N Archives - Taegan Goddard's Political Dictionary

New Frontier

“New Frontier” is used to describe the domestic and foreign policies of the Kennedy Administration.

The term was first used in John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech for the Democratic party’s nomination for president. He referred to “the frontier of the 1960’s–a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils– a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”

After Kennedy’s election, the term became synonymous with the collection of policies he put forward, similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, or LBJ’s Great Society. Everything from the Bay of Pigs Invasion to his tax cuts became part of the New Frontier.

NIMBY

An acronym for ‘not in my backyard.’ It represents opposition to a proposal for development because it would be built close to them, and affect them in some way.

NIMBY is often used for local development projects like airports, pipelines, or local fracking. People who use the phrase may be supportive of the development, but do not want it near them due to the negative effects it could bring to their hometown.

Forbes: “From housing construction caps in San Francisco and the Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska to bridge and subway construction in New York City and port expansion in Savannah, Ga., NIMBY has delayed, killed or inflated the expenses of more than 500 projects nationwide over the last decade at a cost to the economy of more than $1 trillion annually.”

nut-cutting time

The point when you have tried everything but failed.

While the “nut-cutting time” originally refers to the effort required to remove a rusted or stripped nut, it has come to be used in a legislative context as the time to exert maximum effort to round up votes to get a bill passed due to an approaching deadline.

While the term did not originally refer to castration, many have used that as its double-meaning in a political context.

nuclear option

When the presiding officer of the U.S. Senate disregards a rule or precedent.

This most commonly refers to an effort by the Senate to end a filibuster by a simple majority, even though rules specify that ending a filibuster requires the consent of at least 60 senators.

An opinion written by Vice President Richard Nixon in 1957 concluded that the U.S. Constitution grants the presiding officer the authority to override Senate rules in this way. If a majority vote to uphold the presiding officer, his interpretation of the rules becomes a precedent.

Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) first called the option “nuclear” in March 2003, using the metaphor of a nuclear strike to suggest it might provoke retaliation by the minority party.

nattering nabobs of negativism

A phrase used by Vice President Spiro Agnew to refer to the members of the media with whom he had a very acrimonious relationship.

Said Agnew while speaking to the California Republican state convention on September 11, 1970: “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club — the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.'”

While the phrase is generally attributed to Agnew, it was actually written by White House speechwriter William Safire.

Will Bunch: “The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called ‘the silent majority’ a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred.”

“It also started a dangerous spiral of events — journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority.”

netroots

Political activism organized through blogs and other online social media.

The term was coined by Jerome Armstrong and is used in his 2006 book co-authored with Markos Moulitsas, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, in which they note “the netroots activist, much like the new generation of grassroots activist, is fiercely partisan, fiercely multi-issue, and focused on building a broader movement. It’s not an ideological movement — there is actually very little, issue-wise, that unites most modern party activists except, perhaps opposition to the Iraq war.”