On September 17, 1787, the men responsible for drafting a constitution for the new American nation walked out of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. They had labored for nearly four months, first attempting a simple revision of the Articles of Confederation, and in the end drafting an entirely new document. It had been an unusually hot summer, and the framers of the constitution had sweltered inside the great hall with the windows closed to the throng of curious onlookers who had gathered outside to witness history in the making.
The Constitutional Convention, as it came to be called, was chaired by George Washington, who represented his home state of Virginia. Washington had planned to retire when the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, but his sense of duty took him to Philadelphia instead. His status as a war hero made him an obvious choice as chairman of the gathering. But many other luminaries were in attendance as well, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton (Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were in Europe and did not attend). To the gathering crowd, though, the most familiar face was that of the eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin, an original signer of the Declaration of Independence eleven years earlier and a resident of Philadelphia since he was seventeen. As the men descended the stairs, many people in the crowd shouted out questions about the nature of the new government. One female voice shouted at Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” The Grand Old Man replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
In the years that followed, a lively debate ensued over whether a republican form of government was indeed the best model for America. As the new nation struggled to get established, there were a predictable number of second-guessers, and many even suggested a return to a monarchical form of government.
In a 1795 debate in Congress, this issue surfaced yet again. Fisher Ames, a congressman from Massachusetts, rose to speak in favor of the republican model. Ames, who would later become president of Harvard University, was one of the great orators of the era. And in one of the most memorable metaphors ever offered in a Congressional debate, he compared the competing forms of government to two very different types of eighteenth-century maritime vessels:
A monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well,
but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom;
whilst a republic is a raft which would never sink,
but then your feet are always in the water.
As often happens with particularly apt metaphors, the remark helped put things into perspective for new Americans, reminding them that their fledgling government had a plain and simple seaworthiness that was far preferable to the elegant fragility of European governments. The image was so compelling, it had tremendous staying power. Two hundred years later, the sentiment showed up in an observation from Louisiana senator Russell B. Long:
Democracy is like a raft.
It won’t sink, but you’ll always have your feet wet.
With the Constitutional Convention over, George Washington left Philadelphia and headed back to Mount Vernon. He was fully expecting—at long last—to spend the remainder of his life pursuing his many interests and avocations. But private life was not in his future.
In 1788, after the Constitution was formally ratified by the states, a new entity called the electoral college selected Washington as the first United States president. Once again, the hero of the Revolutionary War struggled to reconcile his personal desires with his sense of duty. He had always harbored a deep disdain for politics, and even worried that the formation of political parties would deeply—and dangerously—divide the country. He finally accepted the nomination, but he approached the new role with great trepidation. In a letter he wrote to a friend on April 1, 1789, less than a month before his inauguration, he confessed:
My movements to the chair of Government
will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of
a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.
Figurative language has had a long history in political life. In the sixth century B.C., the legendary Athenian lawmaker Solon embarked on a series of political reforms that repealed the harsh laws of the Emperor Draco (of draconian fame) and established the foundation for the world’s first democracy. In the early days of Solon’s reign, a bearded stranger showed up at his door and identified himself as Anacharsis, a prince from the distant Northern kingdom of Scythia (modern-day Ukraine). With his rustic appearance and well-worn clothing, Anacharsis was not exactly a regal sight, but he proved to be a man of uncommon wisdom, penetrating insight, and refreshing frankness. Within a short time, this curious man won over the citizens of Athens, much like Benjamin Franklin did in the 1770s when, as America’s first ambassador to France, he captivated the French people.
Anacharsis became a trusted advisor to Solon and was the first outsider to be made an Athenian citizen (he, along with Solon, went on to achieve immortality when ancient historians included them among the legendary Seven Wise Men of Greece). One day, in a show of confidence in his new confidante, Solon revealed his plans for a wholesale revision of laws governing the Athenian people. Expecting support for his great dream, the emperor was shocked when Anacharsis laughed at the idea. When pressed for an explanation, Anacharsis explained that it was impossible to restrain the vices of people by statute. And then he added:
Written laws are like spiders’ webs,
and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak,
while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
This fascinating anecdote was passed along by word of mouth for centuries before the Greek historian Plutarch recorded it for posterity. Today, twenty-five hundred years after Anacharsis offered his analogy, it is routinely cited in discussions about the lack of justice in judicial systems all around the world. His observation also simulated many spin-offs, including this from a 1707 essay by Jonathan Swift:
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies,
but let wasps and hornets break through.
