Speaking Democrat
'TOGETHER, America can do better." The Democrats' awkward new slogan may not say much more than "Anybody would be an improvement on the current bunch of bozos," yet many Democrats are hoping that it will be enough to bring the party back to life this fall. And they may be right, given the widespread discontent with the administration's apparently bottomless bozosity.
But the very ungrammaticality of the Democrats' slogan reminds you that this is a party with a chronic problem of telling a coherent story about itself, right down to an inability to get its adverbs and subjects to agree. Until Democrats can spell out a more explicit and compelling vision for America, it isn't clear how the party can restore its faded luster.
A Democracy Corps study last year showed that Americans are more than twice as likely to say that the Republicans know what they stand for. It's no wonder that the word "Republican" is statistically far more likely than "Democrat" to attract companion terms like "mainstream," "true believer" and "faithful." In the public mind, "Republican" names a movement, whereas "Democrat" suggests a P.O. box number.
True, most Democrats acknowledge that they have a communication problem, but only in the way that a man with the measles might perceive that he has a complexion problem. Yes, they've let themselves be out-messaged in the bumper-sticker wars. But for all the Democrats' obsession with improving their issue-framing, the Republicans' electoral successes owe relatively little to their snappy line of patter.
In spite of catchphrases such as "No Child Left Behind," "Healthy Forests" and "Clear Skies," voters still give Democrats the edge on education and the environment. The administration's incessant invocations of the "ownership society" couldn't win broad support for privatizing Social Security. And surveys show that rebaptizing the estate tax as the "death tax" didn't have much effect on support for its repeal.
The right's real linguistic triumphs don't lie in its buzzwords and slogans, but in capturing the ground-level language of politics. When we talk about politics nowadays -- and by "we," I mean just about everybody, left, right and center -- we reflexively use language that embodies the worldview of the right.
