I haven't read Lakoff's book yet, but he underestimates the importance of personal leadership. Humans seem to be lemmings with blogs and media, but most will blindly follow a charismatic leader off a cliff with no effective due diligence.
Politics rewards charismatic sociopathy and punishes tentative thoughtfulness. Blair, Bush, Palin (to an extent), Reagan, Thatcher, and Obama were/are powered by charisma, not by insight and effectiveness.
We won't get intelligent politics until democracy becomes about substance and effectiveness, not about rhetoric and marketing.
It's partly a culture in which honesty, modesty and hard work are highly valued. And a sense of equality. But mostly it's the consensus governments that produce more intelligent politics (possibly resulting from the cultural values). Consensus tends to dilute ideology, and ensure thorough debates. You can't be me, I'm taken
So long as there is a good-sized portion of the electorate that doesn't know and doesn't care about policy substance, politics will be about marketing, narrative, and propaganda.
The typical answer to that is better education, but as an educator myself, I think that's a doomed answer. Mass participation in politics at the local level is more viable, simply because it has existed in the past, while a "well-educated" electorate that focuses on "issues and substance" has been the eternal pipe dream.
In complex systems you can fit data (high-information) to almost any model (courtesy of many variables, most of them hidden/assumed).
As long as the alignment between narrative and data is not grotesquely off, "high-information" is mostly useless and reinforces self-confirmation bias.
