Should have seen it coming

(Updated below.)

This story begins a few days ago, the American Dialect Society announced that singular "they" was their choice as Word of the Year for 2015. (Go here for pervious years' ADS WOTY selections.) The internet blew up, and I commented on my Facebook page:

Okay, first, we need to keep in mind that it's the American Dialect Society, and they cleverly do this once a year so people will remember they exist.

And American English is at least trying to find a remedy to this centuries-old problem. What's the alternative? "He or she" is clunky. We know the problem with generic "he" (or "she"). And "s/he" is unpronounceable. In an age when Webster's offers "figuratively" as a nonstandard synonym for "literally," the whole they/them thing just isn't the hill I'm prepared to die on. If I'm working under a style manual that forbids singular "they," I follow it. Otherwise I default to the Midwestern dialect of my youth, and save my disdain for things like "impactful."

A friend commented that the "they" problem can often be gotten around with a little care in re-writing, which is true, but that end-runs the problem rather than solving it. Basically, this problem is a pseudo-problem anyway, created by generations of prescriptive grammarians trying to force English and American English into the procrustean bed of Latin.

The next day, the story came out that Chris Hughes, the Facebook-co-founding billionaire who purchased The New Republic in 2012, was putting it up for sale. Hughes was not known to have any particular feel for the magazine or its long tradition when he bought it; it was simply a shiny thing he planned to turn it into a showcase for his largely-inapplicable theories about digital media. (Spoiler it went badly.)

Here are the first several lines from his announcement – online, naturally, because that's how it works – that TNR was for sale (emphasis added):

I have some difficult news today: I have decided to put The New Republic up for sale. I bought this company nearly four years ago to ensure its survival and give it the financial runway to experiment with new business models in a time of immense change in media. After investing a great deal of time, energy, and over $20 million, I have come to the conclusion that it is time for new leadership and vision at The New Republic.

Over the past few years we have made good progress in reinvigorating this institution. Our readership has grown younger and more diverse, largely as a result of our digital strategy. Our journalism has been widely recognized as impactful, impassioned, and more relevant to our nation’s challenges than ever.

p3 wishes Mr. Hughes well in his next endeavor, which we sincerely hope won't be education reform.

Update (1/30/16): Looks like the Washington Post isn't going to save Private Ryan anymore, either.

In which we revisit the high ground of language

Here at p3 we spent a lot of the aughts in sheer bug-ass awe of the imagination and brio with which the Bush administration and its courtiers would simply rename things that were a political liability for them, giving them a new name that usually (and of necessity) denoted the exact opposite of what they were doing. The most notorious of these courtiers was of course Frank Luntz, the René Emile Belloq of political rhetoric, who made his bones with the crude "I'm-rubber-you're-glue" tactics of Newt Gingrich's GOPAC product "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control" in the early 1990s. A decade later he was on top of his brazen, focus group-driven game. Remember "Private accounts?" Or "Healthy Forests Initiative" or the "Clear Skies Act"?

Although many believe that this is probably Luntz's masterwork. Dig it:

In a January 9, 2007, interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Luntz redefined the term "Orwellian" in a positive sense, saying that if one reads Orwell's Essay On Language (presumably referring to Politics and the English Language), "To be 'Orwellian' is to speak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening… and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.

Still, Frank can't live forever. (Dick Cheney might, although that will require constant infusion of the blood of small middle-eastern children and the occasional publicly-funded heart transplant. But Luntz probably won't.) So as a public service we're going to take a look around from time to time, seeing who might be out there in the wings ready to author the next edition of this catalogue of swindles and perversions.

Perhaps it's this fellow, whom Wonkette helpfully identifies as "sentient yeast infection Billy Johnson of NRA News:"

In a June 30 video published on the NRA's "commentators" webpage -- a project that is part of the NRA's efforts to attract a younger and more diverse audience -- NRA News commentator Billy Johnson claimed that media coverage of the killing spree only told "half the story," adding, "Yes, the Santa Barbara murderer had a gun, and yes he killed three people with that gun. But he also killed three people with a knife and injured several others with his car." (Johnson never mentioned those who were wounded by gunfire but survived.)

