Democrats' problem? In a word, labels.
Linguist parses the language of politics
There are few people who follow words, and their ever-changing shades of meaning, more closely than Geoffrey Nunberg .
He is one of the leading linguists in the country, chairman of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, a regular commentator on language trends for NPR's ``Fresh Air." And he has some bad news for liberals as they gird for this fall's midterm elections and the presidential contest in 2008. Even though surveys show that liberal positions on issues like tax fairness, health care , and Social Security enjoy broad support, conservatives have pulled off a ``linguistic coup" so deftly, Nunberg says, that the right now controls ``the basic language of politics" in this country.
Nunberg tries to map a new path for embattled liberals in his new book, which is due out today and is titled (deep breath, now) ``Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving,
Q. First of all, what's with that subtitle? Are you going for your own entry in Guinness?
A. [Laughs] Well, if you don't have a lot of time, you've got the executive summary in the subtitle. It was taken from an ad that the Club for Growth ran during the [2004] Iowa [caucus], and it seemed to me to aptly sum up the stereotype that the right has created of liberals.
Q. Why did liberalism lose its purchase on the language and become a kind of epithet?
A. In part it had nothing to do with language. It had to do with the crisis liberalism underwent in the '60s and '70s because of issues like busing, the apparent failure of Great Society programs, and Vietnam. But it's also because liberals allowed the right to caricature them as this elite, self-indulgent, upper-middle-class coastal phenomenon. It's the right's ability to brand liberalism, to change it from a political philosophy to something more like a lifestyle category and associate it with soft coastal elites.
Q. Won't conservative critics argue that you yourself are part of that elite? After all, you teach at Berkeley, you live in San Francisco, you're a regular on NPR, and you sometimes write for The New York Times.
A. I'm sure they'll say it. The fact that I'm a big fan of country music and NASCAR won't make any difference. But what this book says is that the right has been incredibly successful in capturing the English political vocabulary. In a way, it's a tribute to their ability to spin compelling narratives.
Q. Was there a catchphrase or a label that marked a turning point in that capture?
A. If there's a single moment, you could say it was Reagan's address to the Republican convention in 1988, when he made ``the L word" part of the American political vocabulary. But I think it's a mistake to focus on particular words. That's what Democrats do when they think they can bail on the word ``liberal" and use the word ``progressive." It's not just about ``the L word" or the word ``values," which the Democrats have been trying to recover since 1984. It's about the stereotypes those words stand in for. Democrats can talk about values as much as they like, but it doesn't mean in their mouths what it means in the mouths of Republicans. In Republican mouths, it stands in for these very particular narratives about the decline of personal morality and patriotism and this supercilious elite. If you think that the right's electoral triumphs are just a sign of its ability to spin a snappy line of patter, then you're mistaken. However brilliant the new ideas are that the Democrats come up with, it's not going to work unless they can tell a persuasive narrative of what they're about. Otherwise, you've just got a shopping list.
Q. Who among the current crop of Democratic candidate s seems to understand what you describe as the need to recapture the language and redirect the party's narrative in a more populist direction that builds solidarity between the working class and the middle class?
A. I would say that John Edwards, whatever other shortcomings he has a candidate, has an intuitive understanding of this. Hillary Clinton certainly doesn't get it the way Bill did, though she's trying. Wesley Clark and Mark Warner don't seem to have a natural gift for this stuff. But the crucial thing is to have an overriding narrative that even people who aren't gifted storytellers can recount. For the Republicans, it isn't Reagan's success at being able to tell this story that matters; it's the fact that Sam Brownback and Bill Frist , who are not particularly gifted storytellers, can communicate this narrative.
Q. Doesn't some of the right's control over language have to do with simple volume? It's hard to out-shout Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity , however sturdy your arguments.
A. I think that's right. They've figured out a format for talk radio and talk television that's ideal for articulating the kind of indignation that the right's narrative feeds on. And the left is still struggling with that. Keith Olbermann is doing this very successfully on MSNBC, but Democrats are coming very late to the party.
Q. Is part of the problem for liberalism that some of its wittiest and most articulate exponents -- be they Olbermann or Al Franken or Jon Stewart -- go into entertainment or journalism rather than politics?
A. I don't think so. Rush Limbaugh is fundamentally an entertainer; so are Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity. They're offering this stuff as entertainment. Nobody nowadays is going to turn on their radio for two hours and listen to political screeds. But [in] everything, whether the story is a massacre in Haditha or an increase in wild bachelor parties, O'Reilly or Hannity are going to turn it into an ``All in the Family" episode about conservatives versus liberals.
Q. If conservatism's success is partly a matter of branding, what brand should the Democrats strive for as they head toward 2008?
A. There are certain words like ``fairness" and ``decency" that the Democrats used to own, and lost control over. It's important that they recapture those words."
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com. 
