The comment section on the original proves Lakoff's point about the right wing noise machine, but he misses a couple of iconic talkers for the left like Amy Goodman, Thom Hartmann, and Randi Rhodes.
He also misses some crucial reasons why the left doesn't have the same media presence.
For one, the more extreme righties are, the more they are carrying water for their corporate patrons and sponsors. If lefties got as visceral in the other direction, they would scare off health insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, oil companies, Wall Street, banks, and big ag. I think that just leaves skateboards and computers as potential sponsors.
The other problem is that the Democratic Party is really two parties, one progressive and another trying to sell itself to Wall Street as the other white meat (without the sprinkling of religious nuts). This creates a problem for Democrats that Republicans mostly don't have.
The issues the GOP's true constituents, the very wealthy and corporations, care about, hardly ever overlap with what their base cares about. Republican voters don't care about the intricacies of Wall Street deregulation and the rich don't give a rat's ass about abortion since they can fly their daughter or girlfriend to wherever it's legal.
To the extent the Republican base cares about economics, they don't seem to notice that the GOP tax cuts go mostly to the rich, their jobs go overseas, and their pensions end up in some CEO's secret account in Aruba. The average dittohead endures all that because they are sure they are going to win the lottery and be given the keys to the country club any day now, and don't want to share their winnings with Uncle Sam.
Not so with the Democrats. Their progressive voting base cares about mostly the same issues as the corporate toadying wing (aka the DLC, blue dogs, or ''moderates''), but have nearly exact opposite positions.
The progressives want healthcare available to everyone at a reasonable cost and not attached to a job. The corporate wing wants healthcare reform that protects insurance companies & pharma profits or better yet, increases them.
Progressives want Wall Street punished, reregulated, and monitored, preferably with ankle bracelets like they use on paroled child molesters or those stun collars some people use to keep their dog in the yard. The corporate wing sees Wall Street as the injured party that must be nurtured back to health with massive transfusions of our blood, so they can get back on their feet and wring the remaining drops out of us.
Progressives see the GOP ideas for what they are: a catastrophic failure that has caused debt, death, and ill will toward the US as far as the eye can see. Corporate Democrats want to be bipartisan and salvage what they can of those ideas because after all, those are what Wall Street, banks, and corporations want.
Too many Democrats see themselves not as potential leaders of the free world but call girls of the free market.
So they probably know that a Democratic media presence as big as the right is not a good idea because it will either advance true progressive ideas and piss off their present and hoped for corporate patrons, or if it serves up the thin gruel DLC corporate toadying, no one will listen.
Progressives lack a Limbaugh-like voiceGeorge Lakoff
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Where are the progressives? Largely absent. Or talking issue by issue, not about general themes. We have some icons: Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert. But they only talk to us. They are not omnipresent.
Can President Obama overcome all this? He is by far the best communicator in politics today. But what we get of him are sound bites, an occasional major address, and a five-minute talk Saturdays on You Tube. Meanwhile, the reporting in the media is about positions on issues, not about general principles that get repeated.
The president does, indeed, think and talk using general principles: empathy (caring about others), responsibility for both oneself and others, and the ethic of excellence - working to make yourself, your community, the nation and the world better. He sees these as the basis of American democracy: Empathy is why we have principles like freedom and fairness, not just for ourselves but for everybody.
In the absence of nationwide media cover, the president has to go barnstorming. His former campaign organization has chosen to reactivate its ground game to try to get ordinary people to go door-to-door, speaking in their own words from their own experiences, to gain support for his policies. The idea is for ordinary people to say what they sincerely believe to their neighbors.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/19/INUO170I8P.DTL&hw=by+george+Lakoff&sn=002&sc=519">FULL TEXT 
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