Greenberg: Obama lapses into polspeak

Paul Greenberg, a syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services, is the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

It's not exactly news that businesses in this country have been cutting jobs and pay for a couple of years in hopes of staying solvent. Now the Obama administration may follow suit. The president has proposed freezing the pay of federal employees for the next couple of years, which is just one of the cost-cutting steps his critics have been proposing. It is part of President Barack Obama's gift of gab that he can make it seem like his own idea.

The president indicated that the federal pay freeze might be only the beginning. "Going forward," he began, using the most superfluous and, alas, most ubiquitous phrase in polspeak. What's the alternative? Surely not even his most admiring followers think the wonder-working Obama can reverse time.

"Going forward," the president was saying, "we're going to have to make some additional very tough decisions that this town has put off for a very long time."

"This town" - polspeak for Washington - is supposed to add an air of informal authority to whatever is being proposed. A president should have no need for the phrase, but after the shellacking Obama took in the midterm elections, he may feel the need to at least sound in control.

Please note that the president didn't say he was the one who'd been putting off economizing for a very long time. No, it was "this town" that had been putting it off. This, too, is a required conjugation in the rhetorical lingo of polspeak. When a president has taken some action he's proud of, the accepted form is first person: "I did." But when he's put off doing those things he ought to have done, it's "this town" that hasn't done it. When somebody puts out a Strunk and White for politicians, this construction should be high on the list of rules.

In the event of a major foul-up, presidents may shift to the passive voice. "Mistakes were made," to quote a Reaganism. That way, individual responsibility is sidestepped - or at least diluted, even while said foul-up is duly acknowledged.

No essay on polspeak would be complete without noting Rule No. 535, which mandates that, whenever cutting the federal budget is mentioned, the first response of those whose pay would be cut or frozen, or who might even have to be furloughed or let go must be: "But this will affect only a minuscule portion of the federal budget!"

The same line is inevitably used by those trying to save earmarks, boondoggles and wasteful projects in general. Those we favor are essential, the others expendable. It is part of the genius of selective language that it can skip airily over economic reality - for example, that almost any restraint on the gigantic spending machine that is the federal budget might affect only a small sliver of it. But only by beginning somewhere can the whole out-of-control monster be contained.

It may be too much to hope that the federal budget can actually be reduced, despite the occasional recommendations of well-meaning commissions like Bowles-Simpson, which tend to appear sporadically then disappear into the mists of history with the now-forgotten Hoover Commission.

But even to point out this political reality would be impolite (and impolitic) by all the rules of polspeak, which are designed not to clarify but to obscure.

Recommended reading: George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." Politics long ago won that match, as the latest round of polspeak out of the White House testifies.

Let's hope for more clarity going forward.