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★ ix Foreword I t is the stuff of urban legend, but the estimable journalist-author Joe Klein was an eyewitness. In his first, quickly aborted run for the presidency in 1980, Senator Bob Dole—already a twenty-year veteran of Congress—was asked by a young girl in New Hampshire what he would do about acid rain. Without a second’s pause, Dole replied: “That bill’s in markup.” It’s really not that puzzling why a United States senator would assume that a New England schoolgirl would understand the reference to the intricacies of the legislative process; two decades in the Capitol bubble will do that. For most of the population—let’s call them “regular, normal people”—time spent listening to legislators , operatives, and journalists thrash over public policy on cable or a website can often result in something close to a fugue state, induced by the repeated use of words and phrases that have little if any connection to life as it is lived on planet Earth. That’s why this volume may prove a lifesaver—at least, to those who find politics a fascinating arena, who watch C-sPAn2 the way others watch Duck Dynasty or Storage Wars, but who are often baffled by the conversation. Are you baffled by the way “frankly” is used to mean either its exact opposite (“Frankly, I’m the best candidate”) or nothing at all (“Frankly, 2014 is an election year”)? Incredulous at how “the American people” is trotted out every third sentence? In the words of a former vice president, “Help is on the way.” In one sense, it is utterly unsurprising that political discourse is encrusted with linguistic quirks; that is true of all enterprises . Listen to an nFL broadcast, where “he put the ball on the ground!” has replaced “fumble,” and where “audibilizing” has added two syllables to a perfectly adequate word. Go to a corporate gathering, where attendees are urged to “think outside the x ★ foreword box,” and where no one is fired—only “downsized.” Every profession has its own language, in part because it envelopes the enterprise in mystery, thus increasing the market value of those who have mastered the mystery (doctors can charge more for treating “contusions and abrasions” than “cuts and bruises.”) What’s different about politics, though, is how practitioners consistently miss one of history’s clearest lessons: the most memorable words spoken by political leaders shun the rarified language for simple, clear words that lodge in our memory. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” “Mr. Gorbachev—tear down this wall.” To be fair, there are times when the birth of a new political cliché can be fully justified. In the last year or so, it’s become common for a Washington staffer to refer to a colleague as “a Jonah”— after Jonah Ryan, the hopelessly self-regarding White House staffer on HbO’s wickedly funny Veep. And if a brilliant devious member of Congress has not yet been labeled “an Underwood”— after Kevin Spacey’s character on Netflix’s House of Cards—it’s only a matter of time. Still, there are far too many times when political discourse can trigger an impulse to throw a thesaurus at the TV or computer screen: Do we really need the cable bloviators to describe yet another “defining moment”? Do we really need to read a journalist describing another “carefully crafted” political event—especially when a “carelessly crafted” appearance guarantees media ridicule? In your hands is guide through the thicket, a machete with which to cut your way through the jungle of rhetoric. It is, indeed , a carefully crafted guide that—if employed by enough citizens —may prove a defining moment in the political education of the American people. At the end of the day, though, only time will tell. Jeff Greenfield ...

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