Metaphorical language goes back to antiquity and continues with force today. When politicians describe a campaign as a marathon and not a sprint, we all know what they mean. And when we say an issue is a red herring or describe a candidate as a dark horse or a loose cannon, we’re speaking metaphorically, even if we’re unaware of the origins of such expressions.
One of the most famous contemporary political metaphors emerged in 1962, when Jesse Unruh, Speaker of the California State Assembly, said in an interview in Look magazine:
Money is the mother’s milk of politics.
At the time, Unruh was one of the state’s most flamboyant politicians (he was nicknamed Big Daddy by Raquel Welch). The remark, which vividly captured the role of Big Money in the political process, immediately took hold, and went on to become one of history’s best-known political quotations. By the 1990s, as Unruh’s observation began to suffer from overexposure, another colorful politician—Jim Hightower of Texas—stepped up to the plate with an updated version:
Money is the crack cocaine of politics.
Out of the thousands of new metaphors that appear every year, most have only a limited shelf life. But every now and then a great one appears and goes on to become an integral part of the cultural vocabulary. During the Reagan presidency, many Democrats were frustrated by the President’s ability to remain unscathed despite a variety of mistakes and blunders made during his administration. On an August morning in 1983, as Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder was cooking breakfast for her children, she had a flash of inspiration. “He’s just like a Teflon frying pan,” she thought, “Nothing sticks to him.” Later that day, in an address in Congress, she unveiled the image:
Mr. Speaker, after carefully watching Ronald Reagan,
he is attempting a great breakthrough in political technology—
he has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency…
Harry Truman had a sign on his desk
emblazoned with his motto: “The Buck Stops Here.”
It has obviously been removed and Reagan’s desk has been Teflon-coated.
Schroeder’s colleagues in Congress seized on the concept, and soon people all around the country were repeating it. Within a week, the New York Times helped make it a permanent part of the political lexicon with an article headlined “The Teflon Presidency.” Nobody before Schroeder had ever likened a politician to a non-stick frying pan. But the Teflon metaphor was so brilliant that—there is no better way to describe what happened—it stuck.
Continuing with the adhesion theme, here’s hoping that you find a few more metaphorical observations with sticking power in the remainder of the chapter.
Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion.
Lord Acton, a nineteenth-century British historian, is best known for the dictum, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Also on the subject of power, John Adams painted this vivid verbal picture in 1765: “The jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.”
Gratitude, like love, is never a dependable international emotion.
Man is by nature a political animal.
A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad
is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather
for not going to church on Sunday.
You might think this is about the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998, but it came in 1974 in response to calls to impeach Richard Nixon over Watergate.
The president of the United States bears about as much relationship
to the real business of running America
as does Colonel Sanders to the business of frying chicken.
In the 1990s, South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis also employed a memorable KFC metaphor: “Asking an incumbent member of Congress to vote for term limits is a bit like asking a chicken to vote for Colonel Sanders.”
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
As long as there have been governments, people have derided bureaucracies. In 1868, Russian writer Alexander Ostrovsky wrote in The Diary of a Scoundrel: “It’s all papers and forms; the entire Civil Service is like a fortress, made of papers, forms, and red tape.” Since the early 1800s, red tape has been a metaphor for complicated and time-consuming procedures. The expression comes from a centuries-old practice of tying official government documents in red ribbon.
Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.
Here’s a Washington political riddle where you fill in the blanks:
“As Alberto Gonzales is to the Republicans,
___________ __________ is to the Democrats—
a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance.”
This is how Broder began his syndicated column in April 2007. Analogies have long been a part of the school curriculum, so it was appropriate for Broder to add: “If you answered Sen. Harry Reid, give yourself an A.” The column came a week after Attorney General Gonzalez’s inept performance before senators investigating the controversial firing of eight U. S. attorneys. In the column, Broder also surveyed a variety of Reid’s verbal gaffes, including his 2005 comment that Alan Greenspan was “one of the biggest political hacks” in Washington.
We don’t just have egg on our face. We have omelette all over our suits.
Brokaw placed all the news networks into the same red-faced category when he made this comment on the premature—and ultimately wrong—announcement that Al Gore had carried Florida in the 2000 presidential election. Egg on your face is an American expression that means to have embarrassed oneself through a foolish action.
The government is becoming the family of last resort.
“My country, right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot
would think of saying except in a desperate case.
It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”
Meeting Franklin Roosevelt
was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.
This is one of the great compliments in world history. Churchill, who once wrote that “Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician,” sprinkled his speeches and writings with examples. Here are a few more:
“Hatred plays the same part in government as acid in chemistry.”
