Posted on 08/24/2004 6:40:13 AM PDT by veronica
Hey, did you hear the latest Bushism? The master of verbal gaffes was at it again recently when he tried to invoke the memory of the Minutemen of Massachusetts, who, in the words of the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, "fired the shot heard 'round the world." Except somehow the line came out "fired the shirt 'round the world."
What, you missed it?
Maybe that's because it wasn't George W. Bush who said it. No, it was Edward M. Kennedy who mangled the oft-quoted line from Emerson's "Concord Hymn" during his speech at the Democratic National Convention. Kennedy, of course, has been fracturing syntax in public for four decades, yet somehow his bloopers aren't trotted out as evidence of his dimwittedness. There's no calendar of Teddy-Twisters to re-assure jittery Republicans each morning how much cleverer they are than the senior senator from Massachusetts.
Then again, you probably also missed Hillary Clinton's history lesson a few years back during which she held forth on the life of Sojourner Truth: "I really hope our children learn about Sojourner Truth … because she did stand for truth and she did sojourn in difficult places time and time again… She went through swamps, she was chased by dogs. She was shot at … and she found her way to freedom" whereupon, according to Clinton, our heroine "turned around and went back. She would send out the word to the plantations that she was coming back. And if people could get there … in the trees or on the side of their swamp, she would be there."
The trouble is, Sojourner Truth never escaped her bondage and never was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Hillary was recounting the life of Harriet Tubman.
Now imagine if George Bush had given that speech.
The myth of the president's stupidity is a curious psychological phenomenon. It derives in part, I suspect, from Bush's overt religiosity -- which many half-educated media types ridicule in order to amuse their quarter-educated audience. There's probably also an element of regional snobbery at work. Bush speaks with a pronounced drawl. As Victor David Hanson has noted, the New York and Los Angeles elite will forgive a Southern accent, even find it charming, if it comes from the mouth of a Democrat like Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. But from the mouth of a Republican, it connotes a character from Deliverance. Certainly, Bush is not as linguistically adroit as his supporters would wish. But if you stick a microphone in anyone's face often enough, he's going to say silly things.
Now it's true, for what it's worth, that as a young man Bush didn't do especially well on his SAT exams -- at least compared with other Yale students. He got a 566 verbal and a 640 math, relatively low by Ivy League standards, but the scores ranked him, overall, around the 80th and 90th percentiles respectively. (His combined 1206 is actually the equivalent of a 1280 in current SAT scoring because the test was "re-centered" -- read: dumbed-down -- in the mid 1990s.)
Earlier this year, Linda Gottfredson, co-director of the University of Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society, converted Bush's SAT numbers to an IQ score; she factored in high school norms from an Educational Testing Service study done in the early 1960s, when Bush took the exam, and derived an IQ of 125 -- which would place Bush in the 95th percentile. By comparison, John F. Kennedy's IQ was measured at 119.
To date, John Kerry has not released either his SAT or IQ scores. And in truth intelligence is much more than a number -- as cognitive psychologists constantly reassure us. Still, it's worth pondering the quality of mind that came out with this doozy, from a Democratic candidates' debate last September: "If we hadn't voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat."
Suddenly, a guy who garbles a few phrases doesn't sound quite so bad.
Sojourner Truth escaped to Canada in 1827. She returned to the US in 1829 after New York abolished slavery.
Goldblatt should correct this embarassing mistake.
Hey, let's not knock Ted Kennedy. He gave a wonderful speech for someone who was blind, s**t-faced drunk.
Bush is always misunderestimated.
Great article! I just forwarded it to a number of my Bush-mocking, liberal co-workers...
Good one, very good.
Good related story posted today:
Who do you want running the country?
The first link didn't work. The second link does not confirm Goldblatt's assertion.
Surely the politicos who oppose him now see him as a bit more savvy than they once thought, but the problem is that the American people have accepted as fact that Bush is dumb. I don't know that we can now counter this conclusion, I do so at every opportunity, and I even encounter "yeah, he may be dumb BUT..." from those ON OUR SIDE!
I hope that everyone will realize that we can't give up trying to dispel this nasty, demonstrably untrue and very potent allegation.
Who was Sojourner Truth?
Sojourner Truth came to Northampton in 1843 to live at the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community in Florence. Born a slave in upstate New York in approximately 1797, she labored for a succession of five masters until the Fourth of July, 1827, when slavery was finally abolished in New York State. Then Isabella - as she had been named at birth - became legally free.
After prevailing in a courageous court action demanding the return of her youngest son Peter, who had been illegally sold away from her to a slave owner in Alabama, Isabella moved to New York City. There she worked as a housekeeper and became deeply involved in religion. Isabella had always been very spiritual, and soon after being emancipated, had a vision which affected her profoundly, leading her - as she later described it - to develop a “perfect trust” in God and prayer.
