As was explained in part one of this post, following what is said or written about American politics is often difficult for Americans who are actually used to all the dissembling, spinning, deliberate misconstruing, hyperbole and other nonsense that is to spin facts and lies into glittering campaign finery.

But if you are not from the U.S., it's next two impossible to know what's important or what's not.  Given the central role America still plays in the world -- G-zeroists notwithstanding -- cutting through the headlines and the soundbites to get to the core truths about what's happening in the world's highest-priced democracy is essential.

That's why I've tried to pick out a few terms and explain what each party means by them.  Earlier this week, I visited the Republican lexicon.  Today, we'll take a look at a handful of key illustrations of the quirks and curiosities that comprise the Dem dialect, with a special focus on a few that pertain to foreign policy.

The 1 Percent -- This is a perjorative term of art for every rich, spoiled, corrupt, indolent, exploitative millionaire in America who is not a donor to the Obama reelection effort or the Democratic National Committee.  Donors are referred to as hard-working, job-creating illustrations of the enduring power of the American dream.  (Also understood to refer to those who should be shouldering burden for balancing U.S. budget by paying "their fair share" of taxes.)

The 99 Percent -- This refers to the disenfranchised, struggling victims of Wall Street and corporatist exploitation.  All these people deserve tax cuts, to be funded by the 1 percent.  The fact that there is no way to address the deficit without a bigger burden falling on most of the members of the 99 percent, too, is just not something that should be discussed in public until we are in the midst of robust recovery lest the truth and arithmetic derail everything.

Bush Tax Cuts -- Source of all problems in the U.S. economy, even though President Obama celebrated extending them as a canny political victory in the middle of his first term.  (Also known as the biggest political issue of December 2012.)

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security -- The Holy Trinity of American politics.  They are sacrosanct and must never be touched -- even if major surgery is the only way to actually save their lives.

Financial Services Reform -- A political mirage allowing the president to seemingly take a tough stand against the 1 percent while not alienating too much the fat cats who are needed to pump money into Dem coffers.  Advocate it, sign it, but don't really overdo the enforcement side of it.

Campaign Finance Reform -- Something that is absolutely essential for restoring democracy in America, and which should be implemented just as soon as every currently serving Dem leaves office.

The President's Healthcare Victory -- Shhhh.  Please don't mention this.  Despite the fact that it actually benefitted millions, it is the Voldemort of Dem politics, "the policy whose name must not be spoken."

Romneycare -- Shhh.  Please don't mention this either.  Because as Dems, we'll be forced to admit we kinda like it.

The Unemployment Rate -- The president's true running mate (sorry, Joe.)  If it dips to around 8 percent or below, the president wins re-election.  Interesting fact: the president has almost no ability to impact this outcome and bares only a very limited responsibility for fluctuations in U.S. employment one way or another.

Europe -- Dem heaven.  An ability to balance the love of good cuisine with the love for a well-constructed government bureaucracy. Topless beaches. The fact that the eurocrisis probably will have more to do with whether Obama wins reelection than anything he or anyone in the U.S. might do compromises this love affair somewhat.

China -- Growing up, most Dem policy wonks wanted to be European, today they want to be Chinese. And we hate them for that. 

India -- China with democracy … really fractious democracy at that, and crazy, over-the-top, outspoken media chaos.   A fast growing developing country with an important strategic role and a historical past that gave us Ben Kingsley.  In other words, for visionary Dem foreign policy types, even better than Europe or China.  The ultimate destination/partner for the Dem wonkocracy.

The Middle East -- Er, nice to know ya, time to go, "yay, democracy," "boo, Iran," "love ya, Israel" ... we're out of here.

"Barack Obama has a good working relationship with Bibi Netanyahu" -- Ha.  

"It would be wrong to politicize the successful results of the Bin Laden raid" -- Let's play up this big success at every opportunity that arises.  Wanna bet the story of the Navy SEAL who pulled the trigger leaks closer to election day?  Best illustration of Dem cojones since Madeleine Albright first raised the possibility they might exist.

George Bernard Shaw once observed that England and America are two countries separated by a common language. But now we live in the Internet Age and English has, in way that still galls the Gaullists, become the lingua franca of e-cosmopolitans. The result is that now our language can separate Americans not just from the English but from all the world.

This is especially true when customs and culture and quirks of local context enter into matters. For example, someone outside the United States might pick up a newspaper or log on to a website to read about this week's Iowa caucuses and conclude that they were an important political event in the U.S., that the winners won or that the losers lost. After all, that's what the words on the page or on the screen seemed to say. But the reality is that to understand what's going on in U.S. politics, the international observer really needs some kind of translation device, a U.S. politics to English dictionary, that will help reveal the real meaning obscured by the words.

So let me try to help. Here are a few key translations that may be of use during the current Republican campaign. Note, there are similarly twisted definitions used by Democrats which I will get to later:

Ron Paul:  This is electoral English for "none of the above."  When voters cast a vote for Paul, it is less for the man (there really is a Ron Paul) or his policies (a strange brew of Austrian economics, isolationism, and a late night television ad for solid gold medallions commemorating the historic events at Area 51) than it is a protest vote against the system. 

