Top Democrat issue framer George Lakoff has some advice for the Obama campaign. (From a psychiatric pdf file.)

Stop talking about issues. It's all about "character" (in quotes because according to Lakoff character is just "narrative"):

In 1980, Richard Wirthlin - Ronald Reagan's chief strategist - made a fateful discovery. In his first poll he discovered that most people didn't like Reagan's positions on the issues, but nevertheless wanted to vote for Reagan. The reason, he figured out, is that voters vote for apresident not primarily on the issues, but on five other "character" factors; values; authenticity; communication and connection; trust; and identity. In the Reagan-Carter and Reagan-Mondale debates, Mondale and Carter were ahead on the issues and lost the debates because the debates were not about the issues, but about those other five character factors. George W. Bush used the same observation in his two races. Gore and Kerry ran on the issues. Bush ran on those five factors.

In the 2008 nomination campaign, Hillary ran on the issues, while Obama ran on those five factors and won. McCain is now running a Reagan-Bush style character-based campaign on the Big Five factors. But Obama has switched to a campaign based "on the issues," like Hillary, Gore and Kerry. Obama has reality on his side. And the campaign is assuming that if you just tell people the truth, they will reason to the right conclusion. That's false and they should know better.

Unfortunately, it is also easy to manipulate these things with marketing techniques. As Cillizza points out, McCain and Palin are being marketed as American icons: the war hero and the ideal mom. Obama and Biden were marketed (honestly) as realizations of the American Dream, living hope that it is still possible - with Obama as the lone figure with the charisma, character and talent to actually unite the country and bring back the dream. So far, the McCain-Palin narratives are proving powerful. Palin has enormous charisma of her own. Meanwhile the Obama narrative is being given up in favor of "the issues." It is as though, after the Republicans attacked Obama's charismatic leader persona, the Obama campaign gave up on it, instead of realizing that they could capitalize on it.

However, he thinks Obama has character, because charisma is his "character." And because narratives and stereotypes are real reason which is reality, his charisma is also "real reason":

...the enlightenment theory of reason doesn't describe how people actually work. People think primarily in terms of cultural narratives, stereotypes, frames and metaphors. That is real reason.

Realities matter. To communicate them, you have to make use of real reason. That's what Obama did in the nomination campaign when he used his personal narrative to communicate about the country's needs. Obama needs to go back to being Obama. The Obama campaign's job is to shine a light on those realities through Obama's unique personal qualities as a leader and communicator.

Through a form of trickery known as "conservative populism" which was invented in the 1960s, the Republicans have hoodwinked working people into imagining that they agree with guys like Reagan and McCain (and presumably, they've tricked the working people into believing that these man have character). The real job of Obamacrats is to show them -- by "real reason" (meaning resort to charisma), that they have been fooled:

The Obama campaign has problems with conservative populism. They don't seem to understand it. Conservative populism on a national scale was invented in the late 1960s. At the time, most working people identified themselves with liberals. But conservatives realized that many working people were what I have called "biconceptuals" - they are genuinely conservative in their mode of thought about patriotism and certain family issues, though they are progressive in their understanding of nature (they love the land) and their commitment to communities where people care about each other etc. So conservatives have talked to them nonstop about conservative "patriotism" and "family values", thus activating their conservative mindset. At the same time, conservative theorists invented the ideal of "liberal elitism": that liberals look down upon working people and are not like them. Conservatives have been working at constructing this mythology for nearly 40 years and liberals have stood by and let it happen. Palin is a natural for the conservative populists. She understands their culture.

Conservative populism is a cultural, not an economic, phenomenon. These are folks who often vote against their economic self-interest and instead vote on their identity as conservatives and on their antipathy to liberals, who they see as elitists who look down on them. Simply giving conservative populists facts and figures won't work.

They tend to vote for people they identify with and against people who they see as looking down on them. The job for the Obama campaign is to reverse the present mindset that the Republicans have constructed, to reveal the conservatives as elitist Washington insiders who cynically manipulate them, to get conservative populists to identify with Obama and Biden on the basis of values and character, and to have them see realities through Obama's leadership capacities. Not an easy job. But it's the real job.

But then, if character is really just a narrative, and is actually a phony way of marketing charisma, then maybe he has a point. If not, then Lakoff (and the people who agree with him) are some of the most cynical opportunists in the business.

Call me a bamboozled biconceptual, but I think McCain's life is more than just a cleverly marketed narrative. Sure, there's a lot of political marketing involved in this campaign, as there always is. But no amount of marketing (in politics or anywhere else) can alter the fact that there can be genuine differences in the quality of what is being offered for sale. If character exists (and I think it does; hence the satirical post title), no amount of marketing can change it. There are vast character differences between John McCain and Barack Obama, and these will remain, regardless of who wins and who loses.

MORE: In a stunning show of "real reason," Joe Biden (campaigning in coalmining country) is appealing to the "biconceptual" crowd, and bitterly clinging to his guns:

One of rural Democrats' biggest fears about Obama? That he'll come after the Second Amendment. Not so, said Biden -- and he'd better not try.

"I guarantee you, Barack Obama ain't taking my shotguns, so don't buy that malarkey," Biden said angrily. "They're going to start peddling that to you."

"I got two, if he tries to fool with my Beretta, he's got a problem."

Biden has said he doesn't hunt, but shoots skeet with his two firearms. "I like that little over and under, you know? I'm not bad with it," he said today.

See what happens? Biden speaks reality, while Reynolds resorts to cynical activation of the "biconceptual" mindset!

Sorry. I really should take "reality" more seriously.

MORE: Rex Murphy looks at Obama's narrative, and his charisma, and thinks both are depleted:

...Mr. Obama was the slate; the crowds brought their own chalk.

This is the nature of Mr. Obama's particular kind of charisma. People project their best wishes on him, they fill in the blank of a very attractive and plausible outline. His is not, emphatically, a charisma of deeds. For what has he done, save run for president? He is an accommodating vessel - cool, smart, biracial and "unfinished." This is the Gatsby quality of him that others have noted. Like Gatsby, he is a receptacle of others' glamorous invention.

People see in him, or wish to see, the last great ideal of the American polity fulfilled, a final and full racial accommodation. That should he be elected president, America will have achieved, by his singular persona, the perfect emblematic demonstration of having exorcised at last the great stain of its racially riven origins.

Mr. Obama's charisma is, in this sense, external, something extended to the candidate. And it follows that that which is given may equally be taken away. The sparkle has, in fact, dimmed. He travels now in a lower orbit, closer to Earth - which is to say, he grows more mundane. The great word "hope" sounds less frequently now. He picks a running mate thick with the dust and rancour of many long years in Washington.

His acceptance speech in the Olympic-style stadium could not gather the inspirational energy of his earlier arias. Of late, the flash supernova of U.S. politics is seen "competing" with a second-on-the-ticket female governor of a remote state. There's more than a gap between the "audacity of hope" and "lipstick on a pig." The mouth that spoke the first phrase should not be capable of the second.

He has shrunk into a combative partisan.....