May I have a word? Democrat vs Democratic

Mrs Griffith, my third grade teacher, and grammar school teachers everywhere, hang your heads. All those years of teaching the difference between good and well, between it's and its, between imply and infer, were lost on the political party of the education President, the party of No Child Left Behind.

Teachers have drilled children for generations on the parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives. For example, a believer in democracy is a democrat, a noun. A government based on democracy is a democratic one, an adjective. Likewise, Bill Clinton is a Democrat, a member of the Democratic Party.

Simple, no? You'd think. So how come Republicans have such a hard time with this concept, habitually saying things like "Democrat Party" and "Democrat candidate." Are they all simply uneducated? Or is this a colloquialism like "nucular" that is impossible to shake despite the ridicule it triggers.

A thread on Dallas Blog finally prompted me to dig into the subject. Trey Garrison quoted Kinky Friedman's blog, which referenced "Democratic candidate Chris Bell". Only in Trey Garrison's own commentary, he said, "Democrat gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell."

There it was. Side by side. Kinky gets it right. Trey Garrison gets it wrong, even when Kinky's text is staring him right in the face. Why is that, I wondered? A little Googling turned up this:

“This tick was a custom that went into disuse for nearly 50 years. Its origins, however, are interesting and were toxic. It was Senator Joe McCarthy who, with his twisted mouth often oozing the charming brew of beer and saliva, would snarl out the words 'Democrat Party,' as if they referred to vermin. Perhaps it is an indication of Republican panic that they have descended to using McCarthy's cheap tactics to discredit the opposition.”

I don't think panic motivates Republicans, but "cheap trick" certainly fits. So, now we know that the locution goes back at least as far as the 1950s, but we still don't know why Senator McCarthy chose to use the term. A little more Googling and I had the answer, from The Columbia Guide to Standard American English:

“The proper noun [Democrat] is the name of a member of a major American political party; the adjective Democratic is used in its official name, the Democratic party. Democrat as an adjective is still sometimes used by some twentieth-century Republicans as a campaign tool but was used with particular virulence by the late senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who sought by repeatedly calling it the Democrat party to deny it any possible benefit of the suggestion that it might also be democratic.”

So, there you have it. Republicans continue to pay homage to anti-Communist, witch-hunting, Senator Joe McCarthy all these years later, playing word games to imply that the Democrats (big D) are not democratic (little D).

Juvenile and petty? Certainly. Uneducated? That's harder to answer. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that the majority of Republicans aren't even aware of sounding uneducated, and of the ones that are aware, most of them don't have a clue why Democrats are offended, just that they are. And that's good enough. As Trey Garrison puts it, cluelessly, "I am amused, however, how much it rankles Democrats to be called Democrats. :)"

Ironically, Trey Garrison also says, "I think Tom Pauken would get a kick out of the idea of someone thinking I'm a Republican." Despite his denial, his subconscious misuse of the word Democrat gives him away as a Republican as surely as a peek inside the voting booth would. Personally, I am amused how much it rankles some Republicans to be called Republicans. There's a lot of that going around Washington these days. But the irony is probably lost on Mr Garrison. Doncha think, Mrs Griffith? ;-)