The point of doing this is not to torpedo new ideas, but to anticipate problems before creating them.  The voter-mining approach holds great promise, I'm sure. But a more general embrace of lifestyle campaigning can--if pursued in the wrong way--only make matters worse for a Democratic Party that can't describe itself in 10 words.  Furthermore, it can serve as yet another justification for moving to the mushy middle, scorning both the Democratic Party's activist base and it's voter base.

In "Conservatism Is Our Enemy", Chris noted:

         Bush  Kerry  Margin

Conservative  84    15     69

Liberal       13    85     72

         Bush   Gore   Margin

Conservative  81     17      64

Liberal       13     80      67

My point?  If we pursue lifestyle strategies, we must do so in a way that does not further dilute, disown, disparage or undercut the promotion and defense of liberalism as a political identity and tradition.  To the contrary--we should be thinking about how to marry the two.

But that doesn't seem to be what the mucky-mucks are thinking.  Consider this, from "Remapping the Culture Debate," by Garance Franke-Ruta in the American Prospect:

To continue:

Wait a second!  Has Franke-Ruta actually read George Lakoff?  Has she even read the titles of his books?  Moral Politics???   Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate??? Hello-o!  Whenever such a facile mis-representation enters the debate, you can bet your booties that something's going on beneath the surface.  And here it comes:

In contrast, it's hard to know what these characters are up to, but given their own personal histories, given the little we are told, given the potpouri of insiders mentioned above, and the nature of the data they're using, it seems highly probable that what their approach is both fragmenting--targetting smaller and smaller niches specifically--and overtly mushy/centrist, meaning de facto center/right.

Let me be clear.  I don't think that lifestyle targetting has to be done this way.  But this is the way it is being presented now.  (Full details coming soon, apparently.)  We are fools if we do not consider the whole package, seeing only what we want to see that's inside the package.  We are also fools to think this strategy can work.  Why?  

Well, for one thing, the environmental movement is already much like this.  While the national politicians may equate environmentalism with a handful of large organizations, down on the ground there are thousands upon thousands of local, regional and statewide groups, the vast majority of them more or less "lifestyle-based". They are concerned with preserving, protecting, and/or rehabilitating and enjoying a specific habitat. Or they share a specific concern with a type of habitat--be it wild rivers, native plants, or the California surf.  I know this move vividly than most, in part because 15 years ago I helped put together a directory of environmental groups in the Los Angeles area.

The environmental movement is quite successful by most conventional measures.  An awful lot of people are actively involved.  It enjoys tremendously broad support. Almost no one speaks against it.  And yet, the national GOP is relentlessly opposed to it, and has yet to pay a price, even though support for most environmental priorities is a majority position amongst its own party members.

So think about it.  Here's an example of an already organized lifestyle constituency, and yet it still doesn't translate into a hill of beans in term of national politics.

Does that mean that lifestyle politics is a useless illusion?  No, not at all.  But it does mean that we have to think both carefully and hard about what we're trying to accomplish, and how we can possibly measure our progress to know if we're being successful.  And, of course, we have to combine it with something more. A lot more.

Using psycho-graphics to identify people for voter-contact is a relatively superficial tactic, that need not have any deeper strategic or ideological implications.  And measuring success, or progress in using it should be relatively straight-forward.

But the sort of strategy that Nordhaus and Shellenberger are advocating seems very different indeed. In fact, there's every reason to believe that it will fail for exactly the same reason that the centrist establishment approach to running on centrist "soccer mom" issues has failed.  As Lakoff explains in Don't Think of An Elephant:

Now let us be clear.  Neither Lakoff nor I are  saying that we can simply copy the GOP.  We have more to do than that.  We must learn from what they do that works, and then adapt it as appropriate to our own values and philosophy.  But we cannot move forward by taking one aspect out of context and regarding it as the silver bullet that will answer all our problems.  That is simply an illusion.  A very dangerous one.

Above all, we must realize that two factors underlying this approach have a natural GOP bias.

First, a focus on consumption favors the GOP, just as a focus on production favors the Democrats.  There's an old slogan: "You have to vote like a Democrat to live like a Republican." As consumerism has expanded continually over the past few generations, people have forgotten this.  But they forget it at their peril.  Defending Wal-Mart as a boon to the poor is a prime example of this, highlighting the low cost of consumer products, and ignoring the vast externalized costs, the public, social subsidies that make the low prices possible.  Consumerism doesn't have to favor the GOP. It just has a natural tendency to do so.

Second, this approach divides people into different factions. This is the essetial logic of wedge politics, which is the foundation of conservative success.  The first major move was to divide the working class by pitting whites against blacks--Nixon's "Southern Strategy." 

But the logic is all-encompassing.  Liberals say that we all have something in common, politically. We are, primarily, citizens, who share a common identity, a common responsibility, a common fate.  Our diversity is real and undeniable, but as citizens diversity exists to strengthen what we have in common, not to stand opposed to it. Conservatives claim to deplore diversity as weakening America's civic heritage, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, they do everything imagineable to fragment the electorate.  Trying to beat them at their own game is a sure recipe for failure, even if we do somehow win some elections with it in the short run.

We can adapt a lifestyle approach, provided we realize these and other limitations, and work to craft an integrated approach grounded in the understanding that Lakoff provides. But the two approaches can't be integrated when people like Franke-Ruta--full-time, Harvard-educated political junkies--haven't even bothered to read the titles of Lakoff's books, much less crack them open, and learn the lessons inside.