Did “flip-flop” attach to Kerry because it described his record better than Bush’s? Was Al Gore, in any meaningful sense, a “serial exagerator?” In what conceivable sense was President’s son-Andover-Yale-Harvard Bush anything but an elitist? Yet each of these laughably inapt – or even mirror-image – frames was successfully exploited by Republicans, without citizens ever rejecting them as dishonest or cynical.

And I’d note that none of these has a single thing to do with cultural or “values” issues, nor with economics. Gore, of course, was attacked by the mainstream press as much as he was by the right, but Kerry was not especially victimized, nor was Bush given especially soft treatment (at least not regarding the above frame – in other ways he was comically coddled, especially in 2000). So how to explain this difference in rhetorical firepower without using any of Lakoff’s or Nunberg’s ideas?

And then there’s the white elephant in the room – the Southern Strategy. Given 11 states where the Party of the N- will never get the votes of 60% of the populace, maybe rhetoric doesn’t matter much at all….