Politics plays the clich card
By JULIA KELLER
With one political convention over and another set to begin, a huge question looms over the American political landscape.
That question isn’t: “Who’s gonna win in November?”
It is: “Will this be the most clich -ridden election season in history?”
Because along with the usual array of hackneyed phrases, vacuous sayings, trite verbiage, empty rhetoric and meaningless babble that cluster about political campaigns, the 2008 presidential race already may be challenging the record for clich s, led by the old warhorse: “playing the (insert word here) card.”
During the primaries, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s bid for the Democratic nomination meant that the phrase “playing the race card” was whipped out as frequently as a lobbyist’s gold Amex. Sometimes it means an opponent’s subtle introduction of a distasteful element into a campaign; other times, it means that the candidate himself is introducing the element, claiming that his opponent was already doing it, anyway.
Among the Republicans, the candidacy of U.S. Sen. John McCain prompted this variation: “playing the age card.” And then there was “playing the gender card” in reference to the unsuccessful candidacy of U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, or “playing the Mormon card” in reference to the similarly doomed candidacy of Mitt Romney.
There was even “playing the arugula card” in reference to charges of elitism against Obama, who once mentioned — innocuously — the vegetable, proving that in politics, nothing is innocuous.
Playing-card metaphor
The playing-card metaphor has been around for centuries, as language mavens such as William Safire repeatedly remind us. On Page 378 of the recently published fourth edition of “American Slang” (Collins), editors Barbara Ann Kipfer and Robert L. Chapman note that “playing the (something) card” can be traced back at least as far as 1886.
But clich s, like the fortunes of hedge-fund managers, rise and fall. And in the 2008 election, the playing-card clich is a definite “buy.” Indeed, the 2008 campaign seems destined to bring out the worst in the English language.
The culprit?
The Internet and its punishing deadlines, says Michael Calderone, who writes a media blog for politico.com.
“The ‘blank’ card seems to come up all the time” in campaign coverage, Calderone notes in an e-mail. “There’s often a tendency, especially now that reporters are always on deadline because of the Internet, to fall back into clich .”
No longer can a journalist sink into a comfy armchair and ruminate about an original phrase to describe a moment on the campaign trail; by the time she has finished musing, 3,017 Web sites and 14,356 blogs have reported the news and moved on. Chin-stroking has given way to clich -slinging.
Politics, to be sure, has never been kind to language. Through constant repetition, it tends to turn once sharp-edged and meaningful phrases into mushy pulp or to reduce complex ideas into bumper-sticker platitudes. In his much-anthologized 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” the British writer George Orwell complained that political writing means “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else.” He further charged that “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
‘Style is morality’
Orwell’s countryman Martin Amis, in his 2001 essay collection “The War Against Clich ,” is even stricter: “Style is morality,” he lectures.
And yet it is also true that clich s are a ruthlessly effective shorthand. If you need to communicate quickly and efficiently, a cliche can be a better tool than an original phrase. When pirates threaten and the captain yells, “All hands on deck!” she is using a clich — and probably saving the ship.
Sometimes, you can have a double-scoop of clich . When Obama told an audience that Republicans would note how he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills,” McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, said Obama “has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.”
And Davis said it with a poker face.
X Julia Keller is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.