D.C. Dispatch March 8, 2005

The more people in politics and the media talk about "the perfect storm," the less they actually say.

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Our long national nightmare is over. A new movement is sweeping the land, uniting red and blue. It doesn't matter if you're liberal or conservative, Southern or Northern, urban or rural, extremely intelligent or very, very stupid. Suddenly, Americans of all stripes are having the same thought and voicing it in exactly the same way.

Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., was on CBS not long ago talking about Social Security reform. Santorum said we need reform because of "this perfect storm of low birthrates, people living longer, and then the Baby Boom generation retiring."

You could almost picture the storm, too, with all those birthrates and retirees swirling around inside it.

Who said great oratory is dead?

"I sometimes refer to what's happening in health care as the perfect storm," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., revealed in a recent speech. Eloquent, yes, but this was eloquence with a purpose. Savvy political insiders instantly recognized it as another deft political move from the woman most likely to succeed. By adopting language one would expect to hear from, say, Rick Santorum, Clinton was subtly reaching out to voters on the right and repositioning herself exactly where she needs to be—smack in the center of American politics.

More and more, "the perfect storm" is the center of American life. It's the place where all the differences that divide us are smoothed over, sanded down to a single, all-purpose phrase that everyone can use. And everyone is.

"New York City health officials are confronted with a potential AIDS perfect storm," Time magazine reported last week.

"This is really the perfect storm of media attention," said Jonathan Wilcox, an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, in a recent Canadian news story about Michael Jackson.

Experts on Latin America "see a troubling degree of political instability and a perfect storm of uncertainty on the horizon," according to a foreign dispatch in The New York Times.

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao says pension plans have "been battered by the perfect storm of declining equity markets ... and low interest rates."

Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette told Charlie Rose that during last year's political campaign, blogging "sort of, like, had this perfect storm."

Last week, ABC's PrimeTime Live reported that Lindsay Lohan is facing "a perfect storm of embarrassment" as her father sues her mother for millions of dollars that the teen idol herself earned.

In a recent column, Newsweek's Anna Quindlen wondered why modern mothers are such control freaks. Answer: "A perfect storm of trends and events contributed to this."

The phrase has been around for years, of course. But in the last few months, it seems to have taken on new life. Maybe the Asian tsunami, and the inevitable resurgence of perfect-storm references, dislodged it from the collective unconscious. In America, the distance between a global tragedy and Lindsay Lohan gets shorter every day.

Whatever the reason, it's certainly good to have the perfect storm back. Because, really, why bother inventing new metaphors and similes? Why try to express an idea a little differently from the way it's been expressed ten thousand times before? Most of life is stale and familiar, and language should mirror this grim reality. Freshness and originality are fraudulent.

As somebody once said, the world will little note nor long remember what we say. He was absolutely right. Who remembers what anyone says anymore? Words are just tools. If you've got one that works, you use it over and over and over, until it wears out and you throw it away.

The perfect storm is a tool that's working beautifully at the moment, thanks to its ingenious design. On the surface, it's packed with rich associations—the tragic fishing boat tossed about on the waves, the blockbuster book, Captain George Clooney shouting into the wind. But peel back these shiny layers and inside is a wonderful ... emptiness. It's one of those phrases that can mean practically anything—a semantic void, a vacuum that will suck in any idea or opinion and render it harmless and inane.

It works equally well for any side of an argument. Thus, while Santorum warns of the perfect storm that Social Security reform will prevent, an analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities can contend in a Washington Post story that Social Security reform itself may contribute to a "budgetary perfect storm."

When political opponents use the same language, they become allies and, in a way, friends. The perfect storm is a shared experience, a verbal hot tub where no one is embarrassed by naked banality.

It's also a brilliant way out of the divided-nation problem. The more people in politics and media talk about the perfect storm, the less they actually say. By saying less, and saying it unmemorably, they're much less likely to disagree or to engage in the awful partisan bickering that never gets us anywhere.

So, up with the perfect storm! Whenever you see or hear someone using the phrase, applaud loudly. Use it yourself as often as possible—work it into your conversations, your e-mails, and text messages. May it blow right across this great nation and heal our fractured soul.

William Powers is a columnist for National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.