The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (26 page)

In 1968, Nixon and his writers shied from the noun
moderate,
still inflammatory to “real” Republicans, but embraced its euphemism
mainstream
. President Gerald Ford, after his 1976 defeat, called a meeting of the Republicans Ronald Reagan, John Connally and Nelson Rockefeller and used an older metaphor: “The Republican tent is big enough to encompass the four individuals who are here today.” As the
big tent
was replaced by
mainstream,
both were supplanted by “the politics of
inclusion
” in the 1980s.

That’s why the
iron-fisted
Bush chief strategist Karl Rove accepted
inclusive
and rejected
moderate
. General Colin Powell followed up with a convention speech hailing George W. Bush’s “passion for
inclusion
.”

In his acceptance speech to the GOP convention in Philadelphia, Governor Bush repeated
compassionate conservatism,
defining it in a plain sentence: “It is to put conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity.”

Where and when did the phrase (akin to Jack Kemp’s
bleeding-heart
conservative
) originate? In his book,
Compassionate Conservatism,
Marvin Olasky, professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin (and the Bush adviser who suggested the phrase to the Bush campaign), provides a lead. Olasky suggests coinage by Vernon Jordan, then head of the National Urban League, who said on July 22, 1981, in criticism of the Reagan administration, “I do challenge its failure to exhibit a
compassionate conservatism
.”

However, four months earlier—on March 13, 1981—in an article by Judith Miller of the
New York Times,
Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, said: “I’m a conservative, and proud of it, but I’m a
compassionate conservative
. I’m not some kind of ultra-right-wing maniac, despite some portrayals in the press.” That remains the current political sense of the phrase.

Iron Triangle.
On the eve of his victory in the South Carolina primary, recalling his stunning defeat in New Hampshire, George W. Bush said: “People may not think I’m tough enough, but I am. This is a process of
steeling
me to become president.”

Newsweek,
reporting on the “hardening” of the candidate during the rough tactics of that southern campaign, commented, “Consider him
steeled
.”

The verb, in its sense of “to make hard or strong as steel,” is used in Shakespeare’s poem
Venus and Adonis,
as Venus says: “Give me my heart … O give it me, lest thy hard heart do
steel
it, / And being
steeled,
soft sighs can never grave it.” Governor Bush, in subsequent interviews, repeated the verb; he evidently felt that being
steeled
is an admirable development in a candidate.

Senator John McCain is also partial to a metallic metaphor. “I’ve taken on the
iron triangle:
special interests, campaign finance and lobbying,” he said in mid-February 2000. A few weeks earlier, his definition was formulated slightly differently: “The establishment obviously is in a state of extreme distress, if not panic, because they know I have taken on the
iron
triangle
of money, lobbyists and legislation.”

The origin is military. On United States Army maps during the Korean conflict of 1950-53, an area about thirty miles north of the 38th parallel with its apex at Pyonggang and its corners at Chorwon and Kumhwa was marked the
Iron Triangle
. This was the center anchor of the North Korean defense line and the hub of a communication and supply network. During the Vietnam War, an area of 125 square miles northwest of Saigon was called by the same name. Then the phrase was transferred to Europe and used for nations rather than small areas: in 1977, an editorial in the
New York Times
called East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia “the USSR’s
iron triangle
.”

Meanwhile, the military phrase was being used as a synonym for what Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell, called “the military-industrial complex”—that is, the military services, defense contractors and members of Congress busy at the pork barrel. In the ’70s, the term spread beyond the military to include the cozy relationship among federal agencies, congressional committees and lobbyists.

Ronald Reagan, as he was leaving office, substituted the media for the military in his triangulation. “A
triangle
of institutions—parts of Congress, the media and special-interest groups—is transforming and placing out of focus our constitutional balance,” Reagan warned. Modestly, he did not claim credit for the phrase: “Some have used the term
iron triangle
to describe what I’m talking about.”

McCain left the media out of his
iron triangle,
substituting “money,” so that his three corners are now “money, lobbyists and legislation.”

How did his opponent deal with the three-sided ferrous metaphor?

George W. Bush’s department of figure-of-speech ripostes did fairly well. Another sense of
triangle
is “an iron rod bent in a triangle with one angle open, used as a percussion instrument or bell when struck with another iron rod.”

After being asked frequently about McCain’s symbol, he was readied with a colorful reply. “If a man says, for example,” said Bush, undoubtedly alluding to the man as McCain, “that there’s an
iron triangle
in Washington, D.C., of lobbyists and special interests, and he’s ringing it like a dinner bell to raise money for his campaign, I think that I have a right to point out that he says one thing and does another.”

Although Bush’s
triangle
had only two sides, his word-image nicely brought to mind a picture of an
iron triangle
used sometimes on Texas ranches to call cowhands to dinner.

