Carney's "petite bargain" phrase fails to catch on (whew) Posted at 08:39 AM ET, 03/06/2013 Just like "Mean Girls": stop trying to make "petite bargain" happen! White House spokesman Jay Carney might have tried to make a contribution to the Washington lexicon when he told reporters earlier this week that President Obama would be open to a "petite bargain" on sequestration. Perhaps inspired by the invention of the trendy new term "snowquester," which seemed to be on everyone's lips, Carney came up with the turn of phrase, a riff on the "grand bargain" that the president famously once hoped for. But Shakespeare Carney ain't. Almost no one picked up on the phrase, it seems. On Capitol Hill, it was barely uttered. And it makes for a crummy hashtag, so #petitebargain generated only a few tweets, mostly among Washington reporters mocking the phrase. In fact, Carney's more like the character in "Mean Girls" who tries to popularize the word "fetch" as a synonym for "awesome." She is chided: "Stop trying to make "fetch" happen!"