I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

by Mardy Grothe

  Written laws are like spiders’ webs,

  and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak,

  while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

  This fascinating anecdote was passed along by word of mouth for centuries before the Greek historian Plutarch recorded it for posterity. Today, twenty-five hundred years after Anacharsis offered his analogy, it is routinely cited in discussions about the lack of justice in judicial systems all around the world. His observation also simulated many spin-offs, including this from a 1707 essay by Jonathan Swift:

  Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies,

  but let wasps and hornets break through.

  Metaphorical language goes back to antiquity and continues with force today. When politicians describe a campaign as a marathon and not a sprint, we all know what they mean. And when we say an issue is a red herring or describe a candidate as a dark horse or a loose cannon, we’re speaking metaphorically, even if we’re unaware of the origins of such expressions.

  One of the most famous contemporary political metaphors emerged in 1962, when Jesse Unruh, Speaker of the California State Assembly, said in an interview in Look magazine:

  Money is the mother’s milk of politics.

  At the time, Unruh was one of the state’s most flamboyant politicians (he was nicknamed Big Daddy by Raquel Welch). The remark, which vividly captured the role of Big Money in the political process, immediately took hold, and went on to become one of history’s best-known political quotations. By the 1990s, as Unruh’s observation began to suffer from overexposure, another colorful politician—Jim Hightower of Texas—stepped up to the plate with an updated version:

  Money is the crack cocaine of politics.

  Out of the thousands of new metaphors that appear every year, most have only a limited shelf life. But every now and then a great one appears and goes on to become an integral part of the cultural vocabulary. During the Reagan presidency, many Democrats were frustrated by the President’s ability to remain unscathed despite a variety of mistakes and blunders made during his administration. On an August morning in 1983, as Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder was cooking breakfast for her children, she had a flash of inspiration. “He’s just like a Teflon frying pan,” she thought, “Nothing sticks to him.” Later that day, in an address in Congress, she unveiled the image:

  Mr. Speaker, after carefully watching Ronald Reagan,

  he is attempting a great breakthrough in political technology—

  he has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency…

  Harry Truman had a sign on his desk

  emblazoned with his motto: “The Buck Stops Here.”

  It has obviously been removed and Reagan’s desk has been Teflon-coated.

  Schroeder’s colleagues in Congress seized on the concept, and soon people all around the country were repeating it. Within a week, the New York Times helped make it a permanent part of the political lexicon with an article headlined “The Teflon Presidency.” Nobody before Schroeder had ever likened a politician to a non-stick frying pan. But the Teflon metaphor was so brilliant that—there is no better way to describe what happened—it stuck.

  Continuing with the adhesion theme, here’s hoping that you find a few more metaphorical observations with sticking power in the remainder of the chapter.

  Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion.

  LORD ACTON (John Dahlberg)

  Lord Acton, a nineteenth-century British historian, is best known for the dictum, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Also on the subject of power, John Adams painted this vivid verbal picture in 1765: “The jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.”

  Gratitude, like love, is never a dependable international emotion.

  JOSEPH W. ALSOP, JR.

  Man is by nature a political animal.

  ARISTOTLE

  A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad

  is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather

  for not going to church on Sunday.

  RUSSELL BAKER

  You might think this is about the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998, but it came in 1974 in response to calls to impeach Richard Nixon over Watergate.

  The president of the United States bears about as much relationship

  to the real business of running America

  as does Colonel Sanders to the business of frying chicken.

  J. G. BALLARD

  In the 1990s, South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis also employed a memorable KFC metaphor: “Asking an incumbent member of Congress to vote for term limits is a bit like asking a chicken to vote for Colonel Sanders.”

  Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  As long as there have been governments, people have derided bureaucracies. In 1868, Russian writer Alexander Ostrovsky wrote in The Diary of a Scoundrel: “It’s all papers and forms; the entire Civil Service is like a fortress, made of papers, forms, and red tape.” Since the early 1800s, red tape has been a metaphor for complicated and time-consuming procedures. The expression comes from a centuries-old practice of tying official government documents in red ribbon.

  Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.

