"Potential spoiler Ralph Nader met with potential spoilee John Kerry yesterday afternoon," wrote Mark Leibovich in The Washington Post last month.
Spoiler, a slashing word in politics, is apparently of recent vintage. When the conservative columnist William Buckley ran for mayor of New York against the liberal Republican John Lindsay in 1965, thereby splitting the expected vote against the Democrat, Abe Beame, The New York Times observed, "William F. Buckley Jr, the Conservative nominee, has dropped any pretense that his role in the campaign is other than that of a spoiler."
The columnist had no intention of winning (asked what he would do if he did win, Buckley replied, "Demand a recount") but wanted to build a Conservative Party in New York that would discourage Republican candidates from swinging too far left. (Lindsay won, unspoiled by Buckley's 13 percent.)
Before Kerry and Nader had their friendly and inconclusive chat, the presumptive Democratic nominee used a formulation to reporters that has traditionally been used to discourage the defection of party regulars: A vote for Nader would be the equivalent of a vote for President George W. Bush.
everyone a spoiler?
Asked about this, Nader told Judy Woodruff of CNN: "Either we're all spoilers of one another -- trying to take votes from one another -- or none of us are spoilers, because we have equal rights to run for elective office." (Because he dealt with several candidates, "one another" was correct; If his remark had been limited to two, he would have said "each other.")
I called Nader, long a libertarian ally in the privacy wars, to ask for his definition of spoiler. As the choice of nearly 3 million voters in 2000, he offered three: "A spoiler is any candidate who refuses to believe that the two largest parties own all the voters in America" and "any candidate who is perceived as drawing votes away from a Democrat, so long as this candidate is not a Republican." Finally, "with apologies to Ambrose Bierce," he submits, "A spoiler is any person who dares to exercise his or her First Amendment rights inside the electoral arena but outside the two-party duopoly."
To those who suggest his candidacy might siphon off votes of liberals from the Democratic candidate, Nader -- an iconoclast not all that hot about using e-mail -- suggests he could actually help the legions of the left. "One, by trying to galvanize the young; two, by getting many of the 100 million nonvoters to the polls; three, by helping local citizens' groups get visibility and four, by setting a model of probity and innovation." (Nobody can say the man who turned the phrase "consumer advocate" into his personal title is not innovative: He is the only candidate to refuse TV makeup.)
sports link
The word spoiler, in roughly its present political sense, may have come from sports. I recall from days in the Ebbets Field bleachers (but cannot find a citation for) its use in baseball in the 1940s to describe a hitter who, in the final inning of a game, "spoiled" a pitcher's no-hitter by getting a hit.
The Oxford English Dictionary has a 1948 item from The Baltimore Sun about boxing's Jersey Joe Walcott: "In the language of the ring he is known as a `spoiler,' the type of fighter who can make an opponent look bad but who can never look good himself."
In 1950, The Sun's sports pages applied the word to pro football: "In meeting San Francisco here ... the Colts will get a crack at their biggest `spoiler' of the past two seasons."
Political etymologists need help. Earliest use I can find -- though not quite in the sought-after sense of "vote splitter" -- is by The New York Times' Anthony Lewis in 1959, who recounted a legislative maneuver of then Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson to outfox Democratic liberals: "The senator from Texas obviously enjoyed the role of spoiler hugely."
Before that, who? Former president Theodore Roosevelt? As an independent, he outpolled his fellow Republican, president William Howard Taft, making possible the Democrat Woodrow Wilson's victory in 1912.
Send citations (the real thing, not a vague recollection like mine) to onlanguage(at)nytimes.com and win lexicographical fame without fortune.
Is this a system?
Relatedly, the word spoils has long been a staple in politics. Martin Van Buren, known for his unabashed support of the political patronage system, was nominated by his mentor, president Andrew Jackson, to be minister to England in 1832. In January of that year, senator William Learned Marcy (punching up a metaphor expressed in Congress two years earlier) spoke in favor of his fellow New Yorker's nomination, defending his patronage role with "To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy."
Senators Henry Clay and John Calhoun led the charge against Jackson's nomination of "the Little Magician" and defeated it, making a political martyr out of Van Buren and introducing the phrase spoils system to the political lexicon.
Jackson selected him as his running mate, and Van Buren (also called "Old Kinderhook,"from the name of his hometown, which some mistakenly thought was the origin of "OK") became vice president and in 1836 he became the eighth president of the US.
In his 1922 novel, The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald took Marcy's famous line and gave it a thought-provoking turnaround: "The victor belongs to the spoils."
Greek bearing
upbeat word
The Greek word philo, used as a prefix, means "love of," or at least "a predisposition for"; philosophy, for example, is "the love of wisdom."
At a luncheon last month in New York, Greece's new Prime Minister Costas was asked by journalists if he noticed a wave of anti-Americanism sweeping Europe. He replied that he was a philo-American.
Though not a fresh coinage, philo-American was such a refreshing locution that I thought it should be called to your attention.
George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This article will help readers avoid repeating mistakes by examining four examples from the civil war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forces and the Republic of China (ROC) forces that involved two city sieges and two island invasions. The city sieges compared are Changchun (May to October 1948) and Beiping (November 1948 to January 1949, renamed Beijing after its capture), and attempts to invade Kinmen (October 1949) and Hainan (April 1950). Comparing and contrasting these examples, we can learn how Taiwan may prevent a war with
A recent trio of opinion articles in this newspaper reflects the growing anxiety surrounding Washington’s reported request for Taiwan to shift up to 50 percent of its semiconductor production abroad — a process likely to take 10 years, even under the most serious and coordinated effort. Simon H. Tang (湯先鈍) issued a sharp warning (“US trade threatens silicon shield,” Oct. 4, page 8), calling the move a threat to Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” which he argues deters aggression by making Taiwan indispensable. On the same day, Hsiao Hsi-huei (蕭錫惠) (“Responding to US semiconductor policy shift,” Oct. 4, page 8) focused on
Taiwan is rapidly accelerating toward becoming a “super-aged society” — moving at one of the fastest rates globally — with the proportion of elderly people in the population sharply rising. While the demographic shift of “fewer births than deaths” is no longer an anomaly, the nation’s legal framework and social customs appear stuck in the last century. Without adjustments, incidents like last month’s viral kicking incident on the Taipei MRT involving a 73-year-old woman would continue to proliferate, sowing seeds of generational distrust and conflict. The Senior Citizens Welfare Act (老人福利法), originally enacted in 1980 and revised multiple times, positions older
Taiwan’s business-friendly environment and science parks designed to foster technology industries are the key elements of the nation’s winning chip formula, inspiring the US and other countries to try to replicate it. Representatives from US business groups — such as the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, and the Arizona-Taiwan Trade and Investment Office — in July visited the Hsinchu Science Park (新竹科學園區), home to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC) headquarters and its first fab. They showed great interest in creating similar science parks, with aims to build an extensive semiconductor chain suitable for the US, with chip designing, packaging and manufacturing. The
RSS