Washington – The president in his State of the Union address Tuesday night left out a tiny little suffix that means a whole lot to some people. He did it so subtly you could have missed it. Just a little “-ic.”
What’s in an “-ic”?
Bush started the speech on a bipartisan note, honoring the first Madam Speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, and calling on the country to come together.
Then: “I congratulate the Democrat majority,” he said, dropping the last two letters from “Democratic.”
Bush does this a lot, and while it’s hard to say whether the omission was intentional in this instance, it is a semantic tactic that’s been part of Republican warfare for decades.
It’s a little thing, a means of needling the opposition by purposefully mispronouncing its name, and by suggesting that the party on the left is not truly small-“d” democratic. It was all the more striking because it was apparently not what Bush was supposed to say. The prepared speech the White House distributed beforehand retained that precious “-ic.”
The bloggers caught it, of course. “Code word,” wrote one. Another: “Calculated insult.”
“We all noticed,” says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the liberal blogging site DailyKos.com, who replayed the president’s words on his TiVo to make sure he’d heard what he thought he heard. “He just clearly couldn’t help himself.”
“Like nails on a chalkboard,” says John Podesta, chief of staff in the Clinton White House and president of the Center for American Progress.
Tuesday on CNN, Democratic strategist Paul Begala noted the omission right after it happened, adding that the president was being “insulting” and “self-defeating.” Republican strategist Mike Murphy chided Begala, saying that if this was his “biggest complaint, I think the president had a pretty good night.”
The missing “-ic” has a long legacy. Dick Armey was fond of saying “Democrat Party.” Commie- hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy even used the phrase half a century ago.
Could the word have been unintentional?
“It’s hard to disentangle whether that’s an intentional slight at the opposition or traditional problems with the president’s vocabulary,” says Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Boston University.
