Affordable Care Act saves lives, see here, here, here and here. You could also see here, here, here or here.

The following article by TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from ThinkProgress:
Remember when Republicans were the masters of the “wedge issue” — masterfully manipulating public opinion splits on same-sex marriage and other policies to divide the Democratic coalition and cruise to victory? No more. Marriage equality, in fact, now seems to work as a wedge in the other direction, splitting the GOP coalition and forcing moderates into the Democratic camp.
Though few have noticed, it’s starting to look like immigration reform is following the same agenda. Immigration used to divide the Democratic coalition, but now it threatens to split the GOP — and for reasons entirely independent of losing the Latino vote.
Check out these results from a new Public Religion Research institute poll. PRRI asked respondents how the immigration system should deal with undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and found that the vast majority — 63 percent — of Americans said they should be offered a pathway to citizenship. 18 percent said undocumented immigrants should be allowed to become permanent legal residents but not citizens, while a mere 14 percent said they should be identified and deported:

Here’s the amazing thing: while 63 percent overall supported a path to citizenship, so did 60 percent of Republicans! The latter number is actually higher than support levels among independents (57 percent). Support for a path to citizenship has clearly gone mainstream — and bipartisan.
So if there’s bipartisan support, where’s the bipartisan action? The answer is simple: division in the Republican Party. Tea Party Republicans tend to be adamantly, furiously opposed to immigration reform, and they wield a huge amount of influence inside today’s GOP. The chart below from Alan Abramowitz illustrates the extent of that influence:

Tea Party supporters are 52 percent of all Republicans, 57 percent of general election voters, 64 percent of primary voters, 76 percent of rally attendees and a remarkable 80 percent of donors. No wonder immigration reform isn’t getting anywhere.
So where does that leave Republicans who favor a path to citizenship? Until things change — and the Tea Party looks as strong as ever after some post-2013 election rumblings — the issue is pushing them right out of the party.
Immigration reform is generally viewed as an issue where GOP intransigence could wind up supergluing Latinos to the Democratic Party. That’s right, but these data suggest there’s another part to the equation. The GOP could wind up not just failing to gain Latino support but actively losing part of their own coalition. For a party that’s already battling the effects of long-term demographic change, that’s very bad news.

George Lakoff has a post up at Reader Supported News that students of political psychology should find engaging. He riffs on a John Harwood article in the New York Times, which Lakoff describes as “a blatant conservative attack on President Obama” published on the front page as if it were a news story instead of an op-ed. Lakoff explains further:

The Harwood column is illuminating in its attack mode, which is quite artful and an excellent example of conservative attacks. To appreciate it, we should begin by discussing some basic cognitive linguistics. As the great linguist Charles Fillmore discovered in 1975, all words are cognitively defined relative to conceptual “frames” – structures we all use to think all the time. Frames don’t float in the air; they are neural circuits in our brains. Frames in politics are not neutral; they reflect an underlying value system. That means that language in politics is not neutral. Political words do not just pick out something in the world. They reflect value-based frames. If you successfully frame public discourse, you win the debate.
A common neuroscience estimate is that about 98 percent of thought is unconscious and automatic, carried out by the neural system. Daniel Kahneman has since brought frame-based unconscious thought into the public arena in what he has called “System 1 thinking.” Since frames carry value-based inferences with them, successfully framing public discourse means getting the public to adopt your values, and hence winning over the public by unconscious brain change, not by open discussion of the values inherent in the frames and the values that undergird the frames.
I have always suggested to progressives to know their values and state their real values clearly, using frames they really believe. Values trump mere facts presented without the values that make them meaningful. Honest values-based framing is the opposite of spin – the deceptive use of language to avoid embarrassment.

In this context, Lakoff criticizes the framing Harwood deployed in “his manipulative NY Times column” and adds: “The word at issue is “redistribution.” The subject matter is the flow of wealth in the society and what it should be. This is a fundamentally moral issue, and the major political framings reflect two different moral views of democracy itself.” Further,

Conservatives have a very different view of democracy. They believe that democracy gives them the “liberty” to pursue their own interests without the government standing in their way or helping them. Their moral principle is individual responsibility, not social responsibility. If you haven’t developed the discipline to make it on your own, then you should fail – and if you can’t afford health care, so be it. Health care is seen as a “product” and citizens should not be paying for other citizens’ products. Rudy Giuliani, as a good conservative, likened health care to flat- screen TVs. Conservatives say that no one should be paying for anyone else (except their children and family members). Using public resources is seen as making you weak, taking away incentives for you to work for yourself. And they see it as making hard-working moral citizens pay for immoral slackers. This is the conservative frame for redistribution: it is taking away money that you hard-working Americans have earned and deserve, and “redistributing” it to those who haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it. For conservatives, this happens whenever there are public resources paid for by taxpayers. Therefore they believe that all public resources should be banned – and the affordable Care Act is a major special case and just the start.
…Under this view of democracy, money previously made was made properly and using tax money for public resources is “redistribution.” “Using my money to pay for someone else” is inherently unfair in the conservative tradition. Conservatives over the past four decades have framed the word “redistribution” that way. Use of the word activates the conservative framing in general, not just the framing of the Affordable Care Act, but of the nature of democracy itself.
Because most liberals, including liberal economists, still believe in and use the inadequate Cartesian theory of reason, they do not comprehend that the word “redistribution” has been redefined in terms of a conservative frame, and to use the word is to help conservatives in their moral crusade to undermine progressive values and the traditional view of liberal democracy.

Lakoff provides more analysis of Harwood’s conservative framing, and concludes,

Here’s the take-away from these two pieces in the Times this week. First, there was a tiny glimpse of the huge conservative Republican communication system, with no account of its history, it’s extent, or how it works to change people’s brains. I hope the Times will go on to do more and better in the future. Second, the Times printed on its front page a classic example of how the conservative system works, naively presenting it at face value without any serious framing analysis. The Times missed the conservative reframing of the word “redistribution,” missed the difference in the views of morality and democracy that lie behind the framing difference, missed the use of the conservatively reframed word as neutral by liberal economists, missed what it means for a word to be “loaded,” and succumbed like other journalists trained on Cartesian reason in helping conservatism keep its hold on public discourse.
Harwood is a smart political operative. His technique is a classic example of the Republican message machine reported on in Thursday’s Times, and is well worth serious study. The Republican brain change mechanism is not only worth a front-page discussion of its own, but deserves itself to brought into public discourse and reported on regularly.

Disagree if you must with those who see Lakoff’s assessment as a sort of Rosetta Stone of political linguistics. But credit him with an insightful exploration of the psychology of framing political messaging. There are also some interesting discussions in the comments section following Lakoff’s post.