THE WORD HE'S LOOKING FOR IS "POWER"

America's New Political Capital: President Bush infects Washington with his favorite buzzword (Chris Suellentrop, Slate, 12/30/04)

Even when he was the governor of Texas, Bush talked openly about the importance of his political capital, and a search of the Factiva database shows a dramatic increase in the number of stories and news transcripts that contain the words "political capital" since George W. Bush arrived on the national scene as a presidential candidate in 1999. A spike in 1993 is attributable to Bill Clinton's first year in office (Like so many things in politics, it appears that Clinton can be blamed for this, too.) At the time, the Washington Post was so intrigued by the sudden increase in "political capital" in the nation's political capital that it published a front-page article asking, "But what, exactly, is 'political capital'? Where does it come from? Where does it go?" (One sentence reads like parody: " 'I use the phrase all the time,' admits Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.") But the rest of the increase before 1999 is attributable mostly to the increasing number of articles in Factiva's database each year, rather than an increase in the phrase's currency. To test that hypothesis, I compared the incidence of "political capital" each year against the incidence of the elder statesman of Washington clichés: "elder statesman." Sure enough, the frequency of "elder statesman" increases at a similar rate as "political capital" until the year of the 2000 campaign, when Bush's pet phrase takes off and never looks back.

We've become accustomed to talking about all kinds of abstract capital in recent years—human capital, social capital, intellectual capital—but Bush's definition of political capital makes the metaphor particularly inapt. For one, you don't spend capital. You invest it. But Bush's understanding of the idea dictates that it be spent rather than saved. As Karl Rove put it in 2001, "If you don't spend it, it's not like treasure stuck away at a storehouse someplace. It is perishable. It dwindles away." What kind of economic message is that from a president who wants to encourage an ownership society?

Political power is the only kind of power where, the more you use it, the more you have. The President's understanding of this dynamic, while politicians as different as his father and Bill Clinton misunderstand it, is probably his greatest contribution to modern politics.

Posted by David Cohen at December 1, 2004 2:57 PM