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An extract from a very interesting article (with the same title) by Janadas Devan in The Sunday Times today:

The hottest concepts in American politics are not liberalism or conservatism, preventive war or globalisation. Rather, the concept which exercises professional politicians and their handlers most is framing.

According to Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang, framing is “the attempt to define the debate so everyone knows what everyone else is going on about…” Known as framing, as in ‘framing the debate’, this sometimes occurs as a storm of criticism intended to kneecap adversaries rhetorically, to force them into inflexible political stances, or to goad them into reputation-damaging statements”.

A recent article in The New York Times Magazine gave the following example of framing from the last presidential election: The Bush campaign’s successful effort to portray Senator John Kerry as “flip-flopper”, “forever bouncing erratically from one position to another”.

President George W. Bush and his campaign “made sure that virtually every comment they uttered about Kerry during the campaign reminded voters, subtly or not, of this one central theme”.

Mr Kerry helped considerably in the effort by saying, of a Bill to fund US troops in Iraq, “I actually did vote for the US$87 billion before I voted against it.”

The Bush campaign hit the jackpot again when Mr Kerry allowed himself to be filmed wind-surfing, tacking left and right to catch the wind. The Republicans used the footage in an advertisement — “the smartest ad of the campaign”, said the Times.

“Democrates, on the other hand, presented a litany of different complaints about Bush, depending on the day and the backdrop; he was a liar, a corporate stooge, a spoiled rich kid, a reckless warmonger. But they never managed to tie them all into a single, unifying image that voters could associate with the President. As a result, none of them stuck. Bush was attacked. Kerry was framed.”