All political debate exists on three levels: values (top), issues (middle), and policy (bottom). Progressives love to talk on the bottom two levels because they seem more "real" and concrete. Policy and issues are where the facts are. You can put policy onto paper and make an issue a web page heading. Values are tougher to figure out.
Feldman seems to be getting at what rhetoricians used to call theoretical versus practical questions. The classic example was the theoretical question "Should a person marry?" versus the practical question "Should Cato marry?" He's also pointing out, rightly, that policy issues are conducted with values in mind. The representations are slightly different, though, because Feldman's somewhat schematic representation seems to suggest that values are a sort of ultimate abstract level, and that you've got to get the values in order before anything else gets resolved. In actual political debates, however, the course of dispute seems to be more multifacted, tricky, and unpredictable.
