Cognitive approaches to metaphor show a great diversity in themselves, and this diversity is mirrored by the variety of strands within Lakoff's own work. In his individual work since 1990, Lakoff has concentrated a great deal of his energy on applying metaphor theory to politics. Adopting the role of the engaged intellectual, he has used the concepts of folk theories, narrative theory and conceptual metaphor to analyse the discourse of political rhetoric in studies such as his accounts of the two wars in Iraq. He offered a book-length account of the deficiencies of Democrat Party rhetoric in Moral Politics, published in 1996, in which he demonstrates that Democrats have often lost in rhetorical confrontations with Republicans because the latter manage to adopt a positive formulation – a pro-stance – and thereby oblige the Democrats to adopt negative formulation – an anti-stance. This is made all the more easy, Lakoff argues, since Democrats tend to embrace the negative formula because their party has deep roots in protest movements and has a tradition of dissent. Up until recently, as soon as Democrats were confronted with terms such as ‘pro-life’ by anti-abortionists and ‘tax-relief’ by right-wing critics of state spending and taxation, Democrats found their arguments powerless to sway public opinion. In a dramatic intensification of his role as engaged intellectual, Lakoff became a consultant to the Democratic think-tank in the period running up to the second election of George W. Bush, Jr.