Someone recently asked me, “Why do politicians always answer questions in ‘politician-speak’? Why can’t they answer questions like a normal person?”
There are likely a few reasons — probably more than I can list — but two thoughts:
One is, if you talk like a normal person, you will get in trouble. I choose to speak like a normal person, and I get in trouble a lot. Most people do not want to do that.
And by trouble, I mean as a politician, people are always taking little snippets of what you say out of context. So if at any given time you string together six words that don’t have a disclaimer, someone’s going to make a thing about it.
Some politicians don’t want headlines of fake controversies, so they use a lot of practiced messaging and answers because they don’t want to deal with the New York Post or Fox News, because they decided to answer in an improvised way.
Because that’s a big part of what talking like a normal person is: you’re part of a conversation, you don’t pre-rehearse things, you’re talking, answering, and replying to someone in front of you based on what they said in real time. And for a lot of people that can create distraction.
The second thought is that there are specific ways that people poll for what phrases to use that are more persuasive to key audiences, and so they choose to use that.
I’m not here to judge it or talk about whether it’s bad or good. I know it can be frustrating sometimes, because people get too stuck in a rut and then it feels like you’re not getting a real answer. It can feel not authentic.
It’s also this affect that then gets picked up in politics, a “politician-speak”, which is weird. So I get it.
I don’t do it, but I also pay a price for not doing it. You have to choose your battles.
But that's exactly why our movement came to Congress: to speak truth to power, to call out corruption, and to fight tooth and nail for working people across the country — even if that means they call us 'extreme' for it.
In solidarity,
Alexandria
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