The Weekly Screed (#606)

Lexical leftovers from Campaign ‘12
by David Benjamin

PARIS — Although presidential campaigns tend to monopolize our attention while they rage across the body politic like a rampant case of hives, we seem almost violently eager to put them behind us once Election Day has worked its magic cure. The popular buzzwords and phrases that spring up during the race rarely emerge again, either in daily parlance or in any ensuing race. Nonetheless, each campaign has linguistic milestones that characterize both its distinct character and its unique excesses.

Here, in alphabetical order, are a few of the terms I’m saving from Election 2012.

“Antichrist.” Forget that “Arab” broad from 2008. No group of rabid Republicans better typified the right wing’s perfervid hatred of Barack Obama, or more vividly expressed their belief in his illegitimacy as President than the nuts who think he’s the actual Devil. This is a merry and rollicksome bunch. They carry around signs that read, “God Hates Obama” and “Obama Fag-Lover,” and they’re really hot for the Apocalypse. At beastobama.com, it says, “Barack Obama is the Antichrist, and is leading doomed America to her final destruction and the destruction of the world!” If you want to know your punishment for voting Democratic this year, check out Revelations 14:9-11.

“Arithmetic.” If ever one word uttered at a national convention ever resounded as effectively as Bill Clinton’s invocation of “arithmetic” to debunk the fiscal alchemy of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, I can’t remember what it was. Clinton’s galvanizing speech at the Democratic Convention earned him a title that also deserves enshrinement as one of the great coinages of 2012: “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.”

“The Forty-Seven Percent.” The clandestine tape of Romney at a Florida fundraiser dismissing the “47 percent” of Americans who don’t pay federal income tax was a turning point. Ironically, it derived from one of Romney’s loyalest support bases, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which helped turn “the 47 percent” into a fetish within the right-wing parallel universe. Romney’s resort to this echo-chamber factoid backfired when the fatal tape exposed it to the heat, light and scrutiny of the real world.

“Lehman moment.” This term refers to John McCain’s suicidal ‘08 decision to suspend his campaign when the Wall Street collapse buried Lehman Brothers. Since then, a “Lehman moment” is a decisive blunder that discredits a candidate so deeply that he can’t recover. Analysts speculated that Mitt Romney’s premature condemnation of the Obama administration for “sympathizing” with the rioters who killed the U.S. envoy to Libya was his “Lehman moment.” In fact, the “47 percent” revelation is a likelier choice. But then, if you think about it, Romney had a veritable mess of “Lehman moments.”

“Marxist harpy.” Besides the popular claim that she once used Chicago’s charitable Hull House Association to “pimp” little girls to pedophiles, the most feverish description of Michelle Obama by a Republican was when Erick Erickson, a reactionary with a regular spot on CNN’s “John King USA” called the First Lady a “Marxist harpy.” Creepy though Erickson certainly is, he has a knack for the poetic phrase.

“Poopy-head.” Although the Obama team never used the term, anti-tax guerrilla Grover Norquist went on the air after Election Day to declare that Obama only won because he convinced gullible voters that Mitt Romney’s a “poopy-head.” Someone should tell little Grover to get his mind out of the sandbox.

“Romnesia.” After sleepwalking through his first debate, Obama needed a rhetorical device to arrest Mitt’s new-found momentum. In a desperate effort to contrast Romney’s previous positions with the Olympic flip-flops he executed nimbly in Denver, Obama invoked “Romnesia,” an annoyingly glib phrase that nonetheless served its purpose. “Romnesia” launched a thousand soundbites, allowing Obama to mask his embarrassment, tread water and gradually rehabilitate his dignity in later debates. 

“Self-deportation.” Hey, you wanna totally alienate ten percent of the entire U.S. voting public with one little loaded word? Just tell those greasy-haired wetbacks to “self-deport” themselves back to Tijuana — pronto!

“Thurston Howell problem.” Who woulda thunk that a serious U.S. political party would nominate for president a stuffed-shirt so starchy white, so privileged, so preppy, so gated and guarded, so smarmy and elitist that he reminds David Brooks of Thurston Howell III, the cartoonish plutocrat overplayed gloriously by Jim Backus (yes, the voice of Mister Magoo) in everyone’s favorite guilty-pleasure TV show, “Gilligan’s Island”? But there Mitt was, saying stuff like, “I like to fire people,” and “Corporations are people, my friend.”

“Traditional America.” Fox News’ blowhard-in-chief Bill O’Reilly, haunted by the Ghost of Republicans Past, Way Past and Passed Out, made it clear that to be “traditional” in America, ya gotta be white. “It’s not a traditional America any more,” said Bill in a bitter Election Night epitaph. “The white Establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them. And they want stuff… an overwhelming Hispanic vote… the black vote… and women.”

“You didn’t build that.” On the first televised night of the GOP convention, speaker after speaker — with gigantic banners as a visual aid— labored to convince American entrepreneurs that when Barack Obama said, “You didn’t build that,” he was talking about their personal nail parlor, their particular plumbing and heating business, or their family’s sand and gravel outfit, and NOT the vast national infrastructure of bridges, roads, rail, electricity, broadcast spectrum, the Web, sewers, basic research labs, small business loans and land-grant universities that undergird every enterprise in the United States. Although Obama did fumble the phrase when he first uttered it, most people knew what he meant. The Republicans’ tireless distortion and demonization of this out-of-context snippet raged for weeks, climaxing in its Big Night at the RNC. But after all that, the charge never quite stuck. And so, “You didn’t build that” ends up cast — undeservedly — as one of the great Emily Litella misquotes of all time.