  OTTO VON BISMARCK

  Here’s a Washington political riddle where you fill in the blanks:

  “As Alberto Gonzales is to the Republicans,

  ___________ __________ is to the Democrats—

  a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance.”

  DAVID BRODER

  This is how Broder began his syndicated column in April 2007. Analogies have long been a part of the school curriculum, so it was appropriate for Broder to add: “If you answered Sen. Harry Reid, give yourself an A.” The column came a week after Attorney General Gonzalez’s inept performance before senators investigating the controversial firing of eight U. S. attorneys. In the column, Broder also surveyed a variety of Reid’s verbal gaffes, including his 2005 comment that Alan Greenspan was “one of the biggest political hacks” in Washington.

  We don’t just have egg on our face. We have omelette all over our suits.

  TOM BROKAW

  Brokaw placed all the news networks into the same red-faced category when he made this comment on the premature—and ultimately wrong—announcement that Al Gore had carried Florida in the 2000 presidential election. Egg on your face is an American expression that means to have embarrassed oneself through a foolish action.

  The government is becoming the family of last resort.

  JERRY BROWN

  “My country, right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot

  would think of saying except in a desperate case.

  It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  Meeting Franklin Roosevelt

  was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL

  This is one of the great compliments in world history. Churchill, who once wrote that “Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician,” sprinkled his speeches and writings with examples. Here are a few more:

  “Hatred plays the same part in government as acid in chemistry.”

  “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.”

  “What the horn is to the rhinoceros, what the sting is to the wasp, the Mohammadan faith is to the Arabs.”

  “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

  Politics is the womb in which war develops.

  KARL VON CLAUSEWITZ

  Clausewi
tz, a nineteenth-century Prussian general and military theorist, offered this in his 1832 classic On War. The book also contains his most famous observation: “War is merely the continuation of political intercourse by other means.”

  The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain

  the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing.

  JEAN-BAPTISTE COLBERT

  In the seventeenth century, Colbert was Louis XIV’s tax collector. In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke said on the same subject, “To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.” And recently, the American economist Donald J. Boudreaux observed: “Tax hikes are to markets what bacon grease is to human arteries.”

  Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads.

  CHARLES CALEB COLTON

  You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

  MARIO CUOMO

  This famous line, from a 1985 New Republic article, masterfully contrasts the excitement of campaigning with the reality of governing. The underlying sentiment is not original to Cuomo. In a 1718 poem, Matthew Prior wrote:

  I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose:

  And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.

  Treaties are like roses and young girls—they last while they last.

  CHARLES DE GAULLE

  In Mexico, an air conditioner is called a “politician,”

  because it makes a lot of noise but doesn’t work very well.

  LEN DEIGHTON

  Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

  ALBERT EINSTEIN

  English writer Richard Aldington agreed, writing: “Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.” Nationalism, it seems fair to conclude, is a corruption of patriotism.

  Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil,

  and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

  DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

  An election is coming. Universal peace is declared,

  and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

  GEORGE ELIOT

  Great political metaphors sometimes come from fictional characters. This cynical one comes from the protagonist in George Eliot’s 1866 novel Felix Holt, The Radical. In another popular animal metaphor, English theologian W. R. Inge wrote in a 1919 essay: “It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”

  Politicians, like prostitutes, are held in contempt.

  But what man does not run to them when he needs their services?

  BRENDAN FRANCIS (pen name of Edward F. Murphy)

  For George Bush to fire Karl Rove

  would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen.

  AL FRANKEN

  When critics began calling for the head of Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s controversial political adviser, Franken said it wasn’t likely to happen. Picking up on the notion that Rove was “Bush’s Brain,” he argues here that Rove was like ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and Bush was like the dummy Charlie McCarthy. It was a sophisticated jab, suggesting that Bush could speak only the words Rove was putting into his mouth. Rove did resign near the end of Bush’s second term, but there was never any danger of his being fired. In 1975, David Steinberg applied the same ventriloquist metaphor to Gerald Ford: “He looks and talks like he just fell off Edgar Bergen’s lap.”

  Trickle-down theory—the less than elegant metaphor

  that if one feeds the horse enough oats,

  some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

  JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

  Molly Ivins put it this way: “We’ve had trickle-down economics in the country for ten years now, and most of us aren’t even damp yet.”