Undermining their own point, the NRA originally released the video with the title "Santa Barbara Shooting" (as captured by Media Matters below), but has since changed the title to "Santa Barbara Stabber": [...]

Johnson complained that because of headlines that refer to Rodger "as a gunman or a shooter, guns become permanently linked with his crime, while cars and knives get a free pass."

He posited that Rodger is labeled as "the gunman" or "the shooter" and not "the stabber" or "the driver" because "perhaps it would be harder to sell newspapers with those headlines, or perhaps it would be harder to sell gun control policy with those headlines."

(The two-minute video, for those who want to study his form a little more closely, is here.)

One sympathizes. The continued presence of gunmen does make it more difficult to defend a regime in which even the least effort to control access to guns in America is met with fanatical opposition – much as the presence of Anopheles mosquitos might make it more difficult to defend the existence of malaria. Perhaps we should rename the latter "José Grecos de Muertos."

But let's put aside the logical or ethical merits of the case (something Luntz did decades ago) and focus on the more important question: Does this guy have what it takes to be the next Luntz? To be Tommy Gunn, if you will, to Luntz's Rocky Balboa?

Perhaps, but not yet. On the up side, compared to Luntz, Johnson's whole look is better suited to the Millennials demo that conservatives desperately need going forward – young, fit, fashionably attired, and he obviously has his own hair. Plus, he's got a great gig at NRA, where there's an inexhaustible demand for his talents and where he can hone his skills. But like playing for a small-market team, it makes it hard to demonstrate his talents to a wider audience. Mr. Johnson, get out there and attach your name to more hot-button topics, not just guns: Health care. Immigration. Foreign policy. Vaccines and autism. Bookmark Memeorandum. That's how you get to the big show.

And, frankly, you're going to have to be a little less whiny. Go back to that bit of the Luntz interview on "Fresh Air," above: There's no defensiveness, no sense of being treated unfairly, in Luntz's tone – he takes no offense at Gross's "Orwell" question; indeed, he is pleased to have an opportunity to witness for his up-is-down philosophy and the positivity and clarity it's brought to his world.

Two countries separated by a boorish candidate

H. L. Mencken was certainly no Anglophile. So it's no coincidence that he disliked the puritainism they bequeathed to America, which ranked high on the list of “uplift” or “improvement” schemes he so thoroughly despised. And so it is with his magnum opus The American Language, in which the Sage of Baltimore celebrates the robust and evergreen American English against its British counterpart, captive of the dead hand of tradition, prescriptive grammarians, and schoolmarmism.

The first several chapters document with some glee the alarm (or alarum) with which most British and some American eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars and philologists viewed the steadily-lengthening list of differences in vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and idiom between the King's English and whatever-it-was being spoken those uppity former colonists. This item by Adam Seybert in the Edinburgh Review of 1820 captures much of the attitude in the UK of its time:

In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy, and sell and torture.

Well, as far as the institution of slavery was concerned, lord knows we had that one coming.

But as I read that passage a couple of days ago, amused by its condescension, its political and cultural chauvinism, its smug historical cluelessness, I still found myself thinking: Why does this feel so familiar? Where have I heard this before?

Then I remembered:

England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn't been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler's ambitions.

Excerpt from Mitt Romney, No Apology:

The Case for American Greatness” (2010)

Oh, yes. That's where. Now our cousins across the ocean know how it feels to be dissed (Americanism, absorbed from hip-hop in the 1980s) by a foreign nitwit (Americanism, absorbed from German in the 1920s).

Hey, Great Britain: Payback's a bitch, isn't it? (Pretty sure that's an Americanism too.)

Huckleberry Finn: An explanatory note from the author

On the first page of Huckleberry Finn:

EXPLANATORY

IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR.

But I’m sure Twain -- who took exquisite care to make sure his characters said exactly what he wanted them to say, in the way he wanted them to say it -- would have approved of a latter-day "Twain expert" substituting the word "slave" into the text 219 times, on the apparent assumption that his characters were trying to say something else and not succeeding.

Bad metaphors make bad economic policy: Part 2

(Updated below.) 

Remember: If you don't think about language, it will do your thinking for you.

