"Let us make sure no Democrat is left behind," said a Florida campaign organizer in the last midterm election.
"No Vote Left Behind" is the name of a hard-money political action committee in Seattle that takes pride in faithfully reporting to the Federal Election Commission.
In Nebraska, three young men dressed in long-tailed tuxedo coats and bow ties protested US President George W. Bush's tax cuts with signs reading, "No millionaire left behind."
On rare occasion, a political phrase becomes a template for a variety of causes. In this case, the originating phrase is "No child left behind," popularized by Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund in 1993. Former president Ronald Reagan had told the National Council of Negro Women in 1983 that he had "begun to outline an agenda for excellence in education that will leave no child behind."
Another great template phrase is "We are all ... now."
After the 9/11 attacks, the French newspaper Le Monde, usually disdainful of the US, declared in sympathy, "We are all Americans now."
The Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman wrote, "Midwesterners who long regarded the city as if it were a foreign capital know that `we are all New Yorkers now,'" a phrase used at the same time by Democratic Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"We are all Danes now," the Brussels Journal declared this year, asserting freedom-of-expression solidarity with the Danish newspaper that published a group of cartoons causing Muslim groups to launch a furious taking-offense offensive. The same sentence appeared in a headline in the Boston Globe (which evidently admires this construction) over a stirring column by Jeff Jacoby.
The phrase is bottomed on "We are all Keynesians now," startling the economic world when spoken in 1965 by the free-market conservative Milton Friedman; Lord Keynes was the exemplar of the school of government activism in driving the economy. Friedman's temporary concession was repeated in 1972 by president Richard Nixon.
John Fund of the Wall Street Journal headed a 1994 column about the emergence of grass-roots alternatives to the national media with "We are all pundits now." Eleven years later, the headline over an op-ed column in the New York Times by the blogger Andrew Rotherham of the Progressive Policy Institute used the word borrowed from the Hindi with the other template: "No pundit left behind."
Attach reform to a word and it gains a sinister connotation. That's what has happened to earmark, which in political parlance used to mean only "reserved for a particular purpose."
But after Republican Senator John McCain and others denounced the explosion of spending on "pork-barrel projects," Bush joined in with a State of the Union reformation: "I am pleased that members of Congress are working on earmark reform -- because the federal budget has too many special-interest projects."
The word began as a mark -- a cut or a brand -- on the ear of livestock to show ownership. It picked up metaphoric meaning in 1612, in a religious tract about the "eare-markt slaues of Sathan." More recently, the fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff described the House Appropriations Committee as "an earmark favor factory."
Today, the congressional earmark attached to a spending bill, like a tag on the ear of a cow, still has defenders. Republican Representative Roy Blunt said it stopped funds from being spent by Washington bureaucrats "who often have little knowledge of the need or legitimacy of projects they fund." But the phrase earmark reform has a clean-government ring to it, and the definition "particular purpose" has a hard time up against "special interest."
In time for the run-up to the 2008 presidential campaign, announcement is hereby made (in the passive voice) of a new awards competition to vie with the Oscars, Grammys, Super Bowl rings and other symbols of performance excellence.
Former Virginia governor Mark Warner is currently the subject of Beltway buzz about being an alternative to Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. On a trip to New Hampshire this month, this dark horse -- his ratings at 3 percent, a good place to start -- electrified his audience with this flourish: "We can't afford leaders who are about posturing and polarization rather than foresight and follow-through."
That is entry No. 1 for the Warren Gamaliel Harding All-American Apt Alliteration Award. Lexicographic Irregulars are invited to observe the candidates on the stump -- of whatever party or political persuasion -- and send in examples of their use of ringing phrases made up of words that begin with the same letter and thereby thrill the electorate.
The winning candidate -- not necessarily the party's nominee, but the most egregious alliterator -- will receive a small plastic bust of president Warren Harding, who in addition to being the 1918 coiner of founding fathers (a term once revered, now considered sexist), set this high standard in 1920 that has never been successfully challenged:
The American people, he intoned, in words possibly ghosted by Judson Welliver, his White House "literary clerk," looked to national leaders for "not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration, not agitation but adjustment, not surgery but serenity, not the dramatic but the dispassionate, not experiment but equipoise...."
Who will win the first Gamaliel? Your entry will count, if it's a great and gripping grabber.
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s (李顯龍) decision to step down after 19 years and hand power to his deputy, Lawrence Wong (黃循財), on May 15 was expected — though, perhaps, not so soon. Most political analysts had been eyeing an end-of-year handover, to ensure more time for Wong to study and shadow the role, ahead of general elections that must be called by November next year. Wong — who is currently both deputy prime minister and minister of finance — would need a combination of fresh ideas, wisdom and experience as he writes the nation’s next chapter. The world that
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As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry