Month: May 2012

I recently suggested that GOP congressmen speaking at a lower reading level showed they were dumber. Megan Carpentier takes issue:

The nation’s capitol is, for better and sometimes for worse, filled with people with fancy degrees, high SAT scores, a love of big words and immersed in a culture dominated by jargon and acronyms that often obscure the meaning of that which they are supposedly designed to communicate. Speaking at a graduate school level proves only that you can use big words in the correct fashion. Communicating complicated concepts in simple ways that people without your education can understand while not feeling stupid that you’re explaining it to them is actually a much tougher skill — and one they definitely don’t teach in college.

A few Dish readers also dissent:

Did you even read the article? The GOP freshman given the lowest grade in the "study" – or however you want to characterize their evaluation of speech patterns – is a Georgetown graduate, with honors, who then got his law degree from the University of North Carolina – which is ranked No. 38 by US News in its annual survey of law schools. Quit linking to trashy stuff on HuffPo – it brings down your content.

Another:

There is really a lot left to be desired about this "study" and the reporting on it.  I guess we can ignore that maybe a measure of readability (the Flesch-Kincaid test) shouldn't be used in measuring a speech.  I guess we can ignore that more complex speech does not make someone well spoken.  If we ignore those things, then I guess we can say Congress sounds dumb and now we have the study to prove it.

Please, listen to the NPR piece and tell us what you think.  The example they give for the highest level speaker is a mess.  You can actually understand the lowest-level speaker.  And his father was a grammar teacher!
 
By the way, Old Man and the Sea reads at 5th grade level.

Kevin Williamson claims it's the GOP:

[W]orse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow "switched places" vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.

Chait fisks:

Williamson crafts a tale in which the Republican Party is and always has been the greatest friend the civil rights cause ever had. The Republican takeover of the white South had absolutely nothing to do with civil rights, the revisionist case proclaims, except insofar as white Southerners supported Republicans because they were more pro-civil rights.

Bernstein piles on:

[Y]ou would never know from reading this quite long article that there was a northern wing of the Democratic Party at all. Democrats, for Williamson, were Southern Democrats, and they collectively and inexplicably had a "radical turnaround" in 1964. But of course that's not even remotely true. The real story is that the Democratic Party essentially split in two over time, with the Southern branch eventually disappearing. The key event is the 1948 Democratic National Convention, at which Humphrey gave a famous speech in favor of a strong civil rights plank, and the South responded by walking out and running a separate campaign.

Galupo is slightly more sympathetic:

Williamson is on firm ground when he cites other factors to explain Republican dominance in Dixie: among them the rise of a new suburban class in the South; the capture by the McGovernite left of the Democratic Party. He could have mentioned the influence of conservative protestantism as well. … But it’s too clever by half to try to pin the parts of this worldview that offend our sensibilities onto the contemporary Democratic party.

Williamson is dead-on when it comes to the past. The party of Lincoln was indeed a noble cause. But it was consciously killed by Nixon and then Reagan. Let me remind Kevin of the words of Lee Atwater, no liberal or knee-jerk Democrat:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Why would Atwater lie?

(Photo: A banner incorporating the Confederate flag trails a small plane prior to a NASCAR Nextel Cup Series race May 12, 2007 at Darlington Raceway in Darlington, South Carolina. The banner was a protest organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. By Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

Will.i.am helicopters from London to Oxford – to attend a climate change conference.

Unless the administration wants to leak national security details for a Hollywood propaganda movie. The key context:

As is now well documented, the Obama administration has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, prosecuting more of them under espionage statutes than all prior administrations combined: twice as many as all prior administrations combined, in fact.

In Australia, the press asks, you know, questions about public officials, rather than covering for them:

Thankfully, no topic was off-limits in this discussion. Crabb brought McGinniss around to the issue of Trigg’s birth. Although McGinniss says he is unable to say for certain whether or not Sarah gave birth to this child, he recounted the "Wild Ride" theory in every detail and concluded that, if in fact she was the birth mother, she is one hellishly reckless "mother." As he described each detail of the "Wild Ride" sequence of events, with the revelation of each new detail, the laughter became louder and louder. So by the end of the story, when he came to the part where she took an hour and a half drive from Anchorage to a basic and ill-equipped Wasilla hospital, the audience was in stitches! The audience left no doubt they believed not one syllable of the story – not one.

What a healthy reaction: pure, incapacitating laughter at the ludicrous stories Palin told.

