Chris Satullo: Republicans excel at playing the frame game

He who frames the debate wins the debate.

This is the heart of modern American politics. This is why the Republican Party wins more elections than its governing record would seem to justify.

What does it mean to frame the debate? It involves something deeper than the shadings known as spin.

Spin dances across the terrain; framing defines it.

Win the framing war, and it's easier to spin even the most uncomfortable facts. Lose this war, and you forever slip, slide, and fumble uphill towards entrenched positions.

You are, to put it another way, a Democrat.

What is framing, and why does it matter so?

First, it's an essential human activity. The world is too vast, volatile and various for us to take it all in. We need to sort and cull data.

Second, it's an essential political skill. How does it work? Well, consider three common meanings of the verb to frame. Each has a political corollary.

Framing a house: A house's wooden skeleton defines its basic shape and size, while allowing for design variety inside.

Political framing means shaping a master narrative into which you fit your smaller, ad hoc issues. At this, Ronald Reagan was a great American master. We still live inside the core narrative he framed about American renewal through strength, moral clarity and reluctant government. This is what Barack Obama meant when he praised Reagan's political achievement - an achievement he would like to match and replace.

Framing the photo: When you use a camera, you shape how others see the scene you shoot. You select the angle, put certain elements in sharp focus, relegate others to a fuzzy background, and shunt still others outside the frame altogether.

So it is with political issues. Whoever builds the frame through which the public sees an issue gains an advantage. And in politics, frames are built out of language.

George Lakoff is a linguist who had a brief vogue among Democratic operatives after the 2004 election. In books such as Don't Think of an Elephant, he explored how conservatives frame issues to their advantage. As a political guru, Lakoff proved inept, but his basic premise was sound: Words matter, and they work on subterranean as well as conscious levels.

Take the phrase tax relief, a favored Lakoff example. What does one need relief from? A burden. The phrase dictates that taxes be seen as an onus to be lifted, not an essential act of a mature government. In any debate framed as "Do you support tax relief?" only one answer wins. Yes, I do.

Framing a person: In this legal usage, a frame discards, invents or arranges facts to indict a culprit.

In politics, it involves the quest to pin blame: Who lost Vietnam? Who lost control of our streets? Who caused the deficit? Who let 9/11 happen? Who failed New Orleans? Who enabled the mortgage meltdown?

Such framing battles go to the swift and shameless. Tab a villain and you force the other guy to play defense. Harp on small facts that support your case, while pooh-poohing big ones that don't.

Each side does this feverishly. Republicans do it better.

Think this is all just semantics? Our use of words, Lakoff argues, actually rewires our brains, making them more receptive to messages that travel established neural pathways, and hostile to messages that must forge new paths.

This is why facts bounce off frames. We hate it when a fact challenges an entrenched mental frame. We resist, we refuse.

For years, conservatives have deftly pounded home frames that imply a sharp character advantage for them over liberals.

Sarah Palin is such a hit with social conservatives because, compared to wooden John McCain, she's a whiz at invoking their favorite culture-war framings: conservatives' steadfast moral clarity vs. liberals' weak-kneed addiction to nuance; real people vs. arrogant experts; small-town goodness vs. big-city perfidy; doers vs. talkers.

Palin's Twin Cities triumph was an object lesson in how conservatives try to exploit the power of framing to enable cultural resentments to trump economic ones.

Democrats lose elections for lots of reasons. Too much corruption. Too many backward-looking solutions. But a top reason is their relative ineptitude when they try their hand at framing.