After fifteen years in New York, Isabella felt a call to become a travelling preacher. She took her new name - Sojourner Truth - and with little more than the clothes on her back, began walking through Long Island and Connecticut, speaking to people in the countryside about her life and her relationship with God. She was a powerful speaker and singer. When she rose to speak, wrote one observer, “her commanding figure and dignified manner hushed every trifler to silence.” Audiences were “melted into tears by her touching stories.”
After several months of traveling, Truth was encouraged by friends to go to the Northampton Association, which had been founded in 1841 as a cooperative community dedicated to abolitionism, pacifism, equality and the betterment of human life. There, she met progressive thinkers like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and David Ruggles, and the local abolitionists Samuel Hill, George Benson and Olive Gilbert. Douglass described her at the time as “a strange compound of wit and wisdom, of wild enthusiasm and flintlike common sense.”
When the association disbanded in 1846, Truth remained in Northampton, moving for the first time into her own home, on Park Street in Florence, with a loan from Samuel Hill. Although Truth never learned to read or write, she dictated her memoirs to Olive Gilbert and they were published in 1850 as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. This book, and her presence as a speaker, made her a sought-after figure on the anti-slavery woman’s rights lecture circuit.
Over the next decade she travelled and spoke widely. She is particularly remembered for the famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech she gave at the woman’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.
Truth moved to Michigan in 1857 and continued her advocacy. After the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, she moved to Washington, D.C., where, in her late 60’s, she began working with former slaves in the newly created Freedman’s Village. She met with President Lincoln in the White House, where he told her that he had heard her speeches long before.
After the Civil War, she set out on a final crusade to gain support for her dream of a land distribution program for former slaves - an idea which, despite her lobbying, Congress refused to enact. Finally she returned to her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, where, surrounded by her family and friends, she died in 1883
Plus, he managed to fly the F-102 that everybody who flies fighters loves to hate because if it's slippery handling characteristics. And he's still alive to tell the tale.
Bush, like Clinton, is a very able player of Machiavellian power politics. Clinton instinctively recognized this form of power I.Q. in Bush early on just as he knew that Al Gore was completely clueless in this area. Bush's well-known malaprop "strategery" seems to describe some of this type of intelligence -- the ability to formulate and employ power strategies in a highly strategic and effective manner.
Unlike Clinton, Bush is both principled and highly disciplined. One of the few times he gives up his game is when he allows himself to smirk at the smart asses he is in the process of outwitting. Fortunately for him, many of his pompous adversaries are so invested in their own superiority that Bush is able to employ simple rope-a-dope techniques again and again with devastating consequences.
Sojourner Truth ended up in southern Michigan.
Sojourner Truth ended up in southern Michigan.
Fortunately I am not old enough to have overlapped with Coolidge, I only date back to Ike. Silent Cal's disdain for gab made him somewhat singular in the ranks of top rank politicians. Perhaps it is not fair for me to tag him as being inarticulate. He is credited with at least the following very memorable speech:
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
Cal may not even have had as poor oratory skills as did Harding. H.L. Mencken described his speeches as: "It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it."
Bush 43 has already more than his share of memorable quotes, which I think will outlive those of Clinton. This is because they resonate with his character and firm believes rather than coming off as the merely the clever product of some forgotten speech writer drone. At his best, Bush is an exceptionally effective communicator. Even his malaprops have a kind of bizarro eloquence to them in that they can efficiently and memorably communicate an idea even while he unintentionally abandons grammar, syntax, and recognizable English words.
What stands out for me is the he as with Cal has reached the highest level of politics without being particularly gifted in the use of one of the primary tools of the trade. While I may be alone in this view, even Reagan fumbled around with his words (think of all the "Wellls"). With Reagan, however, his nonverbal language was uncommonly eloquent. He also had more than his share of grace, and in the end, he was truly a great communicator whose words closely partnered with his firmest believes.
Clinton was very glib and exceedingly clever in the way he would support his deceptive words with even more deceptive body language. But in the end it was all blather with the man.
Bush 43's plain speaking ways often work to his advantage as they support his image as a honest and trustworthy man. Unlike Reagan, however, his nonverbal language can be equally out to sea (observe how awkward his hands can be). I think there has been a cost to having a president with such poor communication skills. He has often not been able to effectively communicate the purpose of our current war and why he is fighting this way to much of the nation. This has resulting in greater divisiveness than I think would otherwise be the case.
In Kerry, Bush is blessed with an opponent who speaks in such an amazingly pompous manner and who is so odiously self-aggrandizing that even his strongest backers can barely stomach the man.
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