As much as politicians like to imagine themselves men and women of action, what they mostly do is talk. They talk to the cameras, they talk to constituents, they talk to contributors, they talk to each other. It's almost impossible to be a successful politician without the ability to lodge words and images in the public mind.

The result is that a really adept politician has to be part linguist and part semiotician. This is particularly true when you're out of power and there's so little you can actually accomplish. As Republicans are faced with the possibility that this week, Democrats might actually succeed in passing their most critical domestic initiative, is their mastery of the symbolic really enough?