Krugman today argues that the administration's newest buzzword, competitiveness, might be good politics but signals poor economic policy.

Along the way, he neatly disposes of the argument-by-metaphor that America (and, by extension, all large entities, including universities, hospitals, you name it) should be thought of as being like a corporation -- and hence run that way:

But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.

Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?

Well, actually, to defeat the purpose of a rhetorical question by answering it, the tiny sliver of the population making out like bandits off those profits think it's really pretty amazingly great. Which ought to tell us a lot about who's got the most invested in this lame metaphor.

(Part 1 of "Bad metaphors make bad economic policy" is here.)

Update: Robert Reich says pretty much the same thing about "competitiveness" (emphasis added):

Word has it that the President will be emphasizing “improving American competitiveness” in his State of the Union Address Tuesday night. As I’ve noted, the term is meaningless — but it’s politically useful. CEOs and many conservatives think it means improving the profitability of American companies. Liberals and labor unions think it means increasing export jobs.

Neither touches at the heart of the matter.

Reading: Billmon on disinformation

Yesterday I mentioned that Republican Eric Cantor's complaint that he, too, was a victim of the same sort of political violence (or threats thereof) directed toward Democratic members of Congress in recent days would be welcomed by the mainstream news media as permission to fit the story into the "both sides are to blame" narrative structure that they're most comfortable with.

In a reply to a comment from Chuck Butcher, who pointed out follow-up reports documenting that there was absolutely no basis in--for want of a better term--fact for Cantor's claim, I added this:

[T]he point is, this is apt to become a Zombie Lie that will continue to walk the earth even though it's been disproved multiple times, simply because its importance to the required narrative ["see? both sides are guilty!"] trumps the niggling fact that it isn't true.

Billmon, in a welcome return at DailyKos, has a really strong diary entry about the inner rhetorical workings of this strategy in Republican hands. Here's a taste:

The basic objective of all this, as I wrote way back when, is very simple:

The goal is to confront the public with two sides hurling identical charges at each other -- the better to convince them that it's just another partisan mudfight and who the hell knows . . . anyway.

Go read the whole thing. Don't get caught up about the title--he's kidding. But his point is dead serious. And dead right.

Proof? Billmon notes this headline from today's NYTimes:

Accusations Fly Between Parties Over Threats and Vandalism

Why bother distinguishing the facts of the matter when storylines like this are so much simpler?

Billmon's diary is going on the much-neglected Reading list in the sidebar.

Reading: Somerby: Be careful what you wish for

Bob Somerby has spent the last couple of weeks demonstrating that an important reason that those congressional and White House Democrats who actually want meaningful health care reform are getting their asses handed to them, again and again, by one egregious Republican lie after another, is that Democrats have no story, while Republicans have two:

1. Big government can't do anything right.

2. Liberal elites think they're smarter than you.

The first is chiefly Ronald Reagan's gift to America. The second one goes much farther back. They appear in a thousand faces. They're all-purpose, one-size-fits-all. And after decades of prepping American audiences to plug in those premises themselves at the right moment, Republicans no longer need facts to carry the day, or the truth, or thought-out policies, or any of that folderol that liberal Democrats are so fond of. They have only to nudge their audiences in the right direction--and that includes the political media, as well as the grass roots--and the audiences will do the rest.

As a result, Democrats in Congress and in the White House regularly lose rhetorical contests that many liberals (i.e., the liberal elites who think they're smarter than you) thought should have been easy tap-ins.

And although Democrats apparently haven't figured out why this is happening, they've obviously noticed the trend, and it makes them . . . well, let's be generous and call them skittish (Somerby's emphasis):

In this morning’s New York Times, a letter writer imagines sweet justice. But does he understand the broken discourse of the past twenty years?

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (9/11/09): It would have been audacious but, nevertheless, a teaching moment had President Obama called Representative Joe Wilson, who heckled him during his address to Congress, to the well, like a teacher calling an errant child to the front of the class, asked him his name, asked him what state he came from, asked him to repeat his remark, asked him to explain why he called him a liar, straightened him out, then told him to sit down.