Ron Paul Supporters: These are young white guys who have never had a date who need something to occupy them until the movie of "The Hobbit" is released...or they are older libertarians who believe that the Fed is where Bilderbergers meet to devalue the dollars they need in order to buy the guns with which they intend to protect their homes from space aliens or people from New York.

Ronald Reagan: This is not a reference to the real Ronald Reagan -- an American president from a while back. Instead it refers to an imaginary, idealized vision of a conservative president developed by the right wing of the Republican Party. Reagan was hardly a true conservative, growing government enormously, creating burgeoning deficits, actively working with Democrats, depending heavily on compromises that drew him closer to a Democratic sub-group that supported him, and hardly living by anything that might be considered the "family values" touted by the religious right. 

Conservative Base of the Republican Party: This is a term for the small minority of right wing Republicans who have been successful at conveying the idea that they control the Republican Party even though they have not be able to select a single genuine member of their faction as the party's candidate since 1964.

Attack Ads: These are what candidates call ads that (often accurately) recount weak parts of their records. Oddly, these are often acts of compromise that actually should be seen as the high points of their public service careers. The synonym for "attack ad" when it refers to an ad you would run against an opponent is "the truth."

Winning: This is not to be confused with the term "winning" made popular by deranged, drug-addled actor Charlie Sheen to refer to the disasters that made his career a shambles.  But it does share some similarities in that it seldom actually refers to winning. Candidates who finish second or third or even fourth or fifth in primaries might be said to have "won" because...well, because they don't want to admit they have lost. Which they did. A recent great example of this kind of spin is when after the Iowa caucuses, Ron Paul observed that if you counted the two guys who finished ahead of him as one guy then he would have finished second. 

Getting Tough with Iran: On a variety of policy issues what candidates say is very different from what they actually mean or intend to do. Therefore it is very important for non-native electoral English speakers to understand the real meaning of key foreign policy assertions lest they fear some of what is promised actually might happen. For example, GOP candidates, in an effort to show they are strong on defense will bend over backwards to say they will/would attack Iran to stop them from getting nuclear weapons. They are no more likely to than any American president -- which is to say, they are probably likely to support an attack on Iran by the Israelis if it needed to be made (as would the Saudis and a number of other of Iran's uncomfortable neighbors.)

Punishing China: This is another promise to be taken with a grain of salt. Mitt Romney, the almost certain GOP presidential candidate, has said he will be tough on the Chinese on trade. He won't be. His friends in business lean heavily against alienating the Chinese whose market is so attractive to them. So he'll rattle the economic saber but should he win election he will pull his punches.

Socialism: This is not a reference to the political theories of Karl Marx nor any descended from them. Rather it is a term used by Republicans to describe any government program that benefits parts of the population other than the rich or big business. It is designed to make the President of the United States seem more godless and "other" like. It implies he speaks Russian or Chinese to his children while burning American flags in secret possibly satanic rituals.

Europe: Hotbed of "socialism."  A synonym for failure...despite the fact that much of northern Europe outperforms the U.S. by almost every economic and quality of life measure.

Read on

If the first several years of any presidency can be characterized as a search by the chief executive for his identity as a leader, then it may be said that Barack Obama's search reached a milestone yesterday. He found a voice in Osawatomie, Kansas. He framed the political debate in America in a way that showed understanding and compassion. Whether this leads to an actual change in his behavior as a leader remains to be seen.

The president gave a powerful and impassioned speech that essentially turned on the idea that is fueling movement on both ends of the political spectrum in America today: that the US is no longer the land of opportunity that it once was, that powerful interests have corrupted the system and tilted the playing field in their direction. He assailed the inequality that has become the system's signature for the past three decades and laid claim to the role of being the champion of the country's forgotten, shrinking, strained middle class. Rebuffing forcefully the central Republican tenet that to speak of these problems is to foment class war, Obama asserted that seeking fairness is not class war but rather is the American way.

Call it canny politics or simply a fair characterization of America's central challenge of the moment, the president stood up for the majority of Americans and effectively if not explicitly turned the argument back on the Republicans: there is class war in America and it has been waged successfully by elites at the expense of Main Street since the Reagan era. The cant that lower taxes for companies and the rich would somehow benefit someone other than companies and the rich was called out for the fraud that it is.

Going further, the president advanced his current agenda -- notably the extension of the payroll tax cut --- as a means of addressing this problem. This was where the speech, for all its promise and the undeniable quality of its delivery, raised the most questions. The problem was well framed. The call to action was clear. But the prescriptive portion of the address was so weak as to make one wonder anew as to whether the president was capable of or inclined to the major adjustments he persuasively argued were necessary.

The speech reminded us both of candidate Obama, the champion of change, and of President Obama, who has been tentative in his challenges to the status quo ... or worse. The speech in Kansas yesterday demanded the end of the Bush tax cuts, a major investment in American infrastructure, the embrace of sweeping changes to ensure economic vitality such as those proposed by the Simpson Bowles Commission, real aid for American homeowners, and Wall Street reforms with far more scope and far sharper teeth than Dodd Frank.

