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Tavis: Geoffrey Nunberg is a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford, and the chair of the usage panel at American Heritage Dictionary. He's also a regular contributor to NPR's 'Fresh Air,' and author of the new book, 'Talking Right, How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into A Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left Wing Freak Show.' Professor Nunberg, (laughs) nice to have you on the program.

Geoffrey Nunberg: Thanks for having me.

Tavis: (Laughs) How long did it take you to come up with this one?

Nunberg: I wish I could take credit for that. That actually comes from an ad that this conservative group, The Club For Growth, ran during the Iowa caucuses in 2004, when it looked like Governor Howard Dean was gonna be the nominee. And they used that line. They said, 'Howard Dean can take his tax-raising, government,' so on and so forth. But Hollywood-loving freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.

Tavis: And it got your attention for a subtitle for a book because?

Nunberg: Because it just speaks to all of the clichés and the stereotypes that the right has used to brand liberalism as this upper middle class lifestyle choice rather than as a political doctrine.

Tavis: How did that happen? And let me explain what I mean by that. What I mean by that is your argument that the right uses language so much better than the left does. When did that happen and how did that happen? I ask that because as far as I can remember, and I'm maybe a few years younger than you, but not much, as far back as I can recall, the right has always used language better than the left. Did I miss something here?

Nunberg: Well, I think at least since the 1970s. The left in the sixties and the time of Civil Rights contributed a lot of words to the language that became part of the moral wallpaper of American life. Words like diversity and discrimination and so on and so forth. But they lost the thread in the 1970s. That's when the right began this branding campaign to brand liberalism, as I say, as an upper middle class lifestyle. And to make their own views dominant.

Tavis: Tell me how they did that.

Nunberg: They did it by being on message, for one thing. And by substituting political discourse, for political discourse, these lifestyle characterizations. Volvo liberals, and latte liberals and so on, as part of this story they told. What I call a kind of faux-populist story that substituted these bogus cultural distinctions that we now think of as the red-blue distinction for the real economic divisions in American life.

Tavis: Let me ask you a real simple question. How is it that some of these phraseologies stick when one can reasonably assume that folk who are left, politically, aren't the only ones who, for example drink lattes, who for example eat sushi, who for example drive Volvos. How did those kinds of words end up being linked to the left, and linked successfully?

Nunberg: Well, it's absolutely true that, in fact, if you look at the data, that most of the people who buy Brie are Republicans? But it still stands in for this stereotype that the right has been trying to pin on the left, it's brie is, it's soft, it's pale, it's runny, it's French, right? (Laughs) What better product to stand in for this image of liberals. And by repeating that, they've been very successful at making this stick.

Tavis: I recall, and I'm sure you do as well, when Newt Gingrich was making his ascendancy to the Speaker's chair, and one of the things he did to get the troops lined up, to get his supporters and votes lined up, was to raise a lot of money, did a lot of work through his PAC. And one of the things he did was teach a course on how to use language.

Taught them the right words to use, how to apply those words. I raise that because I wonder whether or not the right has been more disciplined about not just identifying the right words, but indeed teaching it, literally, to persons who are running for office, so they'd know how to use the language, and to your point, stay on message.

Nunberg: Right, absolutely. In fact, shortly after Gingrich, I did a little experiment. I took all the speeches at the Republican convention; I ran one of these automatic summarization programs on it that pulls out the most frequent words. And it produced this five-sentence speech that could stand in for every Republican speech that's ever been made.

And then a month later, I did the same thing with the Democrats. And what it turned out was word salad. 'Cause there were no repeated words. Everybody was going in one direction or another. So that discipline has had a lot to do with the Republican success at what I think of as capturing the ground zero language of political life.

Tavis: All right, so this isn't rocket science.

Nunberg: No.

Tavis: So, if Republicans can figure out what words to use, how to use those words, and stay on message with those words, why are the Democrats so stuck on stupid?

Nunberg: Well, I think the Democrats have been reluctant to - it isn't just a question of the words. It's a question of the Republicans telling this narrative about these two Americas. The good folks, the ordinary folks of middle America, and the effete, pretentious elites of the coasts, and so on and so forth. And Democrats have been oddly reluctant to tell their own popular story.

Now, Bill Clinton did it brilliantly in 1992. I'm tired of seeing people who work hard and play by the rules get the shaft. That's the kind of story the Democrats have to be able to tell, in order to regain the political ascendancy.

Tavis: Well, that's at the heart of my question, though. If, unless I'm assuming, which I would never assume, that Republicans are smarter than Democrats, essentially smarter, unless I believe that, there's gotta be a reason then why Democrats have not embraced a strategy of being able to be good storytellers, and staying on message. It ain't the most difficult thing in the world to do.

Nunberg: No, it isn't. I think Democrats, in a certain sense, lost their nerve sometime after Vietnam.

Tavis: Okay.

Nunberg: And that's part of it. And there's a timidity about telling these stories, a fear of being accused of class warfare, for example, that's moved the Democrats. Say, oh, we're against big government, too. And trying to neutralize the Republicans' advantage. What they do, in effect, is to validate that advantage, and say well, no, these are the right words to use in political discussion. 'Cause they're using the other guy's language, and that's always a mistake.

Tavis: Let me throw a few words - the subtitle notwithstanding, let me throw a few words at you, not in this subtitle, and get your thoughts on why the phraseology works when the right uses the phrase partial birth abortion.

Nunberg: Well, partial birth abortion connotes this awful procedure where the baby's half out of the womb, and you're killing it. So yeah, it's been very successful for the right, yeah.

Tavis: Compassionate conservative.

Nunberg: Compassionate conservatism is the right's attempt to neutralize or underplay this idea that conservatives are, in fact, hard-hearted creeps. And they come up with the compassionate conservative line. But what it really means is sort of paying lip service where lip service is due. But it's been very effective for them.

Tavis: The culture, or as they put it, a culture of life.

Nunberg: That's a phrase that the right got originally from the Catholic Church. It's been successful in building these alliances among Pentecostals and others of the fundamentalist Protestant right and Catholic right. And it's suggested that life is the uniting feature here.

Tavis: We wanna create, as they will say, an ownership society.

Nunberg: Ownership society. Ownership's a great word. You're supposed to own your work, for example, or own your job. And the idea is that somehow, there's a connection between owning a house, owning a car, and feeling a sense of involvement in the privatization of your Social Security or pension, for example.

Tavis: The Welfare state.

Nunberg: The Welfare state's a phrase that the Democrats and the left created in the 1950s, and became tarred as part of this anti-big government campaign by Reagan and others in the 1980s.

Tavis: No Child Left Behind. If anybody who knows the story behind this one, of course, it came from the Children's Defense Fun.

Nunberg: Children's Defense Fund.

Tavis: But how do you rip off somebody's phrase and make it your own?

Nunberg: Well, that's what the right has done very successfully. Whether it's No Child Left Behind -color blind's a phrase that used to be associated with the left, and with liberal opposition to segregation. It became a part of the right's program around the 1970s, as a means of opposing affirmative action. So, the right has never used that word, colorblind, to mean don't look at the fact that somebody's Black. It only means (laughs) don't look at the fact that somebody's White. It's as if they took all that 1950s Civil Rights footage and were running it in reverse video.

Tavis: I could have fun doing this for hours, but I think those watching get the point, that they, the right that is, have figured out a way to use language that works. Let me turn the corner here, if I can. Tell me to the text here how that reality, that use of language and phraseology cheapens our political discourse, or somehow plays, disrespects, the American voter.

Nunberg: Yeah, I think it really does. It's given an electoral advantage to the right, and it's enabled them to build this coalition between traditional white shoes, country club Republicans who benefit from the Bush tax cuts, and working class voters who are disturbed about the direction of American culture, and who buy into this story about the elites on the coast.

But in the end, it isn't to anybody's advantage, because what it means is when you turn on cable talk shows, for example, most of them, what you see is a kind of reality TV version of 'All In The Family.' Where just Archie and Meathead are bickering over what kind of car they drive, or what kind of cheese they eat, or what kind of coffee drink they have. And the serious issues get slighted in that, in the course. Now, that's not to the advantage of the country. It isn't just to the disadvantage of the left.

Tavis: Aside from this show, which I take pride in saying this, aside from this show and a few others where you really do get the opportunity, the time to make your case, to engage in a civil dialogue, you almost, one could argue, have to learn how to use quick phrases, catchy phrases, pithy phrases like these, to get your point across in the 15 seconds you're going to have.

Nunberg: Right, and it's not a question of discussing issues in a serious way. It's a question of making quick and often cheap points that have more to do with, as I say, the lifestyle of your opponent than with his or her political views.

Tavis: My question is, though, if that's the way, again, aside from a few shows that are still left on the air, if that's the way the game is played, and if at the end of the day, the point here is to win the game. Whether you're Karl Rove or Ken Melman or Howard Dean or Jesse Jackson. If the end game here is to win, you gotta learn how to play the game by the rules, and what's wrong with doing this if these are the rules that win the game today?

Nunberg: I completely agree. You hear Democrats saying oh, our story's too complicated to reduce to 15 second sound bites. Well, Roosevelt could do it, Truman could do it, Kennedy could do it, modern Democrats can do it, too.

Tavis: To that point, what are they missing about how to make that happen? If Democrats were to do this, to talk right, or put another way, to talk left successfully, what would they have to do?

Nunberg: They have to give a sense of what the party stands for. They make a lot of good points that have a lot of support among voters. What the Democrats haven't been able to do is build a kind of overarching story that gives people a sense of what the party's for. Polls show more than half of Americans believe the Republicans know what they stand for.

Only about a quarter of Americans believe the Democrats know what they stand for. And no amount of single programs and proposals is gonna make that right. It's a question of telling a story, and the Democrats haven't been strong at that.

Tavis: Do you think, then, that given the world as we know it right now, heading into these midterm elections, heading into this presidential election cycle, is now a good time or a more complicated time for Democrats to figure out, in this context, how to craft that message?

Nunberg: Well, I think Democrats could do it, but I don't see that they've really been making an effort to do it. Their slogan, together, America can do better, basically says we're better than this bunch of bozos. And it may be, given the degree of bozosity that the Republicans have been showing, that that will work in 2006, at least to help them regain or come close to regaining control of maybe the House, maybe the Senate.

But it doesn't solve this basic problem of giving people a sense that the Democratic Party knows what it stands for. That's been a problem with the Democrats since the 1970s, and they really haven't been able to address it.

Tavis: Finally, is there a way that the left goes about testing whatever they think they wanna use, to see whether or not it can work?

Nunberg: Well, I think the left has to come back, as I say, to this basic story, this popular story. It worked for Clinton in 1992, it worked for Gore after the 2000 convention. It worked for John Edwards, brought him almost to the presidential nomination of his party. And I think they have to get back on that page and use language that conveys those ideas.

Tavis: The new book by Geoffrey Nunberg, 'Talking Right,' and just 'cause I love saying it, 'How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into A Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left Wing Freak Show.' Professor, nice to have you on.

Nunberg: Thanks so much for having me.

Tavis: Up next on this program, Martin Lawrence. Stay with us.