OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response.

That’s the deal. It’s the real “grand bargain.” If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives in New Jersey, this is what you do: You hire a president and tell him to take care of everything you can’t take care of—the security of the nation, its well-being, its long-term interests. And you in turn do your part. You meet your part of the bargain. You work, pay your taxes, which are your financial contribution to making it all work, you become involved in local things—the boy’s ball team, the library, the homeless shelter. You handle what you can handle within your ken, and give the big things to the president.

And if he can’t do it, or if he can’t do it as well as you pay the mortgage and help the kid next door, you get mad. And you fire him.

Aside from the rather uninteresting fact that Republicans are turning on Bush now, this opinion column shows a very common part of framing: the retelling of schematized stories that form the dynamic image schemas that are one of the key components of conceptual frames. Noonan’s story is less schematic on the surface due to ‘human interest’ restrictions of her genre but even her chosen real life anchors serve to underline the basic schematicity of her narrative: “midlevel Verizon exexutive who lives in Jersey” despite its apparent specificity produces a much more generalized image describing an underdetermined but readily identifiable class of people.

But it is the intent and context of this “story” that are of real importance. Not only does it serve to evoke a culturally relevant image but also produces an account of a narrative folk theory of social order (democracy). It sets out the general schema of exchange instantiated through the analogy of employment. The president is employed to do a job just like a Verizon executive is employed to do a job. However, the job is not just mercenary exchange of services for money, it involves duty to community and the moral good: involvement in local affairs, caring for family. Just like the president is expected to do more than just do a job. He is expected to maintain the moral order. Although this part of the job does not map perfectly onto the domain of employment, the job of the voters is to vote the president out. Noonan alludes to another discrepancy in the concluding paragraph:

Americans can't fire the president right now, so they're waiting it out. They can tell a pollster how they feel, and they do, and they can tell friends, and they do that too. They also watch the news conference, and grit their teeth a bit.

This is the process by which understanding of the social world is negotiated. Not all of this process is conscious and volitional but much of it is at least partially deliberate and the role of the columnist is socially sanctioned for this very purpose.