By Mark Shields | February 4, 2017 | 5:15 p.m.
In his first television interview since taking office, Vice President Mike Pence, with apparent sincerity, emphasized to Judy Woodruff of PBS NewsHour just how committed he and the White House are to working right now with the Congress, working very closely with leaders of the House and Senate and earning bipartisan support.
If Pence were sincere about reaching across the aisle, he would not be using insulting Republican code-speak to insult Democrats.
Three different times in his interview with Woodruff, Pence deliberately used language to needle those political adversaries to whom he was allegedly extending an olive branch. Instead of calling people in the other party what those people, correctly and grammatically, call themselves and speaking of Democratic colleagues, Pence resorted to partisan semantics by dropping the last syllable and referring to Democrat senators, Democrat leaders and Democrat members.
Pence, who, according to the authoritative Almanac of American Politics, grew up in Columbus, Ind., as a John F. Kennedy-admiring Catholic and then graduated from Hanover College as a Republican evangelical Christian and went on to host his own conservative talk radio show, The Mike Pence Show, chooses his words carefully. He knows his parts of speech, that Democratic is an adjective and that Democrat is a noun.
People who care about politics, especially vice-presidential politics, all know about the time when in the 1976 VP debate between Bob Dole, the Republican, and Walter Fritz Mondale, the Democrat Dole, slipping into the hatchet-man lingo he had mostly overcome, damaged his tickets chances by saying, If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat (emphasis added) wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.
Pence may not know that the Red-baiting Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who was eventually censured by the Senate, repeatedly questioned the loyalty of members of the Democrat Party.
But Republicans know that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., published his personal attack thesaurus traitor, radical, sick, corrupt to destroy the Democrat Party.
And Pence has been interviewed on enough right-wing talk shows to know well the verbal shorthand; always use the disparaging Democrat to antagonize the Other Side.
To his credit, the cerebral patron saint of American conservatism, William F. Buckley, in National Review, rejected this slur: I have an aversion to Democrat as an adjective, he once said, pointing out that the noun Democrat misused as an adjective is offensive to the ear.
Besides, Democratic Party is a proper noun, and proper nouns are not up for interpretation.
Growing up in heavily Protestant Indiana, you learned early that when someone spoke about the Roman Church, the speaker was not being friendly to Catholic people and beliefs. The same is true when Jew, instead of Jewish, is callously deployed as an adjective for example, before neighbors, lawyer or businessman.
One of our more appealing national customs is that we Americans generally call people (including political parties) what they wish to be called. So if Republicans, including Pence, actually mean what they say about wanting to reach out across the increasingly bitter political divide, then they should immediately banish the offensive adjective Democrat from their collective lexicon.
Well be listening, because in the final analysis, its a matter not of sensitivity but of civility.
Mark Shields is one of the most widely recognized political commentators in the United States. The former Washington Post editorial columnist appears regularly on CNN, on public television and on radio. Click here to contact him, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
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Mark Shields: Mike Pence Betrays Republican Civility with 'Democrat' Slur - Noozhawk