Loose cannon

Reader question:

Please explain “loose cannon”, as in this passage:

This candidate had appealing ideas, was a good speaker, and had an impressive record. But he lost. Too many voters were afraid he was a loose cannon who’d go his own way.

My comments:

A “loose cannon” is one that is, well, loose. It either leaks the cannonball – leaves it rolling out of the barrel – or it may get a cannonball stuck in the barrel, which may explode any minute on its own. In other words, a loose cannon is out of control, and dangerous.

Figuratively, a loose cannon is often used to refer to a person who is unpredictable, and “liable to cause damage if not kept in check by others” (Phrases.org.uk).

In the above example, the “good” candidate lost the race because he’s not always under control and in party politics, control is everything. Party members serve, first and foremost, the interests of their party, looking after its collective agendas ahead of their own. In other words, the group is paramount. The individual must sacrifice its personal preferences, likes or dislikes, for the sake of the group.

Not just in party politics, either. If you’re a Winter Olympic athlete in China, this appears to hold true, too. If, that is, you’re Zhou Yang, who won two gold medals in Vancouver and if you’re under the leadership of such officials as Yu Zaiqing, deputy minister of the Sports Commission, sports’ governing body in China. Yu was quoted by the Nanfang Dushi Daily (NDDaily.com, March 8, 2010) as criticizing Zhou for thinking of his parents first – ahead of, apparently, her “dear leaders” – after securing one of her gold medals: “For a kid to thank their parents is alright, no problem, but first she should have thanked her country.” Yu made the remark during the on-going annual CPPCC (Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference), China’s top political advisory meeting.

Replay: To the camera after skating home first in the 1,500-meter race, Zhou had said: “Getting this gold I’ll change a lot, will become more confident, and this will enable my parents to live a better life.”

Run-on sentences, perhaps, if you’re a pedantic, nitpicking grammarian but other than that I don’t think you can fault the athlete for anything. Therefore, it’s pretty sad to witness a seasoned politician taking exception to the loose lips of “a kid” (Zhou is 18), for forgetting her “dear leaders” in the heat of the moment – fresh after a gold-winning race, that is, in the Olympics, the biggest sports meet of them all. However, putting a positive spin on the matter, I hope Yu’s advice helps prepare Zhou for what life might be like after sports, in case she wants to move on (or down) to sports government after she hangs up the skates. In case, that is, she ever wants to see sports continue to mix with politics.

Anyways, here are two media examples of “loose canon”:

1. Michael Lawrence, the sacked chief executive of the Stock Exchange, was a loose cannon that threatened to explode at any moment causing immense damage, a leading City market-maker said yesterday.

Rejecting allegations by Mr Lawrence that he was ousted by a “classic coup” of market-makers fearing that proposed reforms to the way shares are traded would hit their business, Donald Brydon, deputy chief executive of BZW, said the truth was very different.

“Over a significant time many Exchange board members became edgy about aspects of Mr Lawrence’s performance. There were many opportunities to gain the impression that at any moment the opportunity existed for an explosion to occur over one incident or another,” Mr Brydon told the Treasury Select Committee.

Giving evidence to the MPs moments later, John Kemp-Welch, the chairman of the Stock Exchange, rejected Mr Lawrence’s accusation that he could have saved him by supporting him. “I find it a doubtful proposition. When put to the vote, not one member of the board voted in favour of Mr Lawrence,” he said.

- Market-maker labels Lawrence ‘a loose cannon ready to explode’, Independent.co.uk, March 21, 1996.

2. It’s not exactly a man-bites-dog story when someone accuses Bill Clinton of stretching the truth, but when it's a president of his own party, and when what he calls Clinton is a “bald-faced” liar, and when that president happens to employ Clinton’s wife as the Secretary of State, well, yes, that’s kind of newsworthy.

That’s one of the juicier morsels in Renegade: The Making of a President, a new campaign book by Richard Wolffe, who covered the 2008 presidential race for Newsweek. Wolffe also quotes Barack Obama as referring during the campaign to former President Clinton as “a loose cannon.”

These quotations are sourced directly to Obama himself, and come out of interviews the author did with “the candidate,” as Wolffe calls him in a conscious emulation of Kennedy campaign biographer Theodore White. That Obama cooperated with Wolffe is obvious; in fact, it appears that the idea for the book may originally have been Obama’s. Revealingly, the tension in Wolffe’s narrative is elevated when he’s writing about the nomination fight between Obama and Hillary Clinton more than when he chronicles the runoff between Obama and John McCain. This is as it should be. Not only was the Obama-Clinton contest closer than the Obama-McCain duel, it was longer, more bitter, more interesting, and more historic...

“We had to figure out how to deal with a former president who was just lying, engaging in bald-faced lies,” Obama told Wolffe. When the author asked if Bill Clinton had gotten into his head, Obama replied, “Yes, but I got into his.”

True enough, and, according to Wolffe, that consideration entered into Obama’s thinking when it came to choosing a running mate. Obama instructed his aides to consider Hillary -- if and only if they thought she’d help the ticket win in November. “But,” Obama added, “I’m concerned about Bill Clinton being a loose cannon.”

- Obama on Clinton: A ‘Loose Cannon’ Who Tells ‘Bald-Faced Lies’, Politicsdaily.com, June 3, 2009.