Democrats Won by Flukes

Democrats won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

Barely. 

When they had every advantage.

 
The year 1992 began a long string of Democratic national popular vote victories that serve to comfort and re-assure Democrats. They think they have the winning ideas, people, and demographic trends to make the current success even better in the future. Democrats observe that young people trend Democratic, and they will be around for decades.  Republican seniors are dying off. More people are getting college educated and they trend Democratic. There are more people of color in the country and more of them are voting. It's fair weather ahead for Democrats.

The reality is that Democrats have been lucky.

The Great Depression election. FDR established the New Deal coalition amid the misery of 20% unemployment, bank failures, and a minimal public safety net. Neither the Fed, the Hoover Administration, nor politicians in either party knew what to do to end the Depression. Hoover was the incumbent and things were miserable, so of course he took the blame. Hungry, out-of-work people seek change. FDR was there and he represented change.

The Watergate election. Jimmy Carter won the popular vote in 1976 with 50.08% of the vote. I was a young adult during that election and I remember the zeitgeist. Republicans were on the ropes. Richard Nixon had recently resigned from the presidency with the majority support--insistence--of GOP senators. America had watched a year of hearings and revelations about Nixon, and the TV channels represented non-partisan high-minded citizenship. Revelation after revelation shocked Americans. Back in those days Republican voters could be bothered by misbehavior by a president of their own party. They were embarrassed by what was revealed, because significantly, so was Nixon. He knew he had mis-behaved, which is why he covered up his obstruction of justice. He felt ashamed, and that shame communicated to the public. Besides, he swore in the Oval Office, and it was on tape. We all learned the phrase "expletive deleted," the term for deleted words in printed transcripts of the conversations. Nixon offended people, Republicans included. Icing on the cake of corruption was the revelation that the first Nixon Vice President resigned rather than being prosecuted for taking monetary bribes, right in the VP's office. Gerald Ford faced a tough primary against Reagan. Ford's own words about the era call it a "long national nightmare." It wasn't over because Ford then pardoned Nixon. It all looked bad.

Plus, inflation was out of control and unemployment was high, twin miseries that were not supposed to happen simultaneously, but did. They created a name for it: "Stagflation."

So I ask the question: How much worse can it be for the GOP than it was as the time of the 1976 election?

Jimmy Carter won, but just barely. 

The Ross Perot confusion. The 1992 election that put Bill Clinton into office was a strange three-person race, with the entry and strong presence of an eccentric billionaire. Ross Perot taught us that Americans were intrigued by a plain-talking self-confident billionaire. His bluntness came across as honesty. His billions implied competence. He got 19% of the vote. 

It is unclear whether Perot helped Bush or Clinton. What is clear is that his presence scrambled political alignments and that it was a tough time to be president. George H.W. Bush carried the burden of political longevity turning into frailty. He had succeeded Reagan, having what was essentially Reagan's third term, and this would be a fourth term. Voters were restless. Plus there was a recession. "It's the economy, stupid" was on the wall of the War Room. The meme was that the Reagan-Bush era was tired. Bush looked at his watch during a debate, as if to ask when all this would be over. The answer was soon. Amid all this Bill Clinton won, with a plurality, not a majority. He got 43% of the vote; 57% wanted somebody else.

The Great Financial Crisis election. The Republican nominee had an impossible job in 2008. The Bush Administration presided over a collapse of the financial system. The economy in November, 2008, was shutting down. The banking crisis spread to the insurance industry and then to industrial companies and then to Main Street. General Motors and Chrysler needed to be bailed out. General Electric came within one day of declaring they didn't have cash to operate. Money funds were unsafe. Banks were unsafe. Leave aside whether it was bad timing to have named Sarah Palin as VP nominee at a time when Republican competence was on the table, the election coincided with the worst moments of the Great Financial Crisis, an event so memorable that it got its own initials: GFC. How much worse could it have been for Republicans?

Amid a debacle, Obama won.

Trump and COVID. The 2020 election was another crisis under the GOP watch. The November, 2020 election that coincided with the worst and most frightening weeks of COVID, amid a parabolic rise of COVID deaths into thousands a day. Trump was president  and he had represented the no-big-deal, don't over-react position as regards COVID. That policy looked most misguided at the time of the election. Deaths were skyrocketing and there was not yet a vaccine. Plus, unemployment was high, businesses were shut down. Plus, Trump was singularly divisive, with persistent under-water approval numbers. Even with the benefit of hindsight, one could not have picked worse timing for the election. With misery this profound, was the election a Republican wipe-out?  No. Down-ballot Republicans did just fine and a change in fewer than 50,000 votes spread between a few battleground states would have given this election to Trump. How much worse could it have been for Trump than a daily body count?

