The NY Times Uncovers Conservative Attacks and Then Prints One; Both Are On The Front Page

And the law required insurers to offer coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions, which eased costs for less healthy people but raised prices for others who had been charged lower rates because of their good health.

"The A.C.A. is very much about redistribution, whether or not its advocates acknowledge that this is the case," wrote Reihan Salam on the website of the conservative National Review.

Here again, the "redistribution" word is used in a conservative frame without quotation marks as if the frame were simply true, and the citation is from a major conservative publication, where the word is used with a conservative frame.

The issue is what democracy is about and what health care in a democracy is about. For liberals, democracy is defined by equality, and by the "self-evident...inalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness," where health is inherent to those values. Under such a conception of democracy, health should never be denied because one belongs to a demographic group that fate had given more ailments and injuries.

Conservatives are helped when "redistribution," which they have successfully re-framed their way, is used by certain liberal economists, who naively believe that the word is neutral because economists use it as a technical term.

Harwood begins framing his piece by discussing the case of Rebecca M. Blank.

Ms. Blank is a noted academic economist, having been one of three members of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. From 2009 to 2013 she served as Deputy Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Administration, and has since left for the grand opportunity to become chancellor of the University of Wisconsin.

In 2011, she was considered for Obama's Council of Economic Advisers while serving in the Commerce Department. Harwood reports that she was passed over for the post because of something she had written in 1992:

"A commitment to economic justice necessarily implies a commitment to a redistribution of economic resources, so that the poor and the dispossessed are more fully included in the economic system."

Harwood quotes William Daley, Obama's chief of staff at the time, as saying, "Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people's minds." The Republicans wield it "as a hammer" against Democrats, he said, adding, "It's a word that in the political world, you just don't use." Daley is right that it is a loaded word, in just the sense noted above, namely, that it has been framed by conservatives to fit their ideology and using it activates their frame and their ideology in people's brains, thus helping conservatives. In 2011, Obama was up for re-election and Daley judged that having Republicans dig up that quote would help them launch an unfair attack against the president.

Harwood reports the affair as if Obama had something to hide, rather than not wanting a conservatively framed concept to be falsely attributed to him. Harwood is clever. First, he quotes another liberal economist, Jonathan Gruber, who uses the word naively as a neutral technical economic term. Then at the end of the article, he reports an Obama slip at a talk in Elyria, Ohio 18 months earlier. The slip involved Obama's use of a negative. In  Don't Think of an Elephant!, I pointed out that negating a word, activates the meaning of the word. If I tell you not to think of an elephant, you will think of an elephant. Here is the Obama slip that Harwood cites, "Understand this is not a redistribution argument ... This is not about taking from rich people to give to poor people." That was the slip, and Harwood searched back 18 months to Elyria, Ohio to find it. But then the president caught himself and said positively what he meant. "This is about us together making investments in our country so everybody's got a fair shot."

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 re-framing 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 re-framed 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.