CHAPTER 10
FRAMING
Every word evokes a frame.
— GEORGE LAKOFF
With startling regularity, every month or two someone will call in to my radio program with a very specific story about why they oppose gun control. The story nearly always goes like this:
A friend of mine was shopping at the supermarket, and when she came back from shopping she found a Black guy (it’s always a Black guy) trying to break into her car. As she walked up to her car, he pulled a knife on her. Fortunately, she always carries her gun with her. She pulled her gun out of her purse and he ran away. That’s why we need guns.
That’s a very powerful story. So every time I hear it, I say, “Wow, that’s a powerful story. Tell me more. Who is your friend?” And the caller will say, “Well, actually it didn’t happen to my friend; my friend told me the story about someone else that he knows.” Turns out, the caller doesn’t actually know anyone who pulled a gun on a carjacker in a supermarket parking lot. The story is not a personal story at all. But it has such power, even as a friend-of-a-friend story, because it’s a story that gives us a way of understanding an issue.
There are other stories about gun control. In my case, it really is a personal story.
My best friend in high school, Clark Stinson, went off to the army during the Vietnam War. He came home for the Christmas holiday after basic training and told me how much he hated the army and the prospect of going off to a war he didn’t believe in. He was feeling really depressed, went to a gun shop, bought a gun, put it in his mouth, and blew the back of his head all over his bedroom wall. If he hadn’t been able to get a gun so quickly and easily, he might have been able to get help and still be with us.
Here’s another gun control story, synthesized from several articles in the paper over the past few years:
A family in our community just suffered a terrible tragedy. The father was a gun owner who forgot to lock his gun safe. His five-year-old son had a friend over, and they found the open safe. The man’s son took out the gun, and the boys decided to play cops and robbers. The gun was loaded, and the boy ended up shooting his little friend.
All of these stories are persuasive. They all have strong visual and kinesthetic elements and appeal directly to our feelings—and, as we discussed in part I, feelings always come first in our decision-making process.
When we probe the stories deeper, the handgun-control story has the advantage of being true.1 I’m not saying that someone, somewhere didn’t pull a gun on a carjacker. I’m sure that has happened, and the National Rifle Association probably issued a hundred press releases about it. But easily available handguns do lead to an increase of suicides and an increase in deaths of innocent bystanders. For example, one in six parents say they know a child who accidentally shot him- or herself with a handgun. Guns kept in the home for self-protection are forty-three times more likely to kill a family member or friend than to kill in self-defense. And suicide is nearly five times more likely to occur in a household with a gun than a household without a gun.2
Handgun ownership makes a society more dangerous. A Montreal-based gun control group, for example, uses a statistical comparison between the United States and Canada to bolster the case for increasing gun control in both countries:
Canada has roughly 1 million handguns while the United States has more than 76 million. While there are other factors affecting murder, suicide and unintentional injury rates, a comparison of data in Canada and the United States suggests that access to handguns may play a role. While the murder rate without guns in the U.S. is roughly equivalent (1.8 times) to that of Canada, the murder rate with handguns is 14.5 times the Canadian rate. The costs of firearms death and injury in the two countries have been compared and estimated to be $495 (U.S.) per resident in the United States compared with $195 per resident in Canada.3
Truth is always the most powerful form of persuasion, and it offers the most useful and durable (ecological) frame.
FRAMING JOHN MCCAIN
The conservatives had a hard time going into the 2008 election. None of the Republican frontrunners was a dyed-in-the-wool abortion-hating, war-loving, welfare-bashing, corporatocracy supporter—at least not reliably and all at the same time. Unlike the Democrats, who tend to encourage debate among their candidates, the conservatives began, in May 2006—two years before the election—to push potential front-runners toward particular, uniform, conservative views. They wanted to code their communications from the very first moment of the presidential campaign.
One target of this early effort at political persuasion was John McCain. McCain was reliably pro-war and anti-abortion, but he seemed to have some trouble supporting the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans. Outrageously, McCain had voted to retain the estate tax for estates over $5 million. If someone dies and leaves more than $5 million to heirs, McCain actually thought it was a good idea for their rich children to pay taxes on the money they’re getting by accident of birth that exceeded the first 5 million bucks. The conservatives—who care a lot about people who have $5 million at their disposal—were not happy with McCain. So, when McCain was running to retain his Senate seat back in 2006, they created an ad just for the conservative blogosphere designed to get McCain to change his mind. You can see it at www.nodeathtax.org.