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (9/11/09): It would have been audacious but, nevertheless, a teaching moment had President Obama called Representative Joe Wilson, who heckled him during his address to Congress, to the well, like a teacher calling an errant child to the front of the class, asked him his name, asked him what state he came from, asked him to repeat his remark, asked him to explain why he called him a liar, straightened him out, then told him to sit down.

R— R—
New York, Sept. 10, 2009

Careful, Rosenthal! the analysts cried. Be careful what you wish for! As the Times explains in today’s editorial, “Illegal immigration is an all-purpose policy explosive”—a dangerous place to venture. The people who sold the nation “death panels” are now selling the claim that Joe Wilson was rude, but correct on the merits. Democrats are backing away from the good solid spanking the writer imagines because they know danger lurks there.

More on the no story/two story theme next week (I hope). But for now this Somerby's post (scroll down to "Special Report: Enabling the (un)real McCoys!") is going on the Readings list in the sidebar.

Conservative lexicon update: "Public" and "private"

As many p3 readers know, modern Republican English--tracing its roots back through the focus-grouped falsehoods of Frank Luntz all the way to Newt Gingrich's definitive 1990 work Language: A Key Mechanism of Control^*--is a notoriously difficult dialect to master.

In our continuing efforts to promote bipartisan conversation and understanding, p3 is proud to present another of its occasional features on the conservative lexicon.

"Public" - Something that the government, the news media, religious institutions, and the voters should take intense (usually disapproving) interest in, such as the possibility that a same-sex couple somewhere in California would like to get married. For example, this item from the December 2008 newsletter of CA Assemblyman Michael Duvall:

This past election cycle, voters in Florida and Arizona passed their own initiatives similar to Prop 8. And perhaps most important, 30 states across the nation have voted to protect the institution of marriage by defining it as between a man and woman.

With that said, the purpose of an initiative is to allow every eligible voter the opportunity to directly create public policy. In recent weeks, opponents of Proposition 8 have clearly shown that they have no intention of letting this happen.

"Private" - A matter of absolutely no concern to the government, the news media, religious institutions, or the voters, such as a married elected state assemblyman bragging on the floor of the state assembly about multiple instances of S&M-lite sex with married lobbyists, from whom his campaign has accepted donations, that have taken place in his office. For example, this apology from CA Assemblyman Michael Duvall:

I made a mistake and I sincerely apologize. I deeply regret the comments I made in what I believed to be a private conversation. This is a private matter and I ask that everyone respect the privacy of all involved.

[Note: This statement by former Assemblyman Duvall was published on his website; it has since been replaced by this brief announcement of his immediate resignation for the sake of "fair[ness] to my family, my constituents or to my friends on both sides of the aisle."

In a future installment of "Conservative Lexicon Update," p3 will explore the linguistic peculiarities involved when conservatives use the word "fair."]

^*It seems the only online sources for the complete text of "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control' available online (including the one linked to here) date it from 1995 or 1996, when in fact it was reprinted in full in Harper's Magazine (November 1990) 17-18. The little wheels in Newt's head were hard at work long before he became House Majority Leader.

Conservative lexicon update

From the p3 Lame Excuse for Political Euphemism Watch [LE PEW] desk comes this latest item:

Context: n. momentary political expedience. Used to refer to the difference between a point in time when something was both true and politically useful to say, versus the present point in time when it's still true but no longer politically advantageous to acknowledge.

For example: Bristol Palin, whose credentials on the subject need not be rehearsed here, appearing on "Good Morning America" this week to announce her new self-assumed role as abstinence spokesperson:

Of course, Palin made headlines in February when she declared that abstinence is "not realistic at all." Now she says the quote was "taken out of context. ... I do think it's realistic. It's the harder choice, but it's the safest choice."

This gambit always amuses and irritates me. She sounded pretty definite, after all: What possible context could cause "not realistic at all" to mean anything other than "not realistic at all"? Specifically, in what context does "not realistic at all" actually mean "I do think it's realistic"?

Perhaps "taken out of context" means "unfairly required to mean the same thing twice in a row."

Or does young Bristol (and her political elders) live in a world where the meaning of words flip-flops--going from true to false and back--simply depending on exactly when she uttered them?

