Buencamino does foreign and political affairs analysis for Actionfor Economic Reforms. This article was published in newspaper Today, 13 September 2004 edition, p. 9.
It’s good to be in a part of the world where the cowboy hats outnumber the ties. – GEORGE BUSH, Poplar Bluff, Missouri
LAST week, at a campaign rally in Missouri, George Bush attacked triallawyers. Blaming lawyers for rising medical costs is popular witheveryone who has never been the victim of medical malpractice. Besides,it makes Kerry’s running mate, a former trial lawyer, vulnerable toempty language attacks like, “No one has ever been healed by afrivolous lawsuit.”
“Empty language”, a cognitive analyst explained, “refers to broadstatements that are so abstract and mean so little that they arevirtually impossible to oppose.” In other words, emptylanguage is hee-haw.
Bush “uses empty language to conceal faulty generalizations; toridicule viable alternatives; to attribute negative motivations toothers, thus making them appear contemptible; and to rename and“reframe” opposing viewpoints.”
Hee-haw works with frames and metaphors, those structures that govern the way we think.
A cognitive scientist, George Lakoff, explained, “People think in termsof frames and metaphors—conceptual structures. When the facts don’t fitthe frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.” Andthat’s why despite all the facts proving Bush is a liar, millions ofAmericans still connect Saddam to 911, al-Qaeda and weapons of massdestruction. 911 created Bush’s terror frame. He capitalized on thetragedy by repeatedly reminding Americans that they are under constantthreat; “we have to be right every time while they [the terrorists]only have to be right once.” Bush color-coded fear with terroralert-level warnings that are issued whenever a sense of complacencybegins to manifest itself. Thus Bush can play Pavlov and manipulate aterrorized population to rally behind his leadership.
Bush used a metaphor central to US foreign policy, “A Nation Is APerson,” in the run-up to the war on Iraq. The metaphor of Saddam wasemployed because bin Laden did not fit. He had no country that could beinvaded, occupied, and declared defeated.
On foreign policy, Kerry is running against the terror frame and itsmetaphor. On domestic policy, he is running against what Gore Vidaldescribes as “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor”which Bush cleverly frames as “privatization andderegulation.” Both frames are articulated with hee-haw language.
An attack on tax cuts for the rich is repelled by making taxes aconcern even for the unemployed, “The best and fairest way to make sureAmericans have that money is not to tax it away in the first place”;government regulations meant to protect the common welfare become,“Government should help people improve their lives, not try to runtheir lives”; the deficit that ate the surplus that would have ensuredsocial security for future generations becomes a rationale forprivatizing social security itself: “I believe younger workers ought tobe allowed to take some of their tax money and put it in a personalsavings account, to make sure the Social Security system is availableto them”; skyrocketing medical costs are blamed on, ” frivolouslawsuits running up the cost of your health care “; and foreign policyis personalized, “Dick Cheney and I will make this world safer,stronger and better for every single American.” In addition, Bushtarred Kerry’s nuances as flip-flopping while portraying hisnarrow-mindedness as the “steady, consistent, principled leadership”America needs.
Bush, the analyst observed, “used empty language to reduce complexproblems to images that left the listener relieved that George W. Bushwas in charge.” And maybe Bush is right. Maybe American voters aresimple-minded.
However, it might be dangerous for Bush to place all his money on“principled leadership.” Recent exposes relating to his National Guardservice record could raise questions about his trustworthiness.If those exposes move Americans out of their comfort zone, it wouldleave the cowboy from Crawford, Texas with just a cowboy hat and nocattle in a part of the world where a man’s worth is measured by thesize of hisherd not his hat.
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