The ad is a masterpiece of future pacing, incorporating trance techniques to push McCain into a future in which he will vote against the estate tax. It ties those techniques together with a strong frame to code its message.
Here’s how the ad goes:
[picture of John McCain smiling]
“American family business owners and farmers are counting on John McCain…”
[a white flash, like a camera flashbulb, then a picture of a man holding a boy against a blue sky]
“counting on McCain to protect the jobs they create and the legacy they leave their children…”
This is a very friendly opening, designed to establish a rapport with McCain and with McCain supporters. Americans, families, farmers—all “are counting” on McCain. That suggests they will support him, but the emphasis is on what he does in the future.
The flash that comes between pictures is almost unnoticeable. That fast flash is designed to help put McCain supporters into a learning trance. It registers on the unconscious while the conscious is trying to process the words and the images that are more readily visible. The brain has to focus harder to get the visual process going.
[Flash, then a picture of the Chicago Sun-Times against a black background with a quote from McCain circled. The visual submodalities change quickly as the image is shown far away, then brought close. The auditory submodalities shift as the music changes and becomes darker, even dirgelike, too. For some, the visual/auditory connection may suggest a funeral announcement and evoke a powerful kinesthetic feeling/response of dread.]
“counting on John McCain to keep his promise and show the leadership he’s known for…”
Now the insistence on the future grows stronger. He’s made a promise, and the question is whether he will keep it. The modality changes to kinesthetic.
[No flash here—the image changes at a slower pace to a dark blurred-out picture on a black background. The picture—which may not be consciously recognized the first time one sees the ad—depicts mourners carrying a casket in the rain, with the logo www.nodeathtax.org in white in front of it.]
“counting on him to cast the deciding vote to end the IRS death tax forever.”
Here, finally, is the promise. It’s a promise to “end the IRS death tax forever.” Go back to Newt Gingrich’s anchor words. What words could trigger negative emotions more strongly than “IRS” and “death"? Nothing, perhaps, except “IRS death tax.” Here those very powerful words are themselves anchored in death both visually—through the black background established in the previous shot and the barely visible funeral picture—and auditorily, through the music. McCain is thrown into the future of his promise. What we’ve been counting on him to do is end this terrible thing, the IRS death tax.
Notice the many different ways the ad simultaneously is working to create a trance. Aside from the intermittent flashes, the ad shifts submodalities from auditory to visual to kinesthetic. The effect is that by the time this final, dramatic picture shows up, the viewer must focus very hard to figure out what is happening onscreen. By now most viewers will be deeply in a learning trance.
Notice also that this image gets the viewer to key in particularly on the words death tax in the URL www.nodeathtax.org. As we know, at the unconscious/emotional level the viewer won’t pick up the negative no and will unconsciously only read death tax and shudder.
[The ad flashes again, a flash that is longer and brighter. The picture then goes back to the exact same image the ad began with—an image of John McCain smiling.]
“Ask John McCain to keep his promise and vote to end the death tax.”
Now that the viewers are in a learning trance, they are taken back to the start of the ad, as though the rest of the ad never happened. In this trance they are given a task in the immediate present and the near future: “Ask John McCain to keep his promise.”
At the same time, the ad uses future pacing to throw McCain and his followers into the future. He must keep his promise because all of his supporters will be counting on him. The emotional/irrational mind will “understand” that he was smiling at the beginning of the ad because he kept his promise. That’s the future we can imagine. Now, the ad says, we have to go back and make sure that future happens.
[Picture of McCain smiling zooms in, so his face is closer to us. On top of the image are the words Tell him it’s important….]
“Tell John McCain it’s important.”
[Picture of McCain smiling zooms in more, so he is even closer. On top of the image are the words Tell him we’re watching….]
“Tell him we’re watching.”
[Picture of McCain zooms in again, even closer. On top of the image are the words Tell him we’ll remember….]
“Tell him we’ll remember”.
