Get Me Rewrite: Pelosi Drops Word "Stimulus" From Her Vocabulary

Apparently the word isn't polling too well.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Democrats have dropped the word stimulus from their vocabulary.

Though the House minority leader and her caucus are still pushing an economic stimulus agenda to save the economy, they’ve radically changed their rhetoric with the hope of winning over voters who saw “stimulus” as close to a dirty word.

Democrats are now being careful to frame their job-creation agenda in language excluding references to any stimulus, even though their favored policies for ending the deepest recession since the Great Depression are largely the same.

...

Recognizing the unpopularity of the 2009 package, however, Democratic leaders have revised their message with less loaded language – “job creation” instead of “stimulus;” “Make it in America” in lieu of “Recovery Act” – in hopes of tackling the jobs crisis.

Debbie Wasserman-Shultz is off-message, and that's odd, because she is usually robotically, inhumanly on message.

She avoids the word "stimulus," but does use the word "Recovery Act," which I thought was now verbotten.

Well, the Republicans who think the Recovery Act didn't work are simply wrong. The Recovery Act, as of the beginning of this year, created an additional 3.6 million jobs. We have -- the Recovery Act had a direct impact on making sure the teachers, firefighters, police officers were able to remain in their jobs. It begun -- it helped begin to turn the economy around. 50% of it was tax breaks to small businesses and to the middle class. So every economist you would talk to that is worth their salt acknowledges that without the Recovery Act we would not be continuing on the upswing. We would still be either stuck or spiraling downward. So the Republicans can't make up their own facts. The bottom line is the Recovery Act had an impact.

Note the original trascript contained the word "(stimulus)" in parenthesis after "Recovery Act," but that was just the editor helping the reader out-- Wasserman-Shultz didn't say stimulus.

You know what she did say? This is good. She can't say stimulus anymore, so later in her soundbite, she says we need an... "infusion."

Infusion. Just imagine them trying out a series of synonyms for "stimulus" in focus groups and deciding that "infusion" tests the best, because it makes people think of good food and drink "infused" by fruit juice or something.

Another word she likes is "impact," as a noun, as in "We need additional impact."

If you're unconvinced that Dumb Debbie is a Talking Points Terminator, enjoy her refusing to comment on the Richard Trumka James Hoffa* declaration of war, insisting that her comment on this matter is that we must work together to aid the middle class.

* Whoops. Hoffa, not Trumka.

posted by Ace at 02:33 PM

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