The 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation is great timing to mention one of the most over-used and clichéd terms in the modern political lexicon: Gate.
The proliferation of scandal coverage is clear from the mushrooming list of “gates” that have joined the political vocabulary in recent years.
Any list of gates is an impressive compendium of hype and folly, newsprint and book deals, litigation and vexation. The term has traveled far, precisely because of the press’s preference for scandal. It has gone from Watergate, named for the site of a botched June 1972 attempt by Nixon’s henchmen to bug the president’s Democratic rivals, to Nipplegate, the name given Janet Jackson’s famous “wardrobe malfunction” during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.
A decade later came Bridgegate, over efforts by staffers for New Jersey governor Chris Christie to cause a traffic jam in Fort Lee as a measure of political payback against local Democratic officials.
This specific sort of scandal packaging may be one of American politics’ chief exports. Take a cursory glance at how far the gate name has penetrated the foreign press. Recently, we’ve seen the international scandals of Climategate, Cablegate (over Wikileaks), and Dopegate (over Lance Armstrong) and well as highly country-specific gates. The UK gave us Murdochgate and Bigotgate; Canada, NAFTAgate and Robogate; from Ireland, Brothelgate; and India gave us Slapgate and Porngate.
Many political journalists think it’s time to retire the phrase altogether. Using it in a slap-dash manner detracts from the unique political corruption episode that was Watergate, they contend.
“The scandal — and its endless string of ‘you-name-it-gate’ sequels has doubtless also deterred or dissuaded many qualified and talented private-sector talents from undertaking public service because they know it will require not only expected financial sacrifice, but probably also big legal bills from the investigative culture that Watergate helped spawn,” Politico columnist Todd S. Purdum wrote on Aug. 8, 2014, exactly 40 years after Nixon announced he would resign.
Washington Post “Fix” analyst Philip Bump similarly argued the phrase is overused. “The ‘-gate’ suffix is a favorite of those hoping to cast an event in a negative light, as it has been for years. (Even abroad, a spoiled meat scandal in China earlier this year was dubbed 臭肉门, ‘Foul Meat-gate.’)”
“It's hard to quantify this. Searches for ‘-gate’ don't yield much. And we hate to rely on anecdotalism, but it's obvious that 1) the ‘-gate’ suffix was meaningless before 1970 and that 2) it is used more broadly than to describe the events that brought down Nixon.
Nor is U.S. News columnist Susan Milligan a fan of “gate” - at least what the phrase has morphed into. “It’s become almost comical, watching politicos and the like attach the word ‘gate’ to whatever is upsetting them: Iran-gate, Monica-gate, Benghazi-gate, IRS-gate. To do so not only reduces some genuinely serious events and cases of malfeasance to rhetorical cuteness, but it diminishes the seriousness of the Watergate affair itself.”