Will the man who delivered yesterday's speech enter a new phase of his presidency in which he is willing to go to the mat for such changes, alienate rich donors, offend some in the Wall Street-Washington establishment with whom he has been close throughout his career? Is he the gutsy guy who broke through racial barriers in America and defied the Democratic political establishment on his way up? Or is he the professor, the man in the bubble at the White House, the world's most conservative liberal? A change agent or a weathervane?

As with many Obama speeches and even with his books, this one was a great source of hope, inspiring even. But at this point in America's existence we don't need a president who sees hope as audacious. We need one who sees it as a risk. We don't need change we can believe in. We need change we can see.

Yesterday could have been a watershed and the beginning of the president's march to a second term. Or ... if in the months ahead we continue to see timidity with regard to the big reforms we need, cat-and-mouse games with the Hill, the White House negotiating with itself before it capitulates to the right on the Hill ... then yesterday might be seen as the last great speech of a man who only had an opening act, a guy who could set the  stage, raise expectations, and then have to step aside to let someone else deliver the goods.

Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, flip a coin. There are differences between the two to be sure. But in the end, the net dissimilarity between these two establishment politicians is going to end up being considerably less than campaign rhetoric will suggest -- or than you might hope for.

Neither is anything like a transformational figure. Both are responsible, cautious men. Both, like most presidential candidates, are flawed by their ambition. There may be differences in emphasis, of course. One is too cool, a bit of a weathervane, beholden to Wall Street, not well loved within his own party establishment, not trusted by his party's base and the other is ... well, I guess that proves my point. From foreign policy to domestic programs, you can be pretty sure the efforts they lead will look surprisingly similar.

Presidential candidates run to the middle (and winners hail from the mainstream) because the deciding votes are cast in the middle. Usually -- and there are periodic exceptions -- that is what accounts for the fact that most presidents have more in common with the men who preceded or followed them in office than they would care to acknowledge.

This is one of the reasons that there is regular refrain for third party presidential candidates. It is also one of the reasons that such undertakings are typically doomed to failure and counterproductive.

If you want to produce real change in the way the government of the United States functions, the way to do it is to focus on the Congress. And boy, does the Congress ever need changing.

The failure of the stuporcommittee (which as of this writing seems all but certain) to even seriously grapple with the issue of the deficit is one of the grossest examples of dereliction of duty in the U.S. government since, well, since the Congress approved the Bush tax cuts. As Senator Tom Coburn said when presented with the idea that the Congress had an approval rating of only 13 percent, "I want to know who those 13 percent are." The Congressional approval rating has now fallen to just 9 percent. This Congress doesn't deserve an approval rating. They don't deserve another day on the job. They could all go home tomorrow and I bet it would be six months before anyone even noticed. (That is after the celebrations had died down.)

Yet, it is in the Congress that an effective, instantly relevant third party initiative could be undertaken. What this country -- divided as it is -- needs, is a legislative third party. It needs a group of swing votes that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans could pass anything without. And given the current state of things, that means it could be a fairly small group -- a handful of senators, 10 or 20 or 30  congresspeople. And it would be possible to identify districts and states where electing a third party or sworn swing vote candidate would be possible. And it would not cost a fraction of what it would cost to win a presidential election. And the group would immediately hold the balance of power on the Hill.

Presidential campaigns capture the glamour. It's easier to connect change with a single face, a single name, a single personality. But, look at where Washington is dysfunctional today and you have to acknowledge, the problem lies at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Capitol Hill has become the Boot Hill of ideas, the place initiatives go to die.

Having a third party on a hill that both sides had to work with to get anything done would change the dynamics dramatically. It would force compromise because there literally would be no way to proceed without it. You would think that was true today but the problem with the two political parties is both see compromise as capitulation to the other, it's a zero sum game. With a third party, that was open to reasonable ideas from both sides ... and couldn't succeed without one or the other...that would change things. It would also create a movement that could grow giving people an alternative to the binary choices they face today.

Clearly, something must be done. If the failure of the supercommittee does not convince you of that then you are already resigned to the irreversible decline of the United States. Because that is precisely where this kind of leadership failure will take us. That is why as important as the presidential sweepstakes are, the really important election news story of 2012 will be whether the American people vote for change in a Congress that has sold them out in every way possible. Certainly every member of the supercommittee and the leadership of both parties should be challenged on their record of failure. They should not be allowed to simply blame it on the other side. Just as the president should not be allowed to merely blame this on the Congress. This was important ... and he chose not to engage, not to take the political risk of rolling up his sleeves and working toward a solution, not to threaten and cajole and do what past presidents have done. It -- like his decision to agree to the extension of the Bush tax cuts -- are among the low points of his otherwise quite accomplished presidency. But neither he nor his potential successor will be able to fix Washington from the Oval Office (which is why whomever wins should get out of it and invite more people into it than the president has done this term). The real responsibility for change we can believe in actually resides with the American people ... and the surest sign whether or not they have accepted that challenge will come when the votes are tallied after next year's congressional balloting.