In another journalistic life, I worked at an estimable Beltway publication covering the daily business of Congress. One of the early directives I encountered there concerned the use of the word “reform” in connection with any pending legislation. The notion of reform, I was soberly informed, was simply too charged and incendiary to pass as a description of any agenda item seeking approval from the people’s representatives; the less loaded term “overhaul” was always and everywhere to be preferred.
Never mind that overhauls are far more ambitious in scale than reforms, as any long-suffering sports fan or construction professional can tell you. And never mind that reforms and reformers have always claimed center stage in the drama of our national politics—one can scarcely imagine the civil rights revolution, women’s suffrage, and Social Security (or, on the other side of the ledger, Prohibition, jingoism, and rampant nativism) without them. No, the larger point here was that reform was too wild and indecorous an idea for a respectable Hill journal to grace with serious or sustained treatment.
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