I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (24 page)

 

Politics is the womb in which war develops.

KARL VON CLAUSEWITZ

Clausewitz, 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 Garner, 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.

EDWARD R. MURROW

The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan
was like the trench warfare of World War I:
never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.

PEGGY NOONAN

This is from
What I Saw at the Revolution
(1990) by a key Reagan speechwriter. Often misinterpreted as a swipe at Reagan's intelligence, it was really a comment on his disinterest in and detachment from the details of governance.

 

Everybody knows politics is a contact sport.

BARACK OBAMA

In
The Audacity of Hope
(2007), Obama offered another interesting metaphor: “Maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines. We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters. But I don't think so.”

 

The American political system is like fast food—
mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of
things, and everybody wants some.

P. J. O'ROURKE

Monarchy is the gold filling in a mouth of decay.

JOHN OSBORNE

On the same subject, George Orwell concurred, writing, “England resembles a family, a family with the wrong members in control.” Also on the English monarchy, Nancy Mitford observed: “An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”

 

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession.
I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

RONALD REAGAN,
comparing politicians to prostitutes

Government is like a baby.
An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end
and no sense of responsibility at the other.

RONALD REAGAN

Like many of Reagan's lines, this one was borrowed and adapted from someone else. The twentieth-century English clergyman Ronald Knox defined a baby as “A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

 

A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.

JAMES RESTON

The man who loves other countries as much as his own
stands on a level with the man
who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Power is apt to be so insolent and Liberty to be so saucy,
that they are very seldom upon good terms.

GEORGE SAVILE
(Lord Halifax)

Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state
what the safety valve is to the steam engine.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination
is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert.

STENDHAL

This observation comes to mind whenever I see an entertainer or celebrity make a political statement at a concert, awards ceremony, or other cultural event.