I understand that the convention is already over and I wish I had realized it earlier but I have to say it.  Most people in the MSM and indeed here in the blogosphere refer to the site of last nights speech as Invesco Field.

I'm asking you all (especially you posters like Todd, Jerome, Johnathan, and Natasha) from now on to call it MILE HIGH STADIUM.  "Phooey," you say, "Mile High was demolished years ago." Furhermore aren't there better, more noble, less nit-pickey causes to write about?  Certainly all these points are true, but let me explain my reasons before you dismiss this as moon-bat-ery.

As many of you may know Denver was home to a Stadium called Mile High Stadium from 1948 to 2001. Around 1998, after the Broncos finally won a Super Bowl, the owner of the Broncos, Pat Bowen, strong armed the city into building a new stadium for the team which they did using mostly taxpayers dollars to do.  The new stadium was slated to carry the same name as the old one.  However, once the new stadium was built, Invesco bought the naming rights to the stadium and changed it to Invesco Field, setting off a PR firestorm in the local media.  The Denver Post refused to use the name Invesco.  Citizens who had paid to build the stadium felt they had been betrayed and finally Invesco settled to call it officially "Invesco Field at Mile High."

So why should anyone care about a name?  A rose is a rose is a rose, right?  As George Lakoff would say, its all about the framing.  The importance of using Mile High instead of Invesco is that Mile High reminds us that the stadium was built on taxpayer dollars.  The name Invesco concedes the "right" of private companies to rename -- and metaphorically take ownership of -- a building that we the people of the City of Denver paid for.

After a speech like the one that Obama delivered last night, one in which he criticised this conservative doctrine of private companies freeloading on publicly funded projects, it just isn't right to call it Invesco Field.  Granted the stadium isn't a public park, but we paid for it and then Invesco slaps their name on it.

Obama's speech and this convention will be talked about for years to come, so when you write about it call it Mile High Stadium.  It doesn't cost you anything and it reinforces the idea that the building was built by us and not Invesco.  Its also going to make you popular with people from Colorado.

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DFA Night School is back, baby! The fall semester will teach you the advanced skills you need in order to get voters to the polls this November. Participating is easy, fun, and free!

We have a very special guest for the first lesson, which we'll hold on Tuesday, Sept. 19 at 8:30 PM Eastern. I'm sure many of you know UC-Berkeley professor George Lakoff, author of "Don't Think of an Elephant" and more recently "Whose Freedom?". When you're standing at a voter's doorstep, or you're phonebanking voters through a call list, how do you really persuade them to get out and vote for your candidate? We'll answer that and teach you how to develop a message that will sway voters at the deepest levels. RSVP to the live, toll-free conference call right now:

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Cross-posted From Patterns That Connect

People often seem to criticize George Lakoff based on their own peculiar misreadings of him.  And it's happened again over at Talk Left, in a guess commentary by Big Tent Democrat, "What Lakoff and Obama Do Not Understand" [Disclaimer: I would much rather be writing about what Obama does and does not understand, but that will have to wait.]  Curiously, Matt Stoller over at MyDD, referred to this as George Lakoff Gutted, but it's more like a fingernail clipping... that failed.

This is a very rambling, rather tangled post, that seems to have two fundamental misreadings of Lakoff at its core:

(1) It misunderstands Lakoff's criticism of issue-based attempts to target voters.  Lakoff's big picture criticism is that it misunderstands how most people think about politics. His little picture criticism is directed specifically at the laundry-list approach to trying win over swing voters.  Big Tent Democrat misconstrues it as Lakoff ignoring single-issue voters.

(2) It misunderstands why Lakoff talks about talking to conservatives.  Lakoff does so primarily because his theory explains two coherent political frameworks, liberal and conservative.  There is no coherent moderate framework.  However, moderates employ both liberal and conservative frameworks.  Thus, speaking to and countering conservative influences is a way to reach both conservatives and moderates.  Big Tent Democrat mistakenly thinks that Lakoff is ignoring moderates in favor of conservatives.

A deeper look at these misunderstandings, and more, on the flip.

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