This is pacing used both to create a trance and to modify the future. The visual effect of the same picture zooming in, closer and closer, enhances the trance that the viewer is already in. In this trance the viewer is given more commands. The commands appear to be directed to McCain (“Tell him”) but are also directed to the viewer—”remember.” The ad wants viewers to remember how McCain votes on the estate tax and to base their support on how he votes. And, as a powerful and useful side benefit, it directs viewers to emotionally anchor the “IRS death tax.” with powerful negative states for their own future.
The ad is a direct attempt to change the future by modifying the behavior of a candidate—and the electorate. The target of the ad—like my Texan in the Crown Room—was John McCain himself. If McCain votes against the tax, he will get support. If he votes for the tax, viewers will “remember” and vote against him. The outcome is assured by the ad itself, which has put its viewers into a trance and directed them to take those steps—including the viewer named John McCain, who is imagining all those other people out there looking at him and wondering about the…er… size of his vote.
Just in case you are interested, the ad worked. The ad appeared in May 2006. On June 8, 2006, John McCain voted to bring bill H.R. 8, advocating abolishing the estate tax, to a vote.
FRAMING YOUR WORLDVIEW
If all that the “death tax” ad had done was use future pacing to throw McCain and his supporters into a future in which he supported abolishing the estate tax, it would have been effective. If the ad had done that and also put viewers into a learning trance so they would “remember” how McCain voted, it would have been effective. Both those effects, however, would have had a direct political impact only on John McCain. The ad would have been a powerful tool to change McCain’s vote, and no more.
But this ad did something more. It told viewers how to think about the estate tax. It told them to “remember” that the estate tax is an “IRS death tax” That’s a powerful frame.
In the first part of this book, we talked about how we know the world through our senses. We remember through pictures, sounds, tastes, and touch. We then sort those sensations through our feelings. That’s the brain’s folder system. It’s not easy to distill the very complex world around us down to these very simple elements, but that’s what we have to do because that’s how the brain works.
We move from complexity to simplicity by using frames.
A frame is a simple way of understanding a complex set of feelings and sensations. “My family” is a frame I use to think about the people with whom I have a very particular kind of deep and complex relationship, largely based on love but also on interdependence and mutual support. The frame doesn’t actually tell other people anything about who is in my family. I may think my family includes only my wife and children, or I may think of my family as an “extended family” that includes my mother, my in-laws, my siblings, and so forth. It may even include deceased relatives, like my father and my grandparents. For some people “my family” includes people who are not related to them by blood or marriage—they have become family by virtue of close and lasting ties.
A frame won’t tell you about any particular content. If we speak of the frame “my family,” it won’t tell you who I think is in my family, and it won’t tell me who you think is in your family. What a frame will disclose, however, and very powerfully, is how to think about a certain set of people. When people say, “My dog is a member of my family,” we understand immediately the strong feelings those people must have for their dog. They don’t have to explain those feelings at all. They just have to use the word family and we get it. That’s because “my family” is a frame we all understand at a visceral level, even though its content is highly variable.
Politics is all about frames. When I was in high school, the debating instructor would talk about the importance of framing an argument. He’d say, “How do you frame an argument? What position are you taking? How is that position—that frame—constructed?” He knew that once you’ve defined a frame, you’ve colored or changed the meaning of everything that is contained in that frame.
Democrats have finally gotten wise to the power of framing, largely through the work of George Lakoff, a linguistics professor and the author of Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate—The Essential Guide for Progressives. Before Lakoff, Democrats thought that the best way to frame an argument was to describe the argument as accurately as possible. They thought that you convinced people by talking about content. What Lakoff taught them—and what the conservatives already knew from having listened to people like Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz and Karl Rove—was that what matters is our feelings about the content. Remember: feeling comes first.
Back in part II of this book, we discussed anchors and the way that one word can trigger a feeling. Frames are powerful because they can quickly bring up a whole set of feelings. When we communicate, frames give us a simple way to elicit a particular response to what can be a very complex issue or idea.
The conservatives’ “death tax” frame is a perfect example.
THE FRAME ON TAXES
John McCain upset conservatives because of the position he took on the inheritance or estate tax.
The United States was founded in opposition to a monarchy supported by a landed aristocracy. Our country’s Founders wanted to make sure that their radical idea—a country governed by We the People—would never be replaced by a king and a bunch of nobles.