It sounds like a lost Python sketch:

Host: "Good evening. I'm talking with Leonard Pilch-Stripling. Mr Pilch-Stripling, is it true that every other group of four words you say will mean the exact opposite of what they ordinarily mean?"

Leonard: "Yes, Roger, that's true."

Host: "But unless people have been counting your words, how will they know when you're not saying what you really mean?"

Leonard: "I never said that."

Host: "But you did! Just a moment ago!"

Leonard: "Yes, it's a problem."

Host: Ah. I think I see. Mr Pilch-Stripling, you've just spoken twelve words. Does that mean your next four words will be true, or false?"

Leonard: "Depends upon the context."

(H/t to Doctor TV.)

Conservative euphemism update

From the p3 Lame Excuse for Political Euphemism Watch [LE PEW] desk comes this latest item:

The conservative political lexicon has banished the phrase "economic recession" from Republican discourse. From now on, as explained by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) on C-SPAN today, prolonged periods of negative economic growth and high unemployment will be referred to as "just a part of freedom:"

I don’t think we can figure out how to outlaw recessions any more than we can outlaw tornadoes or outlaw hurricanes. […] Economic growth has never gone in one straight line up. It goes in a zigzag line. It’s a part of freedom.

"Freedom booms," if you will.

And here's a heads-up to the people of New Orleans: LE PEW forecasts that, instead of the needlessly alarmist term "hurricanes," conservatives will shortly begin using the phrase "the spirit of Louisiana".

And henceforth, "smallpox" shall be referred to as "happy dots"

From the p3 Lame Excuse for Political Euphemism Watch (LE PEW) desk come the following items:

Item: Family Research Council head Gary Bauer wants us to start calling his ilk "socially conservative evangelicals" instead of "the religious right." He's worried that the latter term may have become "synonymous with extremism."

Item: Blackwater, the private security contractors whose name has become synonymous with "beyond-the-law mercenaries," have taken the idea of corporate rebranding to remove toxic associations to its logical extreme, adopting a corporate name that means nothing at all: Their new corporate name is "Xe" (pronounced "zee").

According to LE PEW, additional changes to the conservative lexicon to be rolled out in the coming months will include the following:

Fiscally irresponsible will now be referred to as penny-wise.

Race- or gay-baiting will now be referred to as white-sheet preferential.

And corrupt Republicans will now be referred to as Republicans.

Two years ago in p3

I was musing on why some people always seem to get the cool jobs:

[R]ight-wing pollster and brand advisor Frank Luntz put the word out: Drop the word privatization and all its variants. Henceforth, the GOP-approved locution would be the poll-tested-as-warmer-and-fuzzier personal accounts. The death of Social Security, but with a human face, if you will.[...]

Honestly, I confess that, deep inside, I’m a little envious. I mean, how great a job would that be--sending out memos all day saying, Henceforth, we shall only refer to A as B? Even though I’m burdened by a moral compass, I nevertheless believe I could do Luntz’s job.

I'm a little disappointed, though, to admit that I didn't succeed in my secret plan, which was to generate a little buzz for the word "expondrigate."

To no avail.

Infrastructure envy

"Don't mourn--organize!" It's a classic battle cry of the progressive left, but it's also become a truism about the history of conservatism in America since Goldwater. After fronting an unabashedly conservative candidate and getting stomped by Johnson in 1964, goes the story, the Republicans dug in for the long haul, to move the country right.

Here's former Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley re-telling the story in the NYTimes:

As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.

Democrats, as has become painfully obvious in the last dozen years, have no such structure--are years from having such a structure. The result, says Bradley:

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.

Now you can take it any of several directions from here. Bradley argues for the obvious course: Start today, getting the money and creating the infrastructure, building the stable long-term organization.

This is path the Dems go down with some frequency -- if it helped the Republicans hand us our heads at the last election, shouldn't we be doing it next time?