Fluke. Democrats need to change their attitude toward their recent electoral success, and recognize that Democratic policy and message are not a tremendous success. The party is a threadbare coalition that wins by Republican error combined with miserable timing for them. If there hadn't been, in John Dean's words, "a cancer on the presidency;" if Republicans, as Obama put it, had not "driven the economy into a ditch;" if Covid deaths hadn't ramped up just then, then everything might have been different.

Democrats are winning elections because Republicans preside over disasters, and even then Democrats just barely eke out victory.  Democrats aren't winning. Republicans are forfeiting.

Joe Manchin is a sentimental fool.

Songwriters know what Joe Manchin is too foolish to learn.

What a fool believes, he sees.

     "I've been working across the aisle with all the Republicans trying to get people to understand that that's the bedrock of our democracy, and accessible, fair and basically secured voting."

             Joe Manchin

     "I would make this observation about the revised version ... all Republicans I think will oppose that as well if that were to be what surfaced on the floor."

          Mitch McConnell

I don't doubt that somewhere in America a college student majoring in Political Science sits in a library listening to popular music on ear buds, thinking she is goofing off when she should be doing her summer reading. Songwriters write about love, broken hearts, and false hearted lovers. Joe Manchin should turn on the radio--or, since this is 2021, a streaming service.

On Top of Old Smokey is an old Scottish folk tune made popular by Pete Seeger singing lead for The Weavers in 1951. Time is ticking on Manchin's opportunity to do something, anything, to address voter access and gerrymandering. The song warns about dithering when political opportunity is there: "I lost my true lover for courting too slow."

And a false hearted lover is worse than a thief
For a thief will just rob you and take all you save
But a false hearted lover will lead you to the grave.

Not one girl in a hundred a poor boy can trust
They'll hug you and kiss you and tell you more lies.

A Boomer like Joe Manchin would know the Doobie Brothers, and has heard the warning of false hope and persistent delusion. What a Fool Believes won a Grammy and was song of the year in 1980. Manchin keeps hoping Mitch McConnell doesn't really mean it when he says no GOP senator will sign onto compromise. He should have noticed that the moment Stacey Abrams said Manchin's compromise voting rights bill was progress, McConnell went to the microphones and denounced it as a Stacey Abrams' liberal takeover. Doesn't Manchin see it?

The sentimental fool don't see
Trying hard to recreate what had yet to be created
Once in her life, she musters a smile for his nostalgic tale
Never coming near what he wanted to say
Only to realize it never really was
She had a place in his life
He never made her think twice. . .
But what a fool believes he sees.

Joe Manchin is 73.  He would have been 19 years old in 1967 and at a prime age to have learned the hard lesson from The Mamas and the Papas that some people will lie to you. They know they should feel guilty, but they don't, not really. 

I saw her again last night
And you know that I shouldn't
To string her along's just not right
If I couldn't I wouldn't
But what can I do, I'm lonely too
And it makes me feel so good to know
You'll never leave me

I'm in way over my head
Now she thinks that I love her
Because that's what I said
Though I never think of her.

McConnell will continue for the simple reason that every political advantage to McConnell and the GOP comes from there being no deal on anything of importance. Republicans prosper if the perception is that Democrats are crazy-liberal-AOC-Muslim-loving socialists, and that the government is a complete failure as long as Democrats are nominally in charge. The worse the government functions--even if Republicans are causing the disfunction--the blame goes to Democrats. People getting hurt is not a bug. It is a feature. If there is a GOP majority in the Senate, Democrats will never get a Supreme Court nominee seated. McConnell said it outright. Biden will look like a helpless failure. That will be a powerful message, that the only government that can function to address America's problems will be one led by Republicans; otherwise it is gridlock.

Is that too cynical a view of McConnell and GOP policy, that sabotage is part of sound GOP policy? Don't ask a political commentator. They have the delusion they understand political behavior and human nature. Ask a songwriter. They know what songs become hits. They understand McConnell. They understand Manchin. 

I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine
Anytime night or day
Only trouble is, gee whiz,
I'm dreamin' my life away

I need you so that I could die
I love you so and that is why
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is
Dream, dream, dream, dream
Dream

Oregon Downstate Blues

Portland is the Big Dog.

Most of the time Medford resents it. Today we should be grateful.

Portland is big; we are small. Portland is dense; we are spread out. Portland has the headquarters; we have the branches. Portland is liberal and Democratic; Medford leans Republican. On statewide issues, Portland outvotes Medford. Portland gets its way.

