{"id":3632,"date":"2016-02-16T09:01:23","date_gmt":"2016-02-16T17:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/into-the-mosh-pit-republican-campaign-talk-gets-nastier\/"},"modified":"2016-02-16T09:01:23","modified_gmt":"2016-02-16T17:01:23","slug":"into-the-mosh-pit-republican-campaign-talk-gets-nastier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/into-the-mosh-pit-republican-campaign-talk-gets-nastier\/","title":{"rendered":"Into the mosh pit: Republican campaign talk gets nastier"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014<\/strong> In 2011, eyebrows shot up when former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin used a salty acronym \u2014 WTF \u2014 to mock the policies of President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

How quaint.<\/p>\n

Five years later, Donald Trump has blown right past acronyms. He\u2019s in a profanity-laced campaign for the Republican nomination that has seen multiple candidates hurl insults and disparaging remarks at one another and their critics.<\/p>\n

In recent days, Trump has publicly lip-synced the F-bomb, blurted out the S-word more than once, hurled an offensive term for coward at rival Ted Cruz and fired a steady string of put-downs at other candidates whom he labels pathetic, liars, losers, nasty, evil and more.<\/p>\n

While Trump started it, other GOP candidates have jumped right into the rhetorical mosh pit, readily trading versions of \u201cliar, liar\u201d in Saturday night\u2019s venomous debate.<\/p>\n

Cruz has said Trump is \u201closing it,\u201d called out his \u201cTrumpertantrums\u201d and dismissed the billionaire\u2019s insults as \u201chysterical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before exiting the race, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie predicted that he could beat Hillary Clinton in a debate, promising, \u201cI\u2019ll beat her rear end on that stage,\u201d and tormented fellow Republican Marco Rubio as a fragile \u201cboy in the bubble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even Jeb Bush, whose 90-year-old mother recently complained that he was too polite, belatedly joined in.<\/p>\n

Bush, a favorite target of Trump\u2019s taunts, tweeted back: \u201cYou aren\u2019t just a loser, you are a liar and a whiner.\u201d This, after weeks of calling him a \u201cjerk.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that politicians are typically paragons of proper speech and etiquette. They\u2019ve just tended to keep their name-calling and coarseness off-mic.<\/p>\n

Now, it\u2019s on the podium \u2014 and by design.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a general taboo-breaking that allows more and more of it to happen faster and faster,\u201d says Robert Lane Greene, author of \u201cYou Are What You Speak,\u201d a book about the politics of language. \u201cThe first time somebody does it, eyebrows go up and people get concerned, but then the next person doing it is less eye-opening.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Democratic nomination contest has been tame in comparison with the Republicans: Hillary Clinton complained of a \u201clow blow\u201d when Bernie Sanders said she was a progressive only on \u201csome days.\u201d Sanders, in turn, rejected Clinton\u2019s accusation that his campaign had engaged in an \u201cartful smear\u201d by insinuating that she was beholden to Wall Street.<\/p>\n

As for the GOP campaign, Greene sees the coarseness of the GOP campaign as evidence that \u201cthe contest to become the alpha male in the room has become more obvious this time than in previous elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

That seems to be just fine with the voters who have put Trump at the top of the polls and handed him a victory in New Hampshire\u2019s first-in-the-nation primary.<\/p>\n

About a quarter of Republican voters in New Hampshire said \u201ctelling it like it is\u201d was the most important quality to them in selecting a candidate, and two-thirds of those voters went for the potty-mouth guy who tells it like no one else.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s real, right?\u201d said Joanne Galvin, an independent voter from Pelham, New Hampshire, explaining her vote for Trump. She dismissed his use of a vulgarity about Cruz at a big rally by saying Trump was simply repeating what someone in the audience had shouted out.<\/p>\n

Trump has offered a similar defense and promised he\u2019ll tone things down if he gets closer to the presidency, saying, \u201cwhen you\u2019re president, or if you\u2019re about to be president, you would act differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked during Saturday\u2019s debate about his penchant for profanity, Trump pledged to knock it off, saying, \u201cI will not do it again … Not using profanity is very easy.\u201d But he also made clear he has no intention of reining in his personal attacks and insults.<\/p>\n

A super PAC supporting Bush is hoping Trump\u2019s language is a turnoff to South Carolina voters. It\u2019s running a radio ad in the state that strings together clips of Trump\u2019s expletive-deleted language and then asks, \u201cIs this the type of man we want our children exposed to? The time is now for South Carolina to end the Trump charade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump frames his blunt language as a harmless rejoinder to political correctness run amok, telling one TV interviewer, \u201cEvery once in a while you can have a little fun, don\u2019t you think?\u201d<\/p>\n

But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on political communication, said Trump has \u201chijacked\u201d political correctness to justify his routine use of personal attacks. That\u2019s causing other candidates to mirror his tactics and creates a worrisome diversion from a needed discussion of ideas, she said.<\/p>\n

Harking back to 1988, she recalled when Republican presidential contender Bob Dole stepped over a line when he snapped at GOP primary rival George Bush to \u201cstop lying about my record.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until then, she said, \u201ccandidates did not use the word \u2018lie\u2019 about each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all part of a broader trend toward informality in politics that has been going on for more than a century, says Greene.<\/p>\n

Many Americans are drawn to Trump, Greene says, because he talks like \u201cthe guy next to them on the bar stool.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people find the guy next to you on the barstool obnoxious, but a lot of Americans ARE that guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Jill Colvin in Nashua, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 In 2011, eyebrows shot up when former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin used a salty acronym \u2014 WTF \u2014 to mock the policies of President Barack Obama. How quaint. Five years later, Donald Trump has blown right past acronyms. He\u2019s in a profanity-laced campaign for the Republican nomination that has seen multiple candidates […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-3632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3632"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=3632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}