It's a way to say "See, I told you so and so was going somewhere" and not get called on it when they don't.

So he's wishing there was a Christie-type candidate. Too bad for him lol

But I hear ya.

In the soundbyte age, they bill themselves as such. "I'm the pro-life, fiscally responsible, fighter for the middle class who believes in energy independence and a strong military." The pundits put the stated positions into columns and place them on the left-right continuum so the pundits can say clever things like 'he's running to the right of Carson on foreign policy.'

Most politicans on the national level are trying to conceal their personalities and present a representative for the public to see, upon whom it should make a decision. Bush's "now watch this drive' comes to mind as a clear moment when he stopped the act and wanted to go back to being George. Rare are the politicians who are just themselves and unrehearsed, who can sit down with pundits for significant lengths of time without pre-planned questions.

The pundits referring to them as commodities is, to some extent, simply the truth.

Pundits don't get points for intelligent analysis.

What bothers me even more is when one of them comes up with what he considers a clever turn of phrase, then proceeds to beat it into the ground by repeating it three, maybe four times.

Yes, I'm talking to you, Chris Matthews.

rather than just that specific individual .

more than the opinion of someone like a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin

"the Chris Christies of the world..."

(1) "I want a gin and tonic."


(2) "I want something like a gin and tonic."


They really don't mean the same thing. By the maxim of relevance, when I say (2) I'm excluding (1).

Try denying the proposition and seeing how well-formed it is:

"I want a gin and tonic but don't want a gin and tonic." That, at best, indicates hesitation, otherwise it's fairly incoherent.

"I want something like a gin and tonic but don't want a gin and tonic." That's perfectly fine: Suggest something that has the properties of gin and tonic that I'm looking for but which is, in itself, not a gin and tonic.

They don't mean the same thing.

We can quibble:
(a) I want a candidate who's Anatolii Jaquan bin Shteyn y Sanchez.

(b) I want a candidate who's like an Anatolii Jaquan bin Shteyn y Sanchez.

(c) I want a candidate who's like Anatolii Jaquan bin Shteyn y Sanchez.

(a) is worded strangely, but it's basically naming the candidate you want. It's like "I want a gin and tonic." (Notice that "I want gin and tonic" reduces it to a mass noun--"just keep the gin and tonic flowing" is buried in there, instead of individual drink portions.) Just as (2) rules out (1) above, so (b) rules out (a). It's a way of saying, fairly clearly, that they don't like that candidate because of some flaw, but want another candidate that's similar but sans the offending defect.

Ex. (c), to me, has a weaker conversational implicature. It doesn't rule out dear Tolya with the same force.

So what's the difference between (b) and (c)? Not sure. Introspection, as Chomsky pointed out, is a sucky way of doing things. Still, at some point native speaker judgments come into play. My intuition may be flawed and parochial, but it's this: In (c) I have some traits in mind, but they're not explicit or well defined. In (b) I have a media representation and I'm not referring to the actual person (can't use an article in English with personal names, we're not speaking Bulgarian, after all). By using the indefinite article, I'm saying there are individual, distinct "AJ bS y S" around, similar enough that as far as I'm concerned they're interchangeable. Much like any gin and tonic is interchangeable with another. If I use (c), he's still a person instead of an object.

I could achieve the same result with

(d) I want a candidate who's got the same relevant traits as Anatolii Jaquan bin Shteyn y Sanchez"

but then the register is wrong and I haven't dehumanized and objectified AJbSyS. Ex. (b) sounds more trendy and cognoscenti, more distant, with Tolya written off as a viable candidate, while (d) sounds more academic. Sometimes it's not just the meaning but the style and register that matters.

Nuance. Language abhors synonyms, whether lexical or syntactic.

THE President is much more respectful.