Medford has a tradition of local pride in this one-sided rivalry. Eighty years ago Medford-area politicians flirted with a renegade movement to split off from the upstate population center and join the State of Jefferson movement. A few people in Southern Oregon and Northern California staged a temporary blockade on Highway 99 to draw attention to our supposedly being neglected, and certainly being outvoted, in our state capitols. The movement fizzled when its big inauguration event coincided with the death of its chief promoter and the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

My first childhood consciousness of Medford's rivalry with Portland came in the 1959-60 school year. Portland's Jefferson High School football team had a 34-game winning streak, led by Terry Baker, who later won the Heisman Trophy, and Mel Renfro, later an all-pro NFL cornerback. Our family joined caravans of cars driving up to Portland's Municipal Stadium to watch the state championship game. Medford High won 7-6.  Medford then went on to win the state basketball championship and state baseball championship. It was Medford athletics' finest hour and year, and it became an enduring part of Medford's sense of identity. We could punch above our weight. We could take on Portland and win. To continue this took constant effort and unconventional tactics, but we were willing to do it. The Medford School Board arranged our school system in a 6-2-2-2 system to keep a single very large class, the better to field teams that could compete with Portland. 

Portland resentment is in the air Medford residents breathe. It doesn't need to be explained or argued. Portland is the big bully and they will push us around--because they can. That sense of local victimization is available on the political shelf to be used when necessary. It saved my brief political career. 

I was a Jackson County Commissioner during the 1982 recession when the Federal Reserve worked to end inflation expectations by raising interest rates into the high teens. Building stopped. Timber harvests stopped. Jackson County's general fund income collapsed since it came almost entirely from receipts from federal timber sales. We suddenly needed to lay off half of county employees. The public was furious about closed parks and libraries and slow service generally. County employees started a recall campaign against me, the complaint being that I was "out of touch" with what local people wanted, i.e. services we had no money to pay for. While recall petitions circulated, the county learned that the powers that be in the State of Oregon--people in Portland, Salem, somewhere up north--had purchased an option to buy several hundred acres of land to site a state prison on county land just outside Medford. It was the first anyone here had heard of it. I had my opportunity to stand up for Medford against the big, bad bullies upstate--the familiar complaint. I rushed to the TV cameras and said, "Eugene and Corvallis get universities, Salem gets the Capitol, and Portland gets all the money, and the people upstate tell us that we get a big state prison to contend with. No way."  Local citizens loved it. I got fan mail and phone calls of congratulations. I was in touch with my constituents after all. The recall fizzled.

Medford residents grouse about the big Multnomah County vote, as if it is somehow odd and unfair that a county of 830,000 should have more political power than a county of 223,000. We hear the comment a lot: "Portland gets what Portland wants." It is true that in the statewide vote Democrat Kate Brown soundly defeated Republican Knute Buehler, with 934,000 votes to 815,000--a margin of 119,000. The results in Multnomah County were 279,000 to 84,000 for Brown, a margin of 195,000. Knute Buehler won the state, except for Multnomah County, but of course it is ridiculous to say "except for Multnomah County." They are Oregonians, too. But so is Medford, and Jackson County voted 51%-42% for Buehler. We are in this together, and Portland gets what Portland wants.

The disturbances in Portland and Governor Brown's COVID policies both exacerbated downstate people's sense of alienation from Portland. Whatever nuances people in Portland might feel about policing the rock-throwing, arson, and looting that took place are largely lost on people here. The continued violence seemed incomprehensible to people I spoke with, including people like myself who generally vote Democratic and who voted for Kate Brown. 

A much larger percentage of people here in Southern Oregon are "vaccine hesitant," and oppose wearing masks and observing social distancing rules. More people here watch Fox. Trump's views matter and so does local leadership. The County Commissioners here lobbied for fewer restrictions. I hear it commonly among local residents, including health care workers in close contact with dozens of people a day: They don't think COVID is very serious, they don't think masks do any good, they don't think the COVID vaccines are safe, and they resent a Democratic governor from Portland metro telling them what to do. It is yet another iteration of the Big Dog pushing us around. 

(I think that attitude is crazy. I am thrilled to be vaccinated. But these are my fellow Medford residents, and I report what I see and hear.)

That attitude shows up in Jackson County vaccination rates well below the statewide average. The low rates--barely 50% of eligible people--mean Jackson County businesses remain under more COVID restrictions than are businesses in the Portland metro area. The price of COVID denial and resistance for Medford-area residents is more regulation, not less, and we are way behind the curve to meet the 65% county threshold that would drop us into a less restrictive category. Happily for Jackson County, the state as a whole will likely meet the goal of 70% vaccination for vaccine-eligible people, no help from Jackson County. This is because of the very high margin in Portland metro vaccinations. We ride on their coattails. They will save us from ourselves.

They outvoted us, like always. This time, Medford should thank them.

Happy Juneteenth

No need to whitewash American History. 

     "This is an effort by the Left to create a day out of whole cloth. . . .[W]e should be focused on what unites us rather than our differences."

