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March 29th, 2024

Insight

This phrase screams 'I'm a politician'

Barton Swaim

By Barton Swaim The Washington Post

Published March 28, 2016

Recently I brought up several commonly mocked political phrases to a group of friends - "going forward," "game changer," "level playing field" and a few others. The only one disliked by all of them - indeed, they all loathed it - was the simple descriptor "the American people."

Why does such an unremarkable noun phrase rankle so badly? Partly, of course, because it's so overused. Scroll through transcripts of recent presidential primary debates and you find that candidates are addicted to it, with Democrats relying on it only slightly more than Republicans. Bernie Sanders speaks of "the American people" almost incessantly, sometimes three or four times in a single answer: "Roosevelt took the oath of office in 1933 at a time when 25 percent of the American people were unemployed . . . And he stood before the American people and he said, 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,' a profound statement that gave the American people the courage to believe. . . ."Marco Rubio, similarly: "I think the question you would ask is, how did you inspire again the American people to believe in the future? . . . What did it take to ensure that the American people, despite all of the difficulties of the time - you know, you look back at that time . . . the American people were scared about the future."

An ordinary person uses many phrases just as often and nobody notices. What makes "the American people" different is that, for the most part, only politicians use it. You can't help feeling they're employing it to give their sentences an extra bit of multisyllabic grandiosity: Mix in "American people" a few times and a banal observation sounds important and heartfelt. Or maybe they're just buying a couple of seconds while they figure out what to say next.

Accordingly, you can almost always delete "the American people" at no cost to meaning: "I intend to keep my promise to the American people" is just a fancier and lengthier way to say "I intend to keep my promise."

The phrase isn't new; it shows up in the speeches of Washington and Adams and other founders as a stately way to refer to the nation. Only in the 20th century did politicians begin using it in that annoyingly presumptuous way that puts it at the top of my friends' list of hated phrases. When today's politicos speak of "the American people," they're usually assigning their own opinions to the entire electorate.

Consider (taking an instance more or less at random) this line from Herbert Hoover's 1929 inaugural address: "The election has again confirmed the determination of the American people that regulation of private enterprise and not government ownership or operation is the course rightly to be pursued in our relation to business." I would have applauded the line at the time, as I suspect my fiercely Republican great-grandfather did. But "the American people," however defined, were evidently not very resolute in their espousal of free-market economics, as they would prove over the next 25 years.

What "the American people want," said Gerald Ford in a debate with Jimmy Carter in 1976, is "a Republican president to check on any excesses that come out of the next Congress if it is a Democratic Congress." He was wrong. The American people wanted no such thing. And when, four years later in a debate with Ronald Reagan, Carter surmised that "the American people" were interested in various components of a national health- insurance program, he was wrong. We weren't.

More recently when Ted Cruz proclaimed in a February debate that "I will always stand with the American people against the bipartisan corruption of Washington," we might have reasonably assumed that the American people weren't standing against bipartisan corruption at all. If we were, it wouldn't exist, and Cruz wouldn't be talking about it.

These facile references to "the American people" must fool few actual American people. No politician seeks to do the will of the people or even knows what that will is, for the excellent and obvious reason that the people have no single will. Blathering on about what "the American people" want and what "the American people" deserve is as phony as it sounds. And here, again, I'm obliged to acknowledge the dark genius of Donald Trump. He seems to know instinctively to avoid phrases that sound too much like the faux- eloquence of modern political discourse: Virtually alone among today's politicos, Trump never seems to use the phrase "the American people."

No one knows what the American people want, but apparently what a lot of them don't want is someone who presumes to speak for them --- someone, in other words, who sounds like a typical politician.


Previously:
02/17/16: Speechwriter's theory on why so many politicians sound like robots

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Barton Swaim is the author of "The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics."

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