The Divider

George W. Bush has often proclaimed himself to be The Decider (and has just as often been derided for it). When he first rode into the White House he also proclaimed himself to be "A Uniter, Not a Divider." Over the years, there were many more supercilious phrases, such as "Mission Accomplished" and "Bring 'em on." Looking back, we (or at least most of us) now know that none of the silly expressions that Bush used were true.

In the new, new world order (otherwise known as the post-election period), we are now in the age of a fledgling two party system again. In light of this situation, Bush's latest is meme is "why can't we all just get along." As with his previous pithy phrases, he doesn't really mean what he says.

In the beginning of August, I wrote about the derogatory tendency of the Publican Party to refer to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party, see The Quiz, citing a New Yorker article on the topic, THE “IC” FACTOR.

In discussing the issue of Bush's claim that he wants to change the tone in Washington, Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post resurrects the IC issue in One Syllable of Civility, saying:

If he wanted to, President Bush could change the tone in Washington with a single syllable: He could just say "ic." That is, he could stop referring to the opposition as the "Democrat Party" and call the other side, as it prefers, the Democratic Party.

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But even as he promised to work to change the tone in Washington after the elections, the president couldn't manage to change his language. In his day-after-the-elections news conference, Bush employed this needling locution five times. . . .

The president isn't alone in his adjectival aversion to "Democratic" when it comes to the party. The provenance of the sneering label "Democrat Party" stretches back to the Harding administration. William Safire traced an early usage to Harold Stassen, who was managing Wendell Willkie's 1940 campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt. A party run by political bosses, Stassen told Safire for a 1984 column, "should not be called a 'Democratic Party.' It should be called the 'Democrat party.' "

Democrat Party was used, pardon the phrase, liberally by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. According to the Columbia Guide to Standard American English, " Democrat as an adjective is still sometimes used by some twentieth-century Republicans as a campaign tool but was used with particular virulence" by McCarthy, "who sought by repeatedly calling it the Democrat party to deny it any possible benefit of the suggestion that it might also be democratic." The word also achieved a prominent run with Bob Dole's especially ugly reference to "Democrat wars" during the 1976 vice presidential debate.

But Democrat-as-epithet has seen its fullest flowering -- on talk radio, among congressional leaders and, more than with any of his predecessors, from the president himself -- during the recent Republican heyday. As Hendrik Hertzberg pointed out in the New Yorker in August, the conservative Web site NewsMax.com takes pains to scrub Associated Press copy "to de-'ic' references" to the party.

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In the few weeks since the election, the president has followed up his syrupy rhetoric of cooperation with a series of face slaps: pushing the doomed nomination of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, resubmitting the equally doomed nominations of a quartet of offensive judicial selections and naming a physician to head the federal family planning program who works for clinics that refuse to offer birth control.

So it's probably naive to give any credence to the presidential happy talk and blue ties. But if, just maybe, the president wants to do more than pay lip service to the notion of a new tone in Washington, he could start by just paying lip service.

Well, there is one consistency in Bush that has not altered a bit over time -- he lies and as things change, he lies some more.

Tags: Bush, Commentary, Politics