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.”
“What the horn is to the rhinoceros, what the sting is to the wasp, the Mohammadan faith is to the Arabs.”
“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”
Politics is the womb in which war develops.
Clausewitz, a nineteenth-century Prussian general and military theorist, offered this in his 1832 classic On War. The book also contains his most famous observation: “War is merely the continuation of political intercourse by other means.”
The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain
the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing.
In the seventeenth century, Colbert was Louis XIV’s tax collector. In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke said on the same subject, “To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.” And recently, the American economist Donald J. Boudreaux observed: “Tax hikes are to markets what bacon grease is to human arteries.”
Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
This famous line, from a 1985 New Republic article, masterfully contrasts the excitement of campaigning with the reality of governing. The underlying sentiment is not original to Cuomo. In a 1718 poem, Matthew Prior wrote:
I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose:
And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.
Treaties are like roses and young girls—they last while they last.
In Mexico, an air conditioner is called a “politician,”
because it makes a lot of noise but doesn’t work very well.
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
English writer Richard Aldington agreed, writing: “Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.” Nationalism, it seems fair to conclude, is a corruption of patriotism.
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil,
and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared,
and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
Great political metaphors sometimes come from fictional characters. This cynical one comes from the protagonist in George Eliot’s 1866 novel Felix Holt, The Radical. In another popular animal metaphor, English theologian W. R. Inge wrote in a 1919 essay: “It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”
Politicians, like prostitutes, are held in contempt.
But what man does not run to them when he needs their services?
For George Bush to fire Karl Rove
would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen.
When critics began calling for the head of Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s controversial political adviser, Franken said it wasn’t likely to happen. Picking up on the notion that Rove was “Bush’s Brain,” he argues here that Rove was like ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and Bush was like the dummy Charlie McCarthy. It was a sophisticated jab, suggesting that Bush could speak only the words Rove was putting into his mouth. Rove did resign near the end of Bush’s second term, but there was never any danger of his being fired. In 1975, David Steinberg applied the same ventriloquist metaphor to Gerald Ford: “He looks and talks like he just fell off Edgar Bergen’s lap.”
Trickle-down theory—the less than elegant metaphor
that if one feeds the horse enough oats,
some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
Molly Ivins put it this way: “We’ve had trickle-down economics in the country for ten years now, and most of us aren’t even damp yet.”
In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from side to side,
thinking they will be more comfortable.
When religion and politics travel in the same cart,
the riders believe nothing can stand in their way.
Politics is a choice of enemas.
You’re gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.
The metaphor may be coarse, but not many would quibble with its accuracy. The words come from the character Ed Cobb in Higgins’s 1991 novel Victories.
I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing
, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
Jefferson also famously wrote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
A prince without letters is a pilot without eyes.
All his government is groping.
This analogy about a leader with inadequate learning has a timeless quality—and clear contemporary relevance. It comes from a commonplace book kept by Jonson and published posthumously in 1641. Commonplace books go back to antiquity but became widespread in the fifteenth century as paper became more affordable. Essentially, they were loosely organized scrapbooks containing literary excerpts and other information of interest. Compilers also commonly recorded their own thoughts and reflections, as Jonson did in his book.
There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers
and defeat is an orphan.
If JFK had known more, he might not have used this metaphor in a 1961 address about the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In 1942, Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciasno, wrote, “As always, victory finds a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” The saying became popular with many Italian and German officers. In his 2007 book No Excuses, political strategist Bob Schrum updated the thought: “If victory has a hundred fathers, it also brings forth a hundred advisors.”
Washington is like a Roman arena.
Gladiators do battle, and the spectators determine who survives by giving the appropriate signal, just as in the Coliseum.
The sound bite is to politics what the aphorism is to exposition:
the art of saying much with little.
In his 1997 Time magazine piece, he added: “The sound bite is the ultimate in making every word tell. It is the very soul of compactness. Brevity is not enough. You need weight. Hence some sound bites qualify for greatness: FDR’s ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself ’ or Reagan’s ‘Tear down this wall.’”
The great nations have always acted like gangsters,
and the small nations like prostitutes.
Politicians are like monkeys.
The higher they climb, the more revolting are the parts they expose.
The average man…regards government as a sort of great milk cow,
with its head in the clouds eating air,
and growing a full teat for everybody on earth.