U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale (R. Montana) on why he voted "no" on the Juneteenth holiday.

The battleground for opposition to Biden has moved from the consequential to the symbolic. We hear less about infrastructure, taxes, deficits, and health care from Republicans than we did a decade ago. Biden is woefully inarticulate and un-charismatic but he has a gift a politician needs to survive and prosper despite shortcomings. He promotes things that are popular.

Most Americans want our roads and bridges improved. Most Americans want to tax the very rich more than they are being taxed now. Americans have been taught that deficits don't matter. American want health care expanded.  Biden wants what Americans want. Republicans are on the wrong side politically in obstructing Biden on these, which is why they wisely changed the subject. Biden isn't fighting the culture war, but Republicans are taking it to him. 

Biden didn't "cancel" any Dr. Seuss books, but we still hear him accused of it. Biden won nomination despite the CRT-supporting Democrats, but he is accused of supporting it. GOP officeholders, with the support of Fox, have a powerful talking point--protecting our children. The great new threat to America is our school children being taught that White Americans have done things which we should regret. 

Note the inclusive "we" and the present tense. White Americans in 2021 are asked to share the guilt for behaviors done in generations past because we are the contented beneficiaries of that injustice. White Americans resent the implication, so Republicans have a powerful weapon. 

White Americans need not feel personal guilt for behaviors done centuries before their birth, but it is not only part of our heritage; it is part of our inheritance. Love America, love the consequences of American policy. There is an implicit accusation. With the help of GOP messaging, Americans hear it.

We live on land taken from Indians, sometimes by conquest, sometimes by broken treaties. We enjoy wealth created by Black slaves, never reimbursed. Our railroad tracks were built by Chinese laborers, who we then excluded. Americans of Japanese ancestry were interred. Jews were excluded and marginalized. 

The Juneteenth holiday is an attempt to integrate some of that history into the full history of America. It is tough medicine made easier to swallow by pointing to a milestone of injustice ending, rather than the injustice itself. Real patriotism is to love America in full recognition of troubling history. 

Roy Saigo is a familiar name in Southern Oregon. He was President of Southern Oregon University, and in his multiple retirements returned to his work as a turn-around agent by serving for a year as President of Westfield State University in western Massachusetts. 

Now in his closing days in that assignment he sent a Juneteenth greeting. Saigo was a victim of that troubling history. He strikes a tone that can serve Americans well as a way to include the full history of America, and remain patriotic and positive. He says Americans can face the truth. We need more of it, for more people. Here is a portion of his letter:

Dear Campus Community:

Today, history was made, as the United States Congress approved a bill to make Juneteenth (June 19)—a day to acknowledge and commemorate the freedom of enslaved people in America—a federal holiday known as Juneteenth National Independence Day. President Joe Biden signed the bill into law this afternoon, and Vice President Kamala Harris—the nation’s first Black and Asian woman to hold that position—delivered remarks on the bill’s passage and the holiday’s significance. 

Roy and Barbara Saigo at my melon field

Personally, as a person imprisoned during World War II because of my race, I cannot think of a more important milestone to observe than the end of slavery in the United States.

The first Juneteenth was observed in 1866 in Texas and today is recognized across the country to mark this important milestone.

As a Massachusetts state university, Westfield State recognizes Juneteenth to allow for reflection, education, and understanding. It is one way Westfield State University continues its commitment toward racial equity and justice. 

I’m grateful to have spent my career as an educator and an advocate for civil rights. To have a democratic society we must have an educated society. To have an educated society we must have quality, affordable, public education. Education is needed today more than ever before, so people can seek and use information, reason critically, and make informed decisions based on evidence. To that end, let us all reflect on the significance of Juneteenth, and let us never forget what happened in this country to bring us to where we are today.

Warmly,

Roy H. Saigo, Ph.D.
Interim President

Juneteenth. What? Juneteenth?

 I had never heard of Juneteenth until this year. I don't feel embarrassed or guilty. 

I am just reporting what I knew and didn't know.

Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. It commemorates the day Union General Gordon Granger announced General Order Number 3 proclaiming the emancipation of slaves in Texas. The Emancipation Proclamation had been announced in September, 1862 freeing slaves in states that were in rebellion, i.e. where it was unenforceable. Texas was the most remote state in the Confederacy and had the fewest federal troops, and even after the war ended in April, 1865 enforcement of emancipation had been inconsistent. General Granger ended that. General Order 3 read:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

By order of Major General Granger

I had a general knowledge--more an assumption than knowledge--that after the surrender at Appomattox people in the South got the word that the war was over and that slavery morphed into whatever arrangements people who owned nothing--but were now free--did to survive. General Granger's announcement gives some insight. They were told to stay right where they were