  In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from side to side,

  thinking they will be more comfortable.

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  When religion and politics travel in the same cart,

  the riders believe nothing can stand in their way.

  FRANK HERBERT

  Politics is a choice of enemas.

  You’re gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.

  GEORGE V. HIGGINS

  The metaphor may be coarse, but not many would quibble with its accuracy. The words come from the character Ed Cobb in Higgins’s 1991 novel Victories.

  I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing

  , and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

  It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON

  Jefferson also famously wrote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

  A prince without letters is a pilot without eyes.

  All his government is groping.

  BEN JONSON

  This analogy about a leader with inadequate learning has a timeless quality—and clear contemporary relevance. It comes from a commonplace book kept by Jonson and published posthumously in 1641. Commonplace books go back to antiquity but became widespread in the fifteenth century as paper became more affordable. Essentially, they were loosely organized scrapbooks containing literary excerpts and other information of interest. Compilers also commonly recorded their own thoughts and reflections, as Jonson did in his book.

  There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers

  and defeat is an orphan.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY

  If JFK had known more, he might not have used this metaphor in a 1961 address about the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In 1942, Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciasno, wrote, “As always, victory finds a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” The saying became popular with many Italian and German officers. In his 2007 book No Excuses, political strategist Bob Schrum updated the thought: “If victory has a hundred fathers, it also brings forth a hundred advisors.”

  Washington is like a Roman arena.

  Gladiators do battle, and the spectators determine who survives by giving the appropriate signal, just as in the Coliseum.

  HENRY A. KISSINGER

  The sound bite is to politics what the aphorism is to exposition:

  the art of saying much with little.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

  In his 1997 Time magazine piece, he added: “The sound bite is the ultimate in making every word tell. It is the very soul of compactness. Brevity is not enough. You need weight. Hence some sound bites qualify for greatness: FDR’s ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself ’ or Reagan’s ‘Tear down this wall.’”

  The great nations have always acted like gangsters,

  and the small nations like prostitutes.

  STANLEY KUBRICK

  Politicians are like monkeys.

  The higher they climb, the more revolting are the parts they expose.

  GWILYM LLOYD GEORGE (son of David Lloyd George)

  The average man…regards government as a sort of great milk cow,

  with its head in the clouds eating air,

  and growing a full teat for everybody on earth.

  CLARENCE MANION

  Manion, Dean of the Notre Dame law school in the mid–1900s, might have been inspired by a somewhat similar metaphor from Winston Churchill: “Some see private enterprise as the predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as the sturdy horse pulling the wagon.”

  The Vice-President of the United States is like a man in a cataleptic state:

  he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain;

  and yet he is perfectly conscious of everything that is going on about him.

  THOMAS R. MARSHALL

  Marshall was Woodrow Wilson’s vice president. John Nance Garne
r, FDR’s vice president, offered an even more famous line: “The vice-presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.”

  Scooter is to Cheney as Cheney is to Bush.

  MARY MATALIN

  I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff when CIA operative Valerie Plame was “outed” in 2005. After a special prosecutor investigation, Libby was indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, and was ultimately convicted in March 2007 (President Bush later commuted the sentence but let the conviction stand). In this analogy, Matalin was saying that Libby—who was known as “Cheney’s Cheney” to Washington insiders—was as important to Cheney as the vice president was to President George W. Bush.

  Being in politics is like being a football coach.

  You have to be smart enough to understand the game

  and dumb enough to think it’s important.

  EUGENE MCCARTHY

  Washington, D.C. is to lying what Wisconsin is to cheese.

  DENNIS MILLER

  Political image is like mixing cement.

  When it’s wet, you can move it around and shape it,

  but at some point it hardens

  and there’s almost nothing you can do to reshape it.

  WALTER MONDALE

  Ideas are like great arrows, but there has to be a bow.

  And politics is the bow of idealism.

  BILL MOYERS

  This is the idealistic view. A cynical one comes from Aldous Huxley: “Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”

  Old politicians, like old actors, revive in the limelight.

  MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

  The politician is…trained in the art of inexactitude.

  His words tend to be blunt or rounded because

  if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.