The conservatives won the framing war of 2009, and it helped strengthen the nascent Tea Party movement as Tea Partiers were deployed to go to town meetings around the country that summer and repeat government takeover, death panels, and Obamacare. If the president had understood the conservative framing tactic, he could have undercut it in a simple way. He could have adopted the same two moral issues, Freedom and Life, from a progressive perspective. If you have cancer and you don’t have health care, you are not free. You are probably going to suffer and die (a Life issue). If you are in a car
...more
