When Democrats try to move toward the center by adopting Republican policies, themes, and language, they come across as false. Authenticity is the key to success to politics, just as Seth Godin says it is the key to success in marketing. The moral is simple, Lakoff says. "Be authentic and stick to what you really believe."

To do this well requires thinking about your language in terms of frames. "Frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality — and sometimes to create what we take to be reality." Lakoff tries to categorize various types of frames: deep frames, surface frames, argument frames, commonplace frames, issue-based frames, and so on. I find these categories confusing and not very helpful, but the basic idea seems sound.

The war on terror, for instance, has been very successful frame for the right. As long as you accept the idea that there is such a thing as a war on terror, you find yourself committed to a scary and endless struggle against something undefinable. If 9/11 had been framed as a major crime rather than an act of war, the response might have been to use diplomacy and good police work to track down those who planned the attack, and the results might have been quite different.

In the chapter "Morality and the Market," Lakoff neatly eviscerates the conservative "leave it to the market" refrain that is heard on topics ranging from healthcare to global warming.

"Consider what a purely free market — that is, a market without government intervention — would look like," Lakoff writes. “Drug companies could market drugs they haven't fully tested, knowing they cannot be regulated or sued. A mining company's only incentive to secure safety for its workers would be the fear that killing too many workers would decrease the labor supply and drive up labor costs or generate ill will. An oil company's only incentive to strip gasoline of lead would be the potential PR problem from putting lead in our atmosphere."

"On issue after issue," he writes, “the counterpoints to the conservative principle of the free market are the progressive principles of human dignity and the common good. We are interested in a market that serves human values, not humans who serve a market.... No one makes it on his or her own in this country. The more you make, the more you have used the common wealth, and the more responsibility you have to pay to maintain the common wealth."