"Romney. This joker comes in saying that Obama has done nothing: 'He hasn't fixed the deficit.' Let me tell you something. Do you actually fucking believe that in four years you're going to fix the deficit? Are you kidding me? That's a lifetime project. … It's amazing the bullshit that people believe," – Jose Canseco, the testosteroned baseball player.

A reader dissents:

The connection you draw between Romney's revoltingly fake persona and his religion is degenerating into bigotry. Have all you analysts of the "Mormon Mask" thought about how Harry Reid, John Huntsman, and Orrin Hatch are Mormons as well? They don't seem this fake. Mitt's plastic personality is to be attributed to Mitt Romney, not his religion.

Or some fusion of both his own personality and his family's deep ties to the LDS Church. Another bolsters my case:

In the published version of his one-man play, "Confessions of a Mormon Boy," gay ex-Mormon Steven Fales starts with a section entitled "The Smile." Here's a quote:

"The Mormon smile is made by first thinking how deeply grateful and blessed you are to belong to 'the only true and living Church upon the face of the whole earth.' As one of the Chosen, this thought brings you incomparable glee that just can't be contained … Your smile can be used for many things, but its official purpose is to attract others to the Church (and other multilevel marketing campaigns–think Amway).  You smile all the time because you never know how or when your smile might convert another to the source of true happiness–'mainstream' Mormonism.  …  If you're ever caught not smiling, you will be held responsible for all the souls that would have been saved had you been smiling as you should have been.  Some of your salvation may be deducted in the next life if you're not careful.  You must avoid this and any guilt with every fiber of your being.  As it says in the Bible, 'Let your light so shine.' …"

So the Mormon smile and Mormon cheer is meant to attract potential converts. It's a missionary tool (or a marketing tool, though that's about the same thing).

Colin Powell takes a look at Romney's foreign policy team, and gulps.

Perhaps they are most impactful when he is not announcing anything he will or can do – but when he simply talks about his own views and evolution in a compelling and persuasive way. He can capture and accelerate the evolution of others. And it appears he has:

Of the 53 percent of Americans who say the freedom to marry should be legal, 39 percent voiced that they were “strongly” in support.  In contrast, only 32 percent voiced “strong” opposition.

That's a shift, as if an authority figure is sometimes necessary to allow people to own their feelings on an issue which had long been regarded as toxic. The gender gap also evaporates in this latest poll, as if Obama gave some straight men permission to support equality. But notice how this has isolated Republicans even further on this issue (the WaPo interactive tool is awesome, btw):

As the country as a whole grows more supportive of gay equality, the GOP is headed in the other direction. Republican support for marriage equality has declined a full ten points just this year – a pretty stunning result. Have they changed their mind simply because Obama supports something? In today's polarized, partisan climate, I wouldn't be surprised.

Republicans have been giddy over Obama's "embarrassing results" in Democratic primaries in West Virginia, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Alec MacGillis rolls his eyes: 

Obama certainly is a vulnerable incumbent, as suggested by the latest national polling showing him only slightly ahead of Mitt Romney. But Kentucky and Arkansas offer little in the way of affirmation. For the hundredth time, let me suggest that people take a look at this map [see above]. It shows the counties where Obama in 2008 got a lower share of the general election vote than John Kerry had four years earlier, even as Obama did vastly better than Kerry nationwide. It is a virtually contiguous band of territory stretching from southwestern Pennsylvania through Appalachia and across the Upland South, finally petering out in north-central Texas. It is, almost to a T, what Colin Woodard, in his fascinating new ethnographic history of North America, American Nations, defined as the territory of the "Borderlanders" — the rough-hewn Scots-Irish who arrived in this country from the "borderlands" of northern Ireland and Scotland, and claimed for themselves the inland hill country, far from the snooty Northeastern elites and Southern gentry. And look more closely at the map — where was Obama's 2008 dropoff particularly heavy? In eastern Kentucky and most of Arkansas.

Keep in mind: this was at the peak of Obama's popularity.

It was before he began his "war on coal," before Obamacare, before all the things that pundits will point to to explain why this part of the country is so dead set against the president. And yet he did worse in this region than Kerry, who's not exactly Johnny Of The Ozarks. The easy explanation for this is obvious, but I don't think it's actually all that simple. The more complicated answer is that this region has been shifting away from the Democrats at the national level for more than a decade now, as the national party has become more identified with highly-educated elites — a trend that Barack Obama accelerated because, well, he's a highly-educated elite. But many voters in these parts still identify as Democrats, unlike their fellow conservatives in the Deep South, and so they turn out to vote in Democratic primaries.