This is a common tactic - define a policy or proposal in terms favorable to one's preferred outcome. Republicans have generally bee more successful doing so than Democrats, for example calling the estate tax a death tax. Democrats seem to have learned the lesson.
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When Treasury Secretary Jack Lew recently gave notice that the federal government would once again hit the debt ceiling in February, the response from congressional Republicans—who twice took the nation to the brink of default—was decidedly muted.
The official line? “We believe that defaulting on our debt is the wrong thing,” says House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “We don’t want to do that.” On Tuesday, the House duly voted to raise the debt limit without conditions, sending the action over to the Senate.
This move represents a 180-degree turn from the previous strategy of trying to extract concessions from Democrats by threatening to send the country into economic chaos.
Why such a stark softening of the party line? Republicans’ retreat from the debt-limit battlefield, which they entered so boldly in the spring of 2011 and again last year, began with a shift in the Democrats’ rhetorical strategy. A simple turn of phrase turned the tables on the GOP.
The short history of debt-limit brinksmanship offers a useful lesson in the power of a word to reframe a national debate and drive public opinion in a new direction.
When Republicans first played the debt-limit card in 2011 to force budget concessions from Democrats, the GOP held the rhetorical upper hand. The dialogue was framed in terms of the policy question at hand: Should the national debt limit be raised, so that the Treasury could borrow more money to pay outstanding bills?
. . . Democrats undermined their own position by talking too much about raising the debt limit—and not talking about the consequences of sending the country into default. As seen in the word frequency chart above, the word “default” didn’t even show up in the debate during the first round of this fight in 2011.
We shared this linguistic analysis with top Democrats and recommended a simple, but critical, change in their message: Stop talking about the “debt limit.” Start the conversation with the word “default.”
It was a straightforward switch in vocabulary—but it started a whole new conversation. When high-profile messengers in the Obama administration and Congress started talking about the danger of “default,” the prominence of that idea quickly increased in news coverage. Commentators began discussing it more, and the theme was amplified in social media.
Democrats also dialed up the emotional resonance of the message by saying that a default could cause an economic “catastrophe.” Emotion works with cognition in the brain to help us with attention, retention and motivation. A message must create an emotional reaction for people to notice it, much less remember it.
Within weeks of Democrats adopting this new tack, the polls began to shift. A Pew survey in July 2011 showed the percentage of respondents concerned about default had increased by seven points—while opposition to raising the debt limit had decreased by one.
