This book by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling is big news in the United States.   It's being held up as showing the way forward for Obama's party, the Democrats.   It's about telling the truth and having morals and principles.

The book says that conservatives tend to get this stuff a little more naturally - they're more naturally oriented to things that make moral sense and are true.   Lefties tend to have policies, rules, laws and controls - without necessarily having a clear nexus to principle and morality.

The tragedy is that this book is meant for people who have lost their way in life.   The simplest example I can give is the "there will be no carbon tax" statement/undertaking/utterance/promise - call it what you will.   It should have been a simple transaction - bewdy, that's Julia Gillard, I know her, she said it - bewdy I can rely on it.

Instead we have the convoluted logic that says it's a price not a tax.   Or yeah it is a tax but we had to do the deal with the Greens to keep power - who wouldn't?   Or even worse "we always said we were going to do this".   Gillard didn't have to break her word - she did it because something brighter and shinier and worth more to her than her character came along.

I don't subscribe to the view that your moral compass in a leadership role should be adjustable to dial-up short-term advantage.   Do that a few times and you give away your character.
 
Never have truer words been spoken than the few first paragraphs in the precis of this book - "Voters cast their ballots for what they believe is right, for the things that make moral sense".   

I thought this review spoke volumes too.

–Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, author of Beyond Outrage

Tragically the people who will read this book will be very much like the young muso who goes up to the jazz great and says "can you teach me about feel".   If you've got to ask, you haven't got it.   I can see so many of this undergraduate cabinet in the sub-prime's ministry lining up to take the course.

Lenore Taylor is a polemicist with The Pamphlet (the publication once known as The Sydney Morning Herald).   Lenore has acknowledged the traditional target of the Fairfax Press today in this article about Tony Abbott

I think Lenore writes very well about the new discovery made by the left in The Little Blue Book.   But fancy that it would take someone to write a how-to manual about being moral and telling the truth for lefties to go "wow"!!!!!