If you're a progressive, you can find lots of people who call themselves conservatives, but who agree with you on lots of things. There are people who call themselves conservatives, but who love the land as much as any environmentalist. Progressives share a number of common values with people who call themselves conservatives. Barack Obama has understood that very well. What he calls bipartisanship is not adopting conservative views, but finding where people who consider themselves conservatives share with him and other progressives these fundamental American values.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

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

Empathy - that is, caring about people and acting responsibly on that care, not just for yourself, but for others - this is something that Barack Obama understands very well. He was a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago for ten years. As an expert on the Constitution and on our family values, he understands very well that the country is fundamentally about caring for one another. The day after his speech, he was interviewed on CNN, and Anderson Cooper asked him what patriotism was. He said patriotism begins with caring for one another.

Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that 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.

One of the things cognitive science teaches us is that when people define their very identity by a worldview, or a narrative, or a mode of thought, they are unlikely to change-for the simple reason that it is physically part of their brain, and so many other aspects of their brain structure would also have to change; that change is highly unlikely.

If you're a progressive, you can find lots of people who call themselves conservatives, but who agree with you on lots of things. There are people who call themselves conservatives, but who love the land as much as any environmentalist. Progressives share a number of common values with people who call themselves conservatives. Barack Obama has understood that very well. What he calls bipartisanship is not adopting conservative views, but finding where people who consider themselves conservatives share with him and other progressives these fundamental American values.