"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.
The bird flu outbreak at US dairy farms keeps finding alarming new ways to surprise scientists. Last week, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed that H5N1 is spreading not just from birds to herds, but among cows. Meanwhile, media reports say that an unknown number of cows are asymptomatic. Although the risk to humans is still low, it is clear that far more work needs to be done to get a handle on the reach of the virus and how it is being transmitted. That would require the USDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to get
For the incoming Administration of President-elect William Lai (賴清德), successfully deterring a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attack or invasion of democratic Taiwan over his four-year term would be a clear victory. But it could also be a curse, because during those four years the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will grow far stronger. As such, increased vigilance in Washington and Taipei will be needed to ensure that already multiplying CCP threat trends don’t overwhelm Taiwan, the United States, and their democratic allies. One CCP attempt to overwhelm was announced on April 19, 2024, namely that the PLA had erred in combining major missions
On April 11, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida delivered a speech at a joint meeting of the US Congress in Washington, in which he said that “China’s current external stance and military actions present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge … to the peace and stability of the international community.” Kishida emphasized Japan’s role as “the US’ closest ally.” “The international order that the US worked for generations to build is facing new challenges,” Kishida said. “I understand it is a heavy burden to carry such hopes on your shoulders,” he said. “Japan is already standing shoulder to shoulder
Former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) used to push for reforms to protect Taiwan by adopting the “three noes” policy as well as “Taiwanization.” Later, then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) wished to save the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) by pushing for the party’s “localization,” hoping to compete with homegrown political parties as a pro-Taiwan KMT. However, the present-day members of the KMT do not know what they are talking about, and do not heed the two former presidents’ words, so the party has suffered a third consecutive defeat in the January presidential election. Soon after gaining power with the help of the KMT’s