Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends.

For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

Conservatives say human beings are people who are primarily concerned with self-interest, and that's what they should be concerned with - self-interest and individual responsibility. They shouldn't be paying for anybody else's health care or anything else like that. As a result, government is something that should be absolutely minimal. It's not there for your overall protection and empowerment - it's not there to offer protection against disease or natural disasters or bad products or companies who sell you fallacious mortgages and so on.

Liberals have a set of folk theories that are fallacious. One of them comes from the Enlightenment, and the assumption is that you are supposed to be logical. They assume all you have to do is tell people the facts and they will reason to the right conclusion. This is utterly ridiculous. Thought is mainly metaphorical. The frames trump all the facts.

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

We now know, from the latest research about neurons, that we are hard-wired for empathy. We're hard-wired for cooperation. That is something about what we are as people - what it means to be a human being. And what Barack Obama was addressing was not just race or just the nature of politics. The great speeches address who we are as people, what it means to be a human being.