Writing more than two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson argued for a tax on accumulated wealth because he knew that if wealth was passed down from one generation to the next, those lucky inheritors would turn into new aristocrats. You don’t hear about the Founders passing on fortunes because most of them didn’t believe in doing so. Thomas Jefferson himself died in debt.
Despite Jefferson’s warnings about the danger to “the state” of the accumulation of “excessive wealth,” such a tax was not actually put into place until 1916. The estate tax was one of the many reforms put into place during the Progressive Era, a period from 1896 to 1918 when ordinary people rose up against the robber barons and monopolists who had created an aristocracy of wealth, power, and privilege in this country. President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, advocated for the estate tax in 1906, arguing, “The man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the State because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”
Teddy Roosevelt, in that simple sentence, gave us the liberal frame on the estate tax and in fact on all taxes. Taxes are the means we use to fund our society, which includes the government institutions that make it possible for people to accumulate wealth.
I often talk to people on my radio show who say they shouldn’t have to pay taxes.
“Why not?” I ask them.
“Well, I’m a self-made man,” they reply. “I’ve earned all of my money by starting my own business, and I don’t see why I should pay any of it to the government.” That’s the conservative core story, that self-interest trumps the public interest.
“Okay,” I say. “Well, do you have plumbing and electricity in your business?”
“Of course.”
“Do your employees and customers use the highway and street system to drive to your business or take public transportation to get there?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. And do you use money for your transactions and keep that money in a bank that you trust?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I say, “it seems to me you’ve relied pretty heavily on the government institutions and government-built infrastructure of our society to build your business. You’ve used public utilities and the public transportation infrastructure; you rely on the public regulation of banking and finance; you probably also are relying on public education to train the people who work for you and on public programs like Social Security and Medicare to cut the cost to you of employee benefits. Seems to me like you owe society a pretty large bill for all the services you use to make your business possible and profitable, and the way we pay that debt is through taxes.”
That’s the traditional liberal American story on taxes, and it’s a powerful one. It works even better for the estate tax.
ESTATE TAX OR DEATH TAX?
Most of us would like to be able to pass along enough money to our children to ensure that they will be able to put food on the table and perhaps even to avoid working for a living for a few generations. We don’t, however, want to create a permanent overclass in America simply because someone got lucky and had a very good businessman for a grandfather or a very good investor for a grandmother. Family dynasties—in our day, the Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Bushes spring to mind—are ultimately not healthy for democracy and largely didn’t even exist in this nation until after the Civil War, when incorporation and taxation laws were changed to allow the massive accumulation of wealth using the corporate form.
Nor are they healthy for capitalism. Many wealthy business-people believe that a powerful class composed mostly of people of inherited wealth cripples innovation and ingenuity, creating a disincentive to work among the best educated. Warren Buffet is a good example of a self-made man who has decided to give his massive estate away rather than give it to his children (the kids don’t become paupers—they each will inherit millions).
He’s in good company, which includes the father of Bill Gates as well as businessman Bill Foster, who will owe the tax.
“The proponents of estate tax repeal are fond of calling it the ‘death tax.’ It’s not a death tax; it’s a rich kids’ tax,” Foster has said. “The estate tax is one of our time-tested and best tools in preventing the aristocracy of an ‘Old Europe’ from establishing itself on our shores.”4
Understood as an inheritance tax or, as Foster calls it, a “rich kids’ tax,” this tax makes sense. An inheritance tax is a kind of tax even a Republican might be willing to support. And that posed a problem for conservatives, who, as I argue in my previous book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, actually want to create a new aristocracy. So they changed the frame.
The frame “inheritance tax or estate tax” gave people the positive message that We the People helped create the wealth of the rich, and We the People have a right to use some of that wealth to pay for the institutions that keep our nation strong. It reminded people of the aristocrats of old Britain and of how in America we have a democracy rather than an aristocracy.
