aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, April 23, 2005

On language

Kevin Drum looks into whether Republicans have succeeded in replacing the unpopular term “private accounts” with the more politically palatable term “personal accounts.” He charts media use of the two phrases and concludes:

So: although Republicans have indeed been working with Orwellian thoroughness to modify the linguistics of Social Security, I’m happy to report that they’ve had only minor success. Overall, it looks to me like the media is writing about Social Security pretty much the way they always have.

It looks like the Republicans are having more success at getting the term “nuclear option” designated a Democrat-created smear phrase. Armondo at Daily Kos is watching and fuming:

The Republicans INVENTED the phrase the “nuclear option” and now they are trying to weasel out of it by calling it a Democratic phrase.

So who came up with the term? Josh Marshall did the digging and turned up this New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Toobin from the March 7th issue:

Changing the Senate’s rules on judicial filibustering was first addressed in 2003, during the successful Democratic filibuster against Miguel Estrada, whom Bush had nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Ted Stevens, a Republican Senate veteran from Alaska, was complaining in the cloakroom that the Democratic tactic should simply be declared out of order, and, soon enough, a group of Republican aides began to talk about changing the rules. It was understood at once that such a change would be explosive; Senator Trent Lott, the former Majority Leader, came up with “nuclear option,” and the term stuck.

So it’s Trent’s term and yet the press appears to be buying the GOP spinmeister’s line that it’s a slur devised by Democrats. Josh points to the Times and Armando to CNN and Newsweek.