Pre-internet, I called the Government Printing Office looking for a C.I.A. world map I’d read about. They didn’t have it, said the woman on the other end of my touch-tone.
“You need to call DMAODS,” she said.
Excuse me?
“Defense Mapping Agency Office of Distribution Services,” she explained.
Silly me.
Acronyms and jargon lose people not steeped in it. My sister once worked in a Washington, D.C. law office. She kept a reference book of government acronyms on her desk the way you might carry a phrasebook when visiting a foreign country.
Ahead of President Joe Biden’s speech Wednesday night, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield agreed. There is one hard rule Biden enforces on his speechwriters: no acronyms.
“It violates his rule of ‘anybody should be able to read this or hear it and understand what I’m talking about’ … He’ll cross it out immediately,” Bedingfield told Politico. “Biden charges people who write for him or communicate for him with ensuring that they’re never condescending to the reader or to the listener,” she said.
That plain-spoken style is part of Biden’s appeal out in Trump country.
Sean Illing of Vox called James Carville for his take on Biden’s first 100 days. Carville went off on lefty jargon and “wokeness” as part of Democrats’ messaging problem in parts of the country they lose.
Carville tells Vox:
We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.
Democrats need to win more votes in Trump country:
Here’s the deal: No matter how you look at the map, the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. That’s the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world.
It is why, for example, a Democrat holds the North Carolina governor’s mansion on the strength of the urban vote, yet Republicans control the legislature and another ten-year redistricting cycle. They rule the countryside.
Biden picked up votes in rural America because “he’s not into ‘faculty lounge’ politics,” Carville explained.
You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.
Dump the jargon-y language, Carville insists, “This ‘too cool for school’ shit doesn’t work, and we have to stop it.”
That is exactly why I insist progressives stop complaining about people voting against their best interests. It’s godawful messaging.
Even standard political jargon. Watch a new volunteer’s eyes glaze over the first time they hear “GOTV.” They think it is a hot, new cable series they’ve missed. Much other trendy jargon on the left sounds as foreign as churchy language evangelicals use to identify their own among the heathen.
On the bookshelf above the desk here is a paperback from 1992 by David Kusnet, President Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter from 1992 to 1994: “Speaking American.”
It may be time again to review it.