The conservatives replaced that nice but not-very-powerful frame “estate tax” with a new frame: “death tax.” Death is one of Gingrich’s anchor words. No one wants to die. It also reminds us that this tax is levied when a loved one dies. Finally, it suggests that everyone will have to pay the tax—because everyone dies—rather than just the 0.27 percent (fewer than three-tenths of 1 percent) of Americans who actually paid it in 2006.5
Here’s how powerful the frame “death tax” is. When pollsters asked Americans whether they thought the estate tax should be reformed or repealed, 57 percent favored keeping the tax as it was or reforming it, while only 23 percent favored repealing it.6 When those same pollsters, joined by Frank Luntz’s company, later asked voters if the “death tax” was “fair,” they got a very different answer: 80 percent of voters polled thought the tax was unfair and should be repealed.7
“Death tax” is effective not because it is the best description of the tax. In fact, it is quite misleading. “Death tax” is effective because it triggers a picture of death and raises a whole constellation of negative emotions that arise for us around death. Those negative emotions become anchored to this tax. Once our feelings have changed, the way we think about an idea changes as well. It’s an incredibly powerful—albeit deceptive—frame and was promoted in large part by several heirs of the Walton family, who spent millions on front groups that promoted the “IRS death tax” frame to save those few people tens of billions of dollars when their estates move to their heirs.
FIGHTING FRAMES WITH FRAMES
When you come face-to-face with a negative but powerful frame, the best solution usually is to reframe it. Our society communicates through frames, so if you want to change a particular frame, you must offer a different but equally or more powerful frame in its place.
The frame of attention deficit disorder (ADD), for example, tells kids that they are defective, disordered, and diseased. In my opinion that doesn’t help children at all. It gives them a disempow-ering message that they are victims of a disorder and that only the medical field holds the answers or cure for them. (In this regard, though, it’s a very useful and profitable frame for the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries.)
Instead of accepting the ADD frame, I decided to create a new frame to describe this particular constellation of behaviors in a positive way.8 I suggested that ADD is a vestigial survival mechanism. ADD suits a person living in a hunter-gatherer world, but it puts a person at a disadvantage in a farming or industrial world. For the first few hundred thousand years of human history, I suggested, people with this group of behaviors ruled the land and sea, as hunters, gatherers, and warriors. Now that most of the world’s population lives in agricultural or industrial societies, ADD becomes a disadvantage—unless you can reinvent your life to work well as a modern variation on being a hunter-gatherer.
In this hunter-versus-farmer frame, the emphasis on “difference” is taken off the individual person and put onto society. Society changed, and when it did, people with a different set of behaviors—the farmers—were better adapted than the hunters. This change was not necessarily for the better. We live in a world where forty-five thousand people die every day from starvation, where more than a hundred species go extinct every day, where toxic and radioactive waste is sold as fertilizer and sprayed on crops, and where children work in factories for just a few dollars a week. Many of us look at society and wonder why we are being asked to adapt to it rather than asking society to change and adapt to us.
Once children who are distracted, impulsive risk-takers see themselves as hunter-gatherers, their whole sense of self changes. Instead of being dissed with disease, disability, and disorder, they feel empowered to investigate their unique attributes. They can be taught to take advantage of their difference by finding places in our current society where those attributes remain useful. Many entrepreneurs, salespeople, actors, stockbrokers, politicians, cops, and talk-radio hosts have these attributes and use them to their advantage. And in my most recent book on the topic, The Edison Gene, I report on how the world’s leading geneticists have now tested and proven my hypothesis as good science.
WAR VERSUS OCCUPATION
Some frames can be hard to see or hear. When George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, he told the American people we were at war. That seemed to be a fact, not a frame.
“War,” however, is a frame, and it’s one of the most powerful in our culture. In the case of Iraq, using the “war” frame was the way that Bush, Rove, and their cronies helped persuade Americans that they were pursuing a noble strategy. Few Americans like to oppose a president when the country is at war.
The fact, however, is that the war in Iraq ended on May 1, 2003, when George W. Bush stood below a “Mission Accomplished” sign aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and correctly declared that we had “victoriously” defeated the Iraqi army and overthrown its government.
Our military machine is tremendously good at fighting wars—blowing up infrastructure, killing opposing armies, and toppling governments. We did that successfully in Iraq, in a matter of a few weeks. We destroyed its army, wiped out its air defenses, devastated its Republican Guard, seized its capital, arrested its leaders, and took control of its government. We won the war.
After we won the war, however, we stayed in Iraq. That is called an occupation.
The distinction between the “war” frame and the “occupation” frame is politically critical because wars can be won or lost but occupations most honorably end by redeployments.
