Opinion: Remember the Great Banana of 1929?

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What is in a name? A great deal when the subject is the $700 billion program for shoring up the economy. At least that’s the view of the Bush administration, John McCain and Nancy Pelosi. They have been propagating the idea that the failure of the proposal in the House on Monday owes at least in part to the ‘bailout’ label the media have affixed to the deal. The preferred term is now ‘rescue.’ (The Times split the difference on Wednesday’s front page, calling the deal a ‘bailout’ in the headline but referring to it as a ‘rescue plan’ in the lead paragraph of the actual story.)

I’m skeptical. Even if the media had forsworn the B word, the angry citizens who jammed Capitol Hill switchboards this week would have opposed it for offering a lifeline to Wall Street, never mind the argument that the real beneficiary will be Main Street.

The semantic fuss over ‘bailout’ remind me of the great Banana Incident during Jimmy Carter’s administration. Alfred Kahn, a Carter economic adviser, infurated the president when he warned that runaway inflation threatened a ‘deep, deep depression.’ After being chastised, Kahn substituted the word ‘banana’ for ‘depression.’ His new warning: ‘We’re in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years.’

Washington is obsessed with the supposed power of nomenclature. That’s why bills in Congress are named after crime victims (see ‘Jacob’s Law’) and why lobbying groups conceal their agendas and affiliations with neutral-sounding name (e.g., Citizens for a Sound Economy’). This is the place, after all, where tax increases were euphemized as ‘revenue enhancements.’ But, for good or ill, voters see through the semantic fog.

If the much-tweaked financial legislation is enacted, it won’t be because its proponents stopped calling it a ‘bailout’ and instead pleaded for passage of a ‘rescue plan’ -- or a banana.

Bailout photo by Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images