Examples Of Synecdoche

But it's not about corporate jets. It was never meant to be about corporate jets. It's about a tax code riddled with subsidies for unproductive activities and that exacerbates unprecedented economic inequality. "Corporate jets" was a metaphor, folks. And a particular type of metaphor — synecdoche, a part that represents the whole.

THE "CORPORATE JETS" metaphor didn't seem to work. Listeners heard the part, not the whole. This is not another in the litany of complaints about Obama's rhetorical failures or his negotiating skills — it's a standard-issue failure for Democrats that long precedes Obama's arrival on the national stage. You can hear it in the language of Senators Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and others. Absorbing the high-priced advice of academic consultants like George Lakoff and Drew Westen, who market banalities dressed up in the glam clothing of linguistics and neuroscience, they learn that they should speak in powerful metaphors rather than broader policy abstractions. But consistently, they fail.

Remember, for example, in 2004 when John Kerry and other Democrats launched an attack on "the Benedict Arnolds" — companies that had moved their headquarters, typically to Bermuda, to minimize their U.S. taxes? The actual Benedicts were very few, but the phrase was meant to be heard as a metaphor for all companies that were moving jobs overseas. Or, more recently, the scheduled repeal of the estate tax was labeled "the Paris Hilton tax cut," identifying it with the best-known and, on the televised and internet evidence, least productive of heiresses. It didn't seem to have much impact on the politics of the estate tax, however, presumably because voters and members of Congress had already absorbed the Republicans' less metaphorical, but false, claim that most of the estates taxed would be small farms and corner stores.