We won World War II, and it carried the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt to great political heights. We lost the Vietnam War, and it politically destroyed Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford.
Americans don’t like to lose or draw at a war. Even people who oppose wars find it uncomfortable, at some level, to lose; and Republican strategists have used this psychological reality for political gain. When wars are won—even when they’re totally illegal and undeclared wars, like Reagan’s adventure in Grenada—it tends to create a national good feeling.
On the other hand, when arguably just wars, or at least legally defensible “police action” wars, like Korea, are not won, they wound the national psyche. And losing a war—like the German loss of WWI—can be so psychologically devastating to a citizenry that it sets up a nation for a strongman dictatorship to “restore the national honor.”
When using the “war” frame, it’s not politically possible to push to end the war: losing a war is too psychologically damaging. When using the frame of “occupation,” however, it is very possible to push to end the occupation, and in fact that end is welcomed. In this case, how you frame the U.S. troop presence in Iraq has everything to do with how soon that troop presence ends.
Here’s a scenario—fictitious—of how Democrats could have played out the change of frames:
TIM RUSSERT: So, Senator Reid, what do you think of this most recent news from the war in Iraq?
SENATOR HARRY REID: The war ended in May 2003, Tim. Our military did its usual brilliant job, and we defeated Saddam’s army. The occupation of Iraq, however, isn’t going so well, in large part because the Bush administration has totally botched the job, leading to the death of thousands of our soldiers and dragging our nation into disrepute around the world. I’d like to see us greatly scale down the current occupation of Iraq, redeploy our occupation forces to nearby nations in case we’re needed by the new Iraqi government, and get our brave young men and women out of harm’s way. Occupations have a nasty way of fomenting civil wars, you know, and we don’t want this one to go any further than it has.
TR: But isn’t the war in Iraq part of the global “War on Terror”?
SR: Our occupation of Iraq is encouraging more Muslims around the world to eye us suspiciously. Some may even be inspired by our occupation of this Islamic nation to take up arms or unconventional weapons against us, perhaps even here at home, just as Osama bin Laden said he hit us on 9/11 because we were occupying part of his homeland, Saudi Arabia, at the Prince Sultan Air Base, where Bush Sr. first put troops in 1991 to project force into Kuwait and enforce the Iraqi no-fly zone. The Bush policy of an unending occupation of Iraq is increasing the danger that people will use the tactic of terror against us and our allies; and, just as George W. Bush wisely redeployed our troops from Saudi Arabia, we should begin right now to redeploy our troops who are occupying Iraq.
TR: But the war…
SR: Tim, Tim, Tim! The war is over! George W. Bush declared victory himself, in May 2003, when our brave soldiers seized control of Iraq. That’s the definition of the end of a war, as anybody who’s ever served in the military can tell you. Unfortunately, our occupation of Iraq since the end of the war, using a small military force and a lot of Halliburton, hasn’t worked. We should take Halliburton’s billions and give them to the Iraqis so they can rebuild their own nation—the way we helped Europeans rebuild after World War II—and go from being an occupying power to being an ally of Iraq and the Iraqi people, like we did with Japan and Germany.
TR [bewildered]: I can’t call it a war anymore? We have to change our NBC “War in Iraq” banners and graphics?
SR [patting Russert’s hand]: Yes, Tim. The war is over. It’s now an occupation and has been for three years. And like all occupations, it’s best to wrap it up so Iraq can get on with its business. I’m sure your graphics people can come up with some new logos that say “Occupation of Iraq.” It’ll be a nice project for them, maybe even earn them some much-needed overtime pay. The “War in Iraq” graphics are getting a bit stale, don’t you think? After all, soon we’ll be able to say that we fought World War II in less time than we’ve been in Iraq. Wars are usually short, but occupations—particularly when they’re done stupidly— can be hellish.
TR [brightening]: Ah, so! Now I get it! I even wrote about wars and occupations in my book about my dad. Thanks for coming on the program today and clarifying this for us.
Frames matter and have consequences, sometimes life-and-death consequences. If the Democrats had been able to shift the media’s discussion from “war” to “occupation” back in 2003, we could have prevented the deaths of many, many Iraqis and thousands of U.S. soldiers.