As a writer I can’t help noticing subtleties in the articles and books I read. A good writer packs a lot of meaning into a short space, and sometimes creates impressions in the reader that are subconscious.

Here’s an example from this weekend:

Obama made his fourth trip to Nevada Friday for a week-before-the-election rally and fundraiser to help Reid squeak out a victory despite low popularity in his home state and an adverse political climate. [Emphasis mine]

I’ve seen the same phrase several times over the last few months, always referring to the travails of embattled Democrats.

Notice the implied message. Those poor Democrats are not being beaten by motivated, possibly better qualified opponents. Nor are they contending with the results of their own disastrous, unpopular policies. Instead, they are dealing with “an adverse political climate”, as if the entire situation were just some random storm that blew up out of nowhere.

This enables reporters to talk about the problems of Democratic candidates without having to face up to the reality of Democratic administration of the last four years for Congress and two years for the White House. They don’t have to come right out and say that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, et. al. have been a disaster for the political left. And they certainly don’t have to make any serious examination of their own internal assumptions that leftism is the ideal political philosophy.

The reporters can even sound somewhat sympathetic to the candidates’ plight. You can almost hear their internal dialog. “Gosh, we don’t know where the storm came from, but those Democrats sure are getting drenched! Isn’t it awful that our statesmen like Reid have to contend with such random things?”

Perhaps I just don’t remember, but I don’t think I saw that phrase when Republicans were getting hammered in 2006 and 2008. Everything was Bush’s fault and the fault of those Republicans caught in assorted ethical scandals. This year, the much worse offenses of Charlie Rangel are quickly shuffled to the “old news” pile and never, ever trotted back out when discussing Democrats’ lagging campaigns.

As I tiresomely repeat, to defeat the political left, it’s important to constantly be on watch for their post-modern attempts to redefine the terms used in politics to make themselves look better. I hope every time you see “adverse political climate” from this point, you’ll translate it more appropriately as “deep, deep hole the Democrats dug for themselves, which the reporter is too chickensh!t to acknowledge.”