Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs, and Washington Handshakes: Decoding the Jargon, Slang, and Bluster of American Political Speech

Introduction

★ xi Introduction N o matter what your political beliefs, you probably long ago reached one conclusion about our nation’s public servants: They can be confusing as hell. They’ve acquired that reputation in part because Washington, D.C., has become spectacularly, even proudly, indecipherable to most outsiders. It has its own political culture, including a specific language. It is a lexicon, a jargon—a code, if you will—that can be alien to those not in the know. (By our estimate, and from our experience, it takes roughly a year of working there to start to get in the know.) Insider-y sounding political jargon often makes it into the news media, but seldom with any explanation or in any meaningful context. This helps sow confusion, which in turn is one of the factors that have fueled the searing and seemingly unending contempt for all things Beltway. But such talk is absolutely not limited to Washington. Like everything else, it’s just more magnified there. Many of the same expressions can be heard at local city council and county commission meetings, as well as statehouses—any place, in other words, where it’s important to know the lingo to fit in. And those places can spawn their own unique expressions. A few examples: • At the Idaho capitol in Boise, the phrase “radiatorcapping ” has been in vogue.1 It describes the process of totally rewriting a bill on the floor of the legislature in much the same fashion as one would overhaul an old car, leaving intact just one original part—the radiator cap. • In the Dakotas, a bill that has been completely changed in a similar fashion is described as “hog housed.” According to the public radio show A Way with Words, the phrase xii ★ introduction derives from a century-old bill that was altered at the last moment to obtain money for a hog barn.2 • Among Massachusetts political insiders, the verb “spot” is popular. As the Boston Globe’s Jim O’Sullivan explains: “If a candidate ‘spots’ his opponent, he has wedged him into an uncomfortable political position. If a president uses the bully pulpit to ‘spot’ Congress, he is portraying it in a negative light unless it votes for his bill. ‘We got spotted by the guy,’ one Massachusetts lawmaker told me after the governor had used his State of the Commonwealth address to champion his municipal financing package.”3 Complaints about the murkiness of political language aren’t new. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” fulminated George Orwell in a famous 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” He inveighed against what he saw as their “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” and concluded: “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”4 We would argue, however, that the problem has only gotten worse since Orwell wrote this. It’s one of the by-products of a polarized political age. Political slang—like all other forms of jargon—helps its practitioners to develop and maintain a sense of shared identity. British linguist Julie Coleman observed in her 2012 book The Life of Slang that such subcultures of language “create in-groups and out-groups and act as an emblem of belonging.”5 And in a town as status conscious as Washington, where it’s been often observed that the hunger for power far trumps that for money, belonging to something—such as the Democratic or Republican parties—is a big deal. This book represents an attempt to defang the slang and crack the code. In writing this, we tried to think back to when we were ★ xiii introduction new to Washington and wishing, like wandering tourists lost in a foreign city, that we had a handy all-in-one-place phrasebook . Some of these are obscure words and phrases; others are broader concepts that we felt we could further explain.We settled on six areas—personalities, expressions, legislation, campaigns/ elections, people/places/things, and media/scandals. These divisions , unlike those in Congress, are not intractable. A number of terms could fit in a different chapter than the one they’re in. We are by no means the first to undertake such a feat—the late New York Times columnist William Safire’s Political Dictionary is the best-known example of...