"Words matter," as Hillary Clinton so often reminded us; and like all campaigns, hers lived and died by the spoken word. Of the millions of dollars she poured into her own campaign, much of it no doubt went into paying speechwriters.
She has grounds to sue them for incompetence, and as a professional writer I'd testify on her behalf.
At countless points in her campaign -- but especially in those early, tone-setting days -- I winced at the dead words those speechwriters put in her mouth. And as someone for whom the English language is not only a source of constant delight but a daily livelihood, too, I'm convinced those verbal choices helped to doom her campaign. Let's start in the pivotal early debates, when both candidates were seeking to define themselves to America.
Obama's key word is: "Change!"
And Clinton fires back with: "Vetted!"
Wow! "Vetted?" She must've had access to top-level writers, and the catchiest word they came up with was "vetted?" And remember, she didn't just use "vetted" once--she made it a running motif in those crucial early debates. Though "Ready on Day One" and other Clinton phrases were also as dead as vaudeville, let's stick with "vetted" for a minute.
If some sinister, conniving, Obama-loving Professor of Rhetoric had purposely set out to sabotage Clinton's campaign from within, he could not in a million thesaurus-hours have come up with a more devastating stink-bomb of a word.
How bad, exactly, is the word "vetted"--and how exactly is it bad?
Let's count the ways.
1.) It's the dead, stone vocabulary of mid-level management. You might as well ask voters to get deliriously excited about reading a year-old inter-office memo concerning possible savings in the company beverage supply. This "stone vocabulary" problem was consistent throughout her campaign. But also:
2.) It's arcane. I'd venture to say that at least fifty percent of the electorate had, and still has, no real idea what the word "vetted" means, unless it involves bandaging a terrier's paw. Furthermore: they don't care what the hell it means. And why should they? Unless they've spent their entire lives in the Wonderfully Wonk-ish World of Washington, that is -- and, even so, see 1) above, as well as:
3.) It reeks of D.C. In those early days, when Obama was selling "change" on a grassroots level, trying to market Clinton around the word "vetted" was like promising More of the Same, only "adequate." As in: "If elected, I promise to be completely adequate!" It only underlined how deeply engrained in Washington-wonk culture Hillary Clinton was, and is. But that leads to the next problem, namely:
4. ) It wasn't even true. Though Hillary might be forgiven for thinking she'd been fully "vetted" after twenty years of often vicious attacks on her and Bill, in fact she'd received no more (or harder) scrutiny than any other of the candidates. So when outright lies, like the Bosnia one, and pretty-much-outright lies, like the NAFTA-support and Irish-peace-process ones, began to crop up here and there, suddenly we heard no more of that dreaded Vetting Thing--which, while an incredible relief to lovers of the English language, kicked the struts out yet again from underneath the Clinton campaign aircraft.
As for "Ready on Day One!": once again, wow, both for the spectacular badness of the phrase itself and for how out-of-touch it was. With America mired deep in the quicksand of George Bush's presidency, Obama's "Change" was active. Clinton's "Ready" was passive. Why Clinton's strategists didn't see that mistake in advance is hard to understand, though in the case of Mark Penn it might've been that he was distracted by his work on behalf of bloodstained mercenaries.
Which leads to my second point: it wasn't just dead language that doomed Hillary's campaign: it was the language of death, too -- most unforgettably when she threatened the "total obliteration" of Iran.
"Totally obliterate" is the language of flat-out psychosis, of Mussolinis, Saddams, and Cherokee-killers. During the Viet Nam war, when the drooling lunatic General Curtis LeMay threatened to "bomb Viet Nam back to the Stone Age," reasonable human beings of all political stripes recoiled in disgust; but at least his language was in synch with his disease. "Total obliteration" only multiplies the creepiness by striking a bureaucratic tone -- suggesting the well-thought-out, clinical extermination of an entire population. By any honest definition, "total obliteration" only means one thing -- and that thing is called "genocide."
Americans are loathe to elect people who openly threaten genocide. They prefer such things be kept a little more subtle. Clinton's threat reverberated like a doomsday bell around the world, if not with an American media obsessed with flag-pins and pastor-baiting. And if it was intended as a signal of her "testicular fortitude," it flopped on that level, too: dead children don't care about the gender of their killer.
On some deep level, despite media indifference, the American people soaked up Hillary Clinton's words all too well. So the language of death -- along with dead language -- helped to kill her campaign.
Maybe it's poetic justice.