But Matthew Yglesias objects that, for all of its evident electoral success in the last decade, the conservatives' machine hasn't accomplished much of the ideological work it was created to perform. In fact, in many ways, and despite the Bush administration's campaign to phase out Social Security (currently floundering), the policies and programs that conservatives abhor have advanced as much under conservative administrations as liberal ones in the last three decades:

[...] it's really not the case that the Goldwater Republicans "didn't try to become Democrats" after losing in 1964. Goldwater ran on a platform of eliminating Social Security, opposing the Civil Rights Act, opposing the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and opposing a federal role in education finance. By the time Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement to power in 1981 he had abandoned all of those planks and also had to accept the existence of the EPA and various other innovations of the 1970s. What he did once in power was basically scale back to some extent programs that didn't even exist when Goldwater ran.

The Bush administration, obviously, has returned to Social Security phase-out, but this looks more like an instance of the right shooting itself in the foot than deploying its infrastructure to good effect. He's expanded Medicare, and needed to accept various expansions of Medicaid, the creation of SCHIP, and other Clinton-era boosts in public-sector health care. The environment is less well-regulated than it was in 2000, but much better protected than it was in 1993. The federal government spends more money than ever on public schools for poor kids.

"Assuming that liberals don't just want to build an infrastructure so that Democrats can govern in corrupt, power-for-power's-sake, GOP style," concludes Yglesias,

there are real limits to how much you want to imitate their methods. The past 30 years of right-wing infrastructure have served the financial interests of their financiers very, very, very well but they've achieved remarkably little in terms of advancing core ideological principles.

And Kevin Drum takes it the rest of the way: Not only are there moral and ideological problems with building a conservative-style machine, there's a case to be made that the idea has political and strategic problems as well:

The Democratic response to all this has been simple: build foundations of our own, fashion a competing liberal way of framing issues, fight back on judges, create liberal talk shows, and remind lobbyists that Republicans won't be in power forever. Which is all fine. But in a way, I think it misses the point.

What conservatives really did was to exploit new levers of power in ways that no one had thought of before. Their answers turned out to be foundations, language, judges, talk radio, and lobbyists, but there's nothing sacred about those particular levers. So while creating our own foundations and talk shows is important, what's more important is that we should be constantly searching for new and underappreciated levers of power and figuring out creative ways to exploit them. Howard Dean's campaign did this in a minor way with its use of internet MeetUps, a new way of organizing grassroots support that took everyone by surprise.

Merely mimicking conservative strategies is a strategy for staying in second place forever. Closer, perhaps, but still in second place. What we need in addition is to stay relentlessly on the lookout for new ways of mobilizing public opinion that no one has thought of before.

Building a long-term financial, intellectual, and media base is important, of course. But there's considerable evidence that slavishly imitating the GOP example invites ideological and political trouble down the road.

Nor should the Democrats get so caught up in infrastructure envy that they miss obvious bets on the table right in front of them, right now. Here are three, at no charge:

• Bush has hitched the Republicans to the ever-more-unpopular plan to phase out Social Security--one of the most expensive, popular, efficient, and successful programs the government has ever produced. It's a simple message to staple to the Republicans' foreheads at every opportunity: Bush and his team want to take your retirement safety away from you. And from your children and grandchildren. Mr. Bush, why do you hate our grandchildren?

• The congressional Republicans overreached beyond anyone's wildest dreams in their involvement with the Terri Schiavo affair. As a result, approval ratings of the congress, and Bush, have sunk to historic lows. By the fact of their involvement as much as the way they handled it, they have painted themselves as hypocritical opportunists who consider themselves politically beholden to the most radically conservative Christian segment of their party. If the evident public disgust at this performance doesn't embolden Senate Democrats during the upcoming judicial nominations, what will?

• DeLay, already in the public eye as the proud architect of the Schiavo debacle, is also about to become much more--the poster boy for corruption and abuse of the system, as Texas grand juries steadily crank out indictments of his closest circle of aids, protégés, and partners. The trail of indictments is leading straight to DeLay, every one knows it, and the Democrats don't need a huge ideological infrastructure to remind everyone that he stands for everything that is wrong with Republican leadership today.

What these are, of course, are straightforward messages hanging on straightforward liberal/progressive values and history. It's not that hard, fellas.

The High Ground of Language, continued: I want a job writing memos like that!

Although the stakes for American workers are considerable, it's been clear for some time that the argument over what to call Bush’s plan to phase out Social Security--should the replacement program be called "private accounts" or "personal accounts?"--does have its genuinely silly moments.

