When he’s not a professor—mandarin may be a better word—at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches cognitive linguistics, George Lakoff turns out books at a prodigious rate and serves as an unofficial aide-de-campe to the John Kerry campaign. He thinks a lot about how conservatives and progressives speak, and why conservatives are so much better at peddling their strict-father model of society, as he puts it, than progressives are at pushing their nurturing-parent outlook. (See Lakoff, George, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Second Edition, 2002.) So concerned has he become with the subject, indeed, that he’s started the Rockridge Institute, a think-tank whose mission it is to help progressives catch up. Can they? Sure, says Lakoff, by effectively framing—using novel terminology and calling on unconscious metaphors to make their points (it’s simpler than it sounds).

The Believer reached Lakoff by phone at his Rockridge office, with its calmly view of the Berkeley campus (so his assistant claims). He was in an exceedingly good mood. His new book, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate—The Essential Guide for Progressives, which he co-wrote with Howard Dean and Don Hazen, was climbing up the Amazon best-seller list, and his role as unofficial linguistic consultant to John Kerry’s campaign seemed to finally be paying off. Kerry had delivered a scathing speech on the Bush Administration’s failures in Iraq the night before…

—James Verini

THE BELIEVER: When did conservatives become so good with language?

GEORGE LAKOFF: Well, with Reagan.

BLVR: Wasn’t it before that, though? I just read Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein, and it seems like they started even that long ago, in the early sixties, with Conscience of a Conservative and all that.

GL: Well, yes. He tried doing it. (William F.) Buckley had started it, but they didn’t get far with it, and it wasn’t very effective. After the ‘64 campaign, no one wanted to be a conservative. And what’s interesting is that Goldwater’s numbers are exactly the same as the hard conservative numbers today. I don’t know if you’re aware of that. Goldwater lost with something like 37 percent to 39 percent. It was something like 61 percent to 39 percent in the general election. Well, take a look at the Pew Poll now. The Pew Poll is interesting, because it segregates the strong support from the support, and if you look at the strong support for both Kerry and Bush, it’s in the range of like 36 percent to 40 percent. The conservatives had had that same percentage of people straight on through from ‘64 to the present, but what they’ve...