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English Language & Usage Sign up or log in to customize your list. Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question The best answers are voted up and rise to the top In today’s Washington Post’s “Today’s Quote,” picked up from the comment of Former Reagan Budget director David Stockman in an interview with The Daily Beast (hat tip to Political Wire), I came across the phrase “Obama will fold faster than a lawn chair.” As I could not get the idea of “fold faster a lawn chair,” or even “fold a lawn chair,” I consulted Merriam Webster, Cambridge Dictionary Online and The online Slang Dictionary in vain to find none of them carry the definition of the above phrases. Is David Stockman predicting that President Obama will withdraw his agenda easily like folding a lawn chair, (or give up lawn chair i.e. his stand) and succumb to Republicans to accept their budget reduction plan? What is the exact meaning of “fold faster a lawn chair”?
Is this a well-established cliché, though I couldn’t find it in any of dictionaries available? The sentence containing this phrase is as follows:I think the Republicans need to stand rigidly firm and shut the government down for a few days. The Obama White House is weak. If the Republicans hold the line, Obama will fold faster than a lawn chair. And the Republicans will get their $60 billion in reductions. A lawn chair is a lightweight piece of folding furniture, made out of aluminum or fiberglass. It is designed to be easy to fold up and put away, or to unfold and take out, when one has guests for a party on the lawn or patio. In this case it means Obama will give in to pressure and abandon his position, if he has one, as he has often done in the past in the face of Republican pressure. Fold, meaning "give in to your opponents" probably comes from the game of poker, where you can literally fold your hand and put it down to signify giving up. A lawn chair is something that folds quickly, although in a different sense.
So this is an idiom like He lies like a rug. which plays on the two different meanings of a word. What he refers to here is actually what we call in the UK a deck chair... The deck chair folds away for ease of storage and is often used as a comical prop because it can be quite unsterdy and can collapse. So what the quote means is that President Obama will fold (collapse under pressure) as easily as an unstable chair (in this instance a lawn chair) will collapse under physical pressure. To fold faster than a lawn chair has a more passive, acted-upon connotation than merely to "withdraw" his agenda. Stockman means that he'll surrender at the least opposition. Stockman has been wrong many times: wrong as a fart in church; so wrong he can't even do wrong right. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google Sign up using Email and Password Post as a guest By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service. Not the answer you're looking for?