AMERICA: From Latinate acronyms to the healthcare debate, Washington's political lexicon is a colourful one
AMERICA HAS been emulating the Roman Empire since the days of the Founding Fathers.
Peter l’Enfant, the French-born engineer and architect appointed in 1791 by George Washington to conceive of a capital for the young country, based the Mall on Roman forums.
Thomas Jefferson wanted the Capitol building to look like a Roman temple, and the Jefferson memorial is America’s Pantheon.
The Roman allegory continued into modern times: designed in 1935, the white marble supreme court building, with its front staircase and columns, makes you feel you’re in ancient Rome.
I suspect the person who devised acronyms for America’s top-ranking officials also had Rome in mind. President of the United States is shortened to Potus – not far removed from potestas, the Latin word for power.
When I read Potus in White House pool reports, I can’t help imagining Barack Obama clad in a toga. For example, in Thursday’s report entitled “Potus on missile shield decision”, we learned that the White House pool “rushed into Diplomatic Room at 10am for a quick statement by Potus”. The First Lady of the United States is suitably acronymed Flotus, evoking the Roman goddess of flowers. She visited a farmers’ market near the White House this week. “Afterwards,” the pool report notes, “Flotus made her way along the bike rack barriers to the tunes of – what else? – U2. Someone placed a small lei of flowers around her neck. It appeared to be made of marigolds.”
The abbreviations extend to the vice-president, VPotus, and supreme court, Scotus.
When greeting an Iraqi vice-president in Baghdad this week, the pool report noted, “VPotus leaned in for the traditional cheek-kissing welcome”.
In keeping with the Roman theme, the pop star Marc Anthony, who is married to another pop star Jennifer Lopez, was a guest of honour at the US Capitol and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI – often misspelled as “CHIC”) gala on Wednesday.
It was Marc Anthony’s 41st birthday, and he was serenaded backstage by Obama and a group of senators and congressmen.
The poetry of American political discourse borrows heavily from world history and culture. Senator Jim DeMint won celebrity for summarising the Republicans’ fight against healthcare reform: “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, It will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”
Before the president bounced back with a vibrant speech to a joint session of Congress on September 9th, numerous editorialists were asking: “Has Obama lost his Mojo?”
In African-American folk belief, a mojo is often a red flannel cloth, tied under one’s clothing and holding an animal, mineral or botanical charm. The word is believed to have come from the Fula language in Cameroon.
White House “czars” figured prominently in increasingly acrimonious exchanges between Republicans and Democrats this week. The “czars” are presidential advisers who are not subject to congressional oversight, and Obama’s predecessors had them too. But conservative groups claim Obama has up to 40 czars, formulating policy on everything from Afghanistan to domestic violence to the Great Lakes.
“Czars belong in Russia,” said a placard at the September 12th anti-Obama rally in Washington.
The healthcare debate has lent no end of colourful expressions to the political vocabulary. Democrats want to tax “Cadillac healthcare plans” – luxury policies held by rich people – to help pay for reform.
The “gang of six” – the panel of three Republican and three Democratic senators who’ve struggled unsuccessfully to draw up a bipartisan plan – is redolent of Jesse James, gunslingers and the Wild West.
Charles Grassley from Iowa, the ranking Republican on the panel, has been particularly prone to tough talk, warning last month against letting the government “decide when to pull the plug on grandma” and announcing this week, “I’ll tell ya, there’s some things that the president has said since then that I took very personally.”
He hasn’t spoken to Obama for six weeks, Grassley said, adding, “I kinda resent” White House statements implying he hadn’t negotiated in good faith.
Then there are the “Ladies from Maine”, Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both Republicans whom the Democrats hope to win over on healthcare. One wonders how the genteel, reasonable Snowe – who bears a passing physical resemblance to Snow White – ended up in the “gang of six”.
Obama’s desperate need for their support has put the Blue Dog Democrats in the limelight. The coalition of 52 conservative House Democrats, whose motto is fiscal restraint, formed in 1995 and are descended from a southern Democratic group known as the Boll Weevils (another great name).
Former Texas Democratic congressman Pete Geren coined the expression, saying some representatives were being “choked blue” by what he regarded as extreme left-wing Democrats. The Blue Dogs were long preceded by Yellow Dog Democrats, who were horrified when a Democratic senator backed the Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hoover in the 1928 election. Thereafter, loyal Democrats were meant to declare: “I’d vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket.”
