During election night coverage of the 2000 presidential race between George W. Bush and Albert Gore, Jr., CBS News’s Dan Rather had a field day with figures of speech. As the electoral votes were counted (and later recounted), Rather employed one folksy aphorism after another. He noted that Bush “…swept through the South like a tornado through a trailer park.” And as the race tightened, he famously quipped, “This race is as tight as a too-small bathing suit on a too-hot car ride back from the beach.”
It’s unclear if the seasoned news anchor was speaking from experience, but on that night, Rather didn’t let a bad metaphor go to waste. Twenty-four years later, bad metaphors are still not hard to find. Take, for example, Eric Trump’s characterization of the removal of planks on abortion and marriage from the GOP Platform in an interview with NBC News anchor Savannah Guthrie ...