The short version: The proponents of phasing out Social Security--whether the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, or then Governor of Texas George Bush--have called it "privatization" for years. At least they did, right up to the point about a year ago when polling revealed that the phase-out scheme, already unpopular with a majority of voters, was even more unpopular when it was called "privatization" or "private accounts."

At that point, right-wing pollster and brand advisor Frank Luntz put the word out: Drop the word privatization and all its variants. Henceforth, the GOP-approved locution would be the poll-tested-as-warmer-and-fuzzier personal accounts. The death of Social Security, but with a human face, if you will.

But the Bush administration, and its allies, didn't stop there. In a display of great, big, huge brass ones that has become the GOP signature, they now complain that anyone who continues to use the proscribed term is--are you sitting down? no sharp objects in your hands or pockets?--engaging in cheap, partisan, semantic game-playing.

In fact, as the NYTimes reports,

Mr. Bush complained last week that "'Privatization' is a trick word," intended to "scare people."

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who's beginning to show some flair for the game, some sense of how it’s played, twisted the knife on the Republicans a little by correcting a reporter in a news conference who called them "personal" accounts:

"It’s 'privatization,'" Mr. Reid said, adding that "personal accounts" was "the Republican term."

Luntz, the Erwin Rommel of the GOP Sprache Korps, quickly put the word out to the troops:

"'Private' is exclusive. 'Private' is limiting. 'Private' is something that’s not available to all. "'Personal' is encompassing. It’s individual. It’s ownership. In the end, you need the combination of 'personal' and 'security.'"

The foot soldiers in the administration and the media wheeled like geese in formation. And thus are Republican talking points born.

Honestly, I confess that, deep inside, I’m a little envious. I mean, how great a job would that be--sending out memos all day saying, Henceforth, we shall only refer to A as B? Even though (unlike Luntz) I’m burdened by a moral compass, I nevertheless believe I could do Luntz’s job.

For example:

To: All Republican operatives
Re: Polling update

Effective immediately, discontinue the use of "unethical" in all references to charges concerning House majority leader Tom DeLay’s lobbyist-financed travel, interfering in Texas redistricting, pending indictments, and so on; upgrade to "high-fiber."

According to our research, "unethical" is perceived by 79% of voters as somehow in conflict with our highly successful "values"(tm) initiative. "High-fiber," by comparison, is perceived by similar numbers, especially among key demographics, as being healthy and promoting regularity.

Sample sentence: We are confident that Congressman DeLay’s many conflicts of interest have set new standards of high-fiber behavior for Republicans.

Or:

To: All Republican operatives
Re: Polling update

Effective immediately, discontinue the use of "failed" and "disastrous" in all references to the results of our Iraq policy; upgrade to "no-iron." 

Our research indicates that 82% of voters associate "failed" policies with poor leadership and bad strategy ("disastrous" tested slightly better, at 79%). "No-iron," on the other hand, is associated by a full 87% of voters with convenience and comfort.

Sample sentence: Americans can sleep better tonight, secure in the knowledge that overextending our defense resources, diverting our attention from al Qaida and bin Laden, and squandering the trust of our allies have produced a no-iron policy in Iraq.

Or:

To: All Republican operatives
Re: Polling update

Effective immediately, discontinue the use of "ruin," "despoil," and "strip" in all discussions of the administration’s environmental policies; upgrade to "expondrigate."

In our polls, 91% of voters reacted negatively when "ruin," "despoil," and "strip" were associated with the air they breathe, the water they drink, or the other natural resources they enjoy. (Note: We followed the survey with focus groups, in which panelists frequently mentioned "Theodore Roosevelt" and "environmental stewardship." No one on the survey team was able to identify these terms, but we plan to incorporate them in future polls, perhaps testing them out with plans to pave over Wyoming after the 2006 elections.) Since current modeling techniques have identified no existing language that could put a positive spin on our environmental policies, we simply made up the word "expondrigate."

Sample sentence: To those Americans concerned that we must preserve the environmental riches of our great nation for future generations, we solemnly assure you that our children’s children will one day look back at us and say, That was the generation that expondrigated every last bird, fish, tree, river, and wilderness acre by 2008.