Cursing is bad form in democracy's sacred spaces

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
The New York Times

GERALD HERBERT / AP Vice President Dick Cheney reads over his notes between live TV interviews at the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va.

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Vice President Dick Cheney forgot that rule last week. He used an obscenity in a heated — and, he thought, private — exchange with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in the Senate chamber. Washington now is buzzing about whether the vice president, who was irked at Leahy's persistent criticism of him, crossed a line.

Politicians are no strangers to salty language. Sen. John Kerry created a stir last year when he used a vulgar phrase to describe President Bush's handling of the Iraq war. President Kennedy could curse a blue streak, although this did not become widely known until after his death. President Johnson's foul mouth was legendary. And President Nixon's Oval Office tapes were so full of vulgarity that the phrase "expletive deleted" became part of the American lexicon when transcripts were released.

Why, then, did Cheney's remarks create such a furor? The answer has less to do with what the vice president said than with where and to whom he said it.

"We have a notion of appropriate space for private words," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Americans, she said, demand respect for democracy's sacred spaces.

The Senate floor, with its rules of decorum — "Will the gentleman from Vermont yield the floor?" — is one such space, although the chamber was not in session when the Cheney-Leahy exchange took place.

The Oval Office is another, which is one reason for the outrage over the Nixon tapes. Nixon later apologized for his words, saying that while he had heard "other presidents use very earthy language in the Oval Office," none of them "had the bad judgment to have it on tape."

The target also matters. It is one thing for a politician to use coarse language, quite another to aim it at a political opponent. Leahy had been criticizing the vice president all week for his ties to Halliburton, the oil-services company, and that provoked their confrontation. Critics of the Bush administration seized on the reports of the vice president's remarks, saying he is cracking under pressure.

	Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., allegedly provoked Cheney.

"There's no evidence that any politician was taken down by the use of foul language," said Steve DeMicco, a Democratic media consultant. "What it amounts to is a window into his temperament."

Cheney, for his part, offered no regrets. "Well," he told Fox News on Friday, "I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it."

If the remark offers a window into Cheney's temperament, Republicans say, what they see is a man of strength and conviction.

"They pushed him right to the edge," said former Sen. Alan Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, Cheney's home state. Simpson said the public would recognize that Cheney's remark "comes from the gut."

"It's real," Simpson added. "Dick Cheney, if he said that, there was nothing contrived in what he said."

Simpson, known for his own use of earthy language, said it never hurt him at the polls because it reinforced the perception that he was a regular guy. But historian Robert Dallek, who wrote a recent biography of Kennedy, said the public still expects a different standard from politicians.

"The public knows they are regular guys," he said, "but the public doesn't want to hear it."

Some say the fallout from vulgar language, if there is any, is worse for Republicans than Democrats, because Republicans make family values a centerpiece of their campaigns and are portrayed as hypocritical when they slip up.

"Because Republicans more overtly support moral principles in their personal lives and what they say, the media sometimes looks for chinks in their armor," said James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian advocacy group.

When news of Cheney's remarks broke, Democrats began circulating quotations from Cheney and Bush in which they promised to restore civility and dignity to Washington.

Republicans responded by noting that Kerry, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine last year, used the same word as Cheney.

Some say the Cheney-Leahy flap is just another example of the partisan divisions in Washington. In the end, said Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, those divisions are the reason the exchange will not hurt Cheney.

"Democrats will say, 'What do you expect from this guy?' And Republicans will say, 'Leahy probably deserved it,' " Cook said. "Everything now is like a partisan Rorschach test, in which what you see depends on which side you're on."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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