What is it about iron that attracts phrase makers? John C. Calhoun, vice president under Andrew Jackson, was nicknamed “the
cast-iron man
” by the English economist Harriet Martineau because he “looks as if he had never been born, and could never be extinguished.” Lou Gehrig, the “
iron horse
” (originally referring to the railroads), was followed by Cal Ripken, the “
iron man,
” who broke Gehrig’s endurance record of 2,130 consecutive games in 1995.

But there is a cruel connotation to the word-image.
Blood and iron,
in German
Blut und Eisen,
meant “military force as distinguished from diplomacy” and was associated in the 1870s with Prince Bismarck, “the
iron
chancellor
.” Autocratic rule was governance with an
iron hand
. Churchill famously called the Soviet separation of the tyrannized East and the free West the
iron curtain,
after a fireproof curtain used in French and English theaters as early as the 18th century. (The Viscountess Snowden, after a visit to Russia soon after World War I, wrote, “We were behind the
‘iron curtain
’ at last!”) In the United States, the undemonstrative first lady Rosalynn Carter was derogated (unfairly, in retrospect) as “the
steel magnolia
.” The
iron rice bowl
was Mao Zedong’s guarantee to China’s workers of a job for life under the Communist system, with cradle-to-grave benefits. President Bill Clinton, celebrating what he believed was the emergence of capitalism in China, said in 1998 that “restructuring state enterprises is critical to building a modern economy, but it is also disrupting settled patterns of life and work, cracking the
iron rice bowl
.”

Thus, McCain’s
iron triangle
has a built-in pejorative connotation. Even the triangle has dark memories, as its evocation in necromancy and in the military usages above indicates. There’s also the
Bermuda Triangle,
where boats disappear mysteriously, as well as the
golden triangle,
the area of Southeast Asia—Myanmar, Laos and Thailand—where opium is cultivated. (On the other hand, people in rejuvenated downtown Pittsburgh, and Texans in the Beaumont-Orange-Port Arthur area, are happy to call their neighborhoods the
golden triangle
.)

J

Judge Fights.
“‘
Borking
’ is out.
‘Court packing
’ is in.” So wrote E. J.

Dionne Jr. in the
Washington Post,
using two of the great politico-judicial attack phrases in rapid succession. Comes now the etymology to help readers rap their gavels when slanted words joust with each other.

The notion of
court packing
can be traced to Lincoln, who wanted a tenth justice on the Supreme Court, and before that to John Adams, whose nominations of “midnight judges” just before he left office caused a ruckus with his successor, Thomas Jefferson, who refused to swear them in.

The phrase
packing the Court
—always pejorative, imputing one-sidedness—burst on the scene in 1936 in criticism of President Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to appoint a new Supreme Court justice every time one of the “nine old men” (a phrase coined by the columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen) reached the age of seventy and refused to step down.

But the president was seen to have overreached, and his plan backfired; even on the verge of a landslide reelection, FDR was put on the defensive.

“If by that phrase
‘packing the Court
’ it is charged,” he said, “that I wish to place on the bench spineless puppets who would disregard the law and would decide specific cases as I wished them to be decided, I make this answer: that no president fit for his office would appoint, and no Senate of honorable men fit for their office would confirm, that kind of appointee to the Supreme Court.”

FDR’s proposal, universally denounced as
court packing,
died in committee; however, the balance of power on the Court soon shifted to the liberals, causing one wag to note, “A switch in time saved nine.”

Turnabout is fair play. The phrase is now the rallying cry of Democrats worried that Bush nominees to the federal bench at all levels will make the court system more conservative. Said Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, “It sure looks like they are intent on building an ideologically driven
court-packing machine
.” Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law at Yale, writing in the
Los Angeles Times,
added a note of breathlessness: “We are on the brink of a
court-packing crisis
.”

Republicans are countering with the eponymous verb possibly first used in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
on Aug. 20, 1987: “Let’s just hope something enduring results for the justice-to-be, like a new verb:
Borked
. Dictionaries will say it’s synonymous with ‘maligned.’” This referred to the way Democrats savaged Ronald Reagan’s nominee, the Appeals Court judge Robert H. Bork, the year before.

“A concerted effort to
‘Bork
’ John Ashcroft would not be well received,” said Senator Trent Lott, the majority leader, about George W. Bush’s nomination for attorney general. The newly nonconfrontational Ashcroft was not
borked
. (I use the lowercase
b
now that the verb is established, but then I lowercase
draconian
and
stentorian,
over the objections of the strict solon Draco and the Greek herald with the booming voice, Stentor.)

The columnist Fred Barnes went to the eponym himself for a definition. “What it means is to be attacked with a series of—not to put it too strongly—a series of lies and mischaracterizations,” Bork said. “And it is an effort at the politics of personal destruction.”

Debate rages over whether the confirmation criteria should be character and merit, or whether an otherwise estimable nominee should be rejected for holding views that some activists believe are outside the ideological mainstream. It may be that senators will vote on the basis of ideology without getting personal. But in coming months, Democrats will charge Bush with
court packing;
returning the fire, Bush will deplore
borking
.