Manion, Dean of the Notre Dame law school in the mid–1900s, might have been inspired by a somewhat similar metaphor from Winston Churchill: “Some see private enterprise as the predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as the sturdy horse pulling the wagon.”
The Vice-President of the United States is like a man in a cataleptic state:
he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain;
and yet he is perfectly conscious of everything that is going on about him.
Marshall was Woodrow Wilson’s vice president. John Nance Garner, FDR’s vice president, offered an even more famous line: “The vice-presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
Scooter is to Cheney as Cheney is to Bush.
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff when CIA operative Valerie Plame was “outed” in 2005. After a special prosecutor investigation, Libby was indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, and was ultimately convicted in March 2007 (President Bush later commuted the sentence but let the conviction stand). In this analogy, Matalin was saying that Libby—who was known as “Cheney’s Cheney” to Washington insiders—was as important to Cheney as the vice president was to President George W. Bush.
Being in politics is like being a football coach.
You have to be smart enough to understand the game
and dumb enough to think it’s important.
Washington, D.C. is to lying what Wisconsin is to cheese.
Political image is like mixing cement.
When it’s wet, you can move it around and shape it,
but at some point it hardens
and there’s almost nothing you can do to reshape it.
Ideas are like great arrows, but there has to be a bow.
And politics is the bow of idealism.
This is the idealistic view. A cynical one comes from Aldous Huxley: “Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”
Old politicians, like old actors, revive in the limelight.
The politician is…trained in the art of inexactitude.
His words tend to be blunt or rounded because
if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.
The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan
was like the trench warfare of World War I:
never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.
This is from What I Saw at the Revolution (1990) by a key Reagan speechwriter. Often misinterpreted as a swipe at Reagan’s intelligence, it was really a comment on his disinterest in and detachment from the details of governance.
Everybody knows politics is a contact sport.
In The Audacity of Hope (2007), Obama offered another interesting metaphor: “Maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines. We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters. But I don’t think so.”
The American political system is like fast food—
mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of
things, and everybody wants some.
Monarchy is the gold filling in a mouth of decay.
On the same subject, George Orwell concurred, writing, “England resembles a family, a family with the wrong members in control.” Also on the English monarchy, Nancy Mitford observed: “An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession.
I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
Government is like a baby.
An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end
and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Like many of Reagan’s lines, this one was borrowed and adapted from someone else. The twentieth-century English clergyman Ronald Knox defined a baby as “A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.
The man who loves other countries as much as his own
stands on a level with the man
who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.
Power is apt to be so insolent and Liberty to be so saucy,
that they are very seldom upon good terms.
Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state
what the safety valve is to the steam engine.
Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination
is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert.
This observation comes to mind whenever I see an entertainer or celebrity make a political statement at a concert, awards ceremony, or other cultural event.
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.
Criticizing a political satirist for being unfair
is like criticizing a nose guard for being physical.
Within the first few months I discovered
that being a president is like riding a tiger.
A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed.
These are the opening words of Truman’s 1956 Memoirs, echoing the words of an ancient Eastern proverb: “Whoever mounts a tiger can never again dismount.” Truman, who often expressed himself in vivid metaphorical ways, also wrote: “The White House is the finest jail in the world.”
A prince who writes against flattery
is as strange as a pope who writes against infallibility.
The implication is clear—powerful people who say they’re immune from flattery are only fooling themselves. Benjamin Disraeli, who served Queen Victoria for many years, expressed it best: “Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.”
Government is not reason and it is not eloquence. It is force!
Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
This popular quotation appears in many quotation anthologies, and even shows up on a Department of Justice web site. It ostensibly comes from Washington’s farewell address, but has never been found in that speech, or anywhere else. It’s now regarded as apocryphal.
Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
Politicians are like diapers.
They should be changed frequently, and for the same reason.
In the 2006 film Man of the Year, William plays Tom Dobbs, a TV comedian who is persuaded by his fans to run for president. Written and directed by Barry Levinson, the film raises an intriguing question—could a Jon Stewart-like TV star actually become president? It’s not a great film, but it does contain this spectacular simile.
The Labor Party is like a stage-coach.
If you rattle along at great speed, everybody inside is too exhilarated
or too seasick to cause any trouble.
But if you stop, everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.
The seed of revolution is repression.
The point is that the seed of revolution doesn’t germinate in free societies but in oppressive ones. In The Female Eunuch (1971), Germaine Greer put it this way: “Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.” However, the best line on the subject comes from John Kenneth Galbraith: “All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.”
Every man who takes office in Washington either grows or swells,
and when I give a man an office,
I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.