In the grand scheme of things, there are probably more important matters to get worked about than whether the president can bring himself to utter the words, “Democratic Party.” But so long as it’s an issue, consider what Bush said in last week’s State of the Union address, according to the official White House transcript.
“We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors underway, and others that are ours to begin. In all of this, much is asked of us. We must have the will to face difficult challenges and determined enemies — and the wisdom to face them together.
“Some in this chamber are new to the House and the Senate — and I congratulate the Democrat majority.” (emphasis added)
Now, as we’ve discussed more than once, “Democrat” is a noun; “Democratic” is an adjective. To congratulate the “Democrat majority” is to use the childish, sophomoric, and grammatically incorrect name Republicans prefer because, like a dimwitted schoolyard bully, they find it amusing to get it wrong. In the context of applauding Dems’ midterm victories, it seemed like a less-than-subtle jab — Bush was mocking Democrats while appearing to be gracious.
Today, during an interview with NPR, Bush pleaded innocent. “That was an oversight,” Bush said. “I mean, I’m not trying to needle…. I meant to be saying, why don’t we show the American people we can actually work together?”
Bush concluded, “I’m not that good at pronouncing words anyway.”
I’ll gladly concede that the president’s proficiency with the language is lacking, but I have a hard time believing that the dropped “ic” in the State of the Union was “an oversight.”
The debate was the subject of a recent WaPo article.
Bush does this a lot, and while it’s hard to say if the omission was intentional in this instance, it is a semantic tactic that’s been part of Republican warfare for decades. It’s a little thing, a means of needling the opposition by purposefully mispronouncing its name, and of suggesting that the party on the left is not truly small-“d” democratic. The president’s pronunciation was all the more striking because it was apparently not what Bush was supposed to say. The prepared speech that the White House distributed beforehand retained that precious “-ic.”
The case of the missing suffix provoked an oh-no-he-di’int reaction from some Democrats. The bloggers caught it, of course. (Bloggers catch that sort of thing.) “Code word,” wrote one. “Calculated insult,” wrote another.
“We all noticed,” says Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the liberal blogging site DailyKos.com, who replayed the president’s opening words on his TiVo to make sure he’d heard what he thought he heard. “He just clearly couldn’t help himself.”
“Like nails on a chalkboard,” says John Podesta, chief of staff in the Clinton White House, and president of the Center for American Progress.
Tuesday on CNN, Democratic strategist Paul Begala noted the omission right after it happened, adding that the president was being “insulting” and “self-defeating.”
Political analyst Charlie Cook suggested the remarks were probably part of a “force of habit.” When it comes to omitting the “-ic,” Cook said Republicans “have been doing it so long that they probably don’t even realize they’re doing it.”
Maybe, maybe not. But the president is scheduled to speak to the House Democratic Caucus at its conference this weekend in Virginia. On the president’s schedule, that event is referred to as the “House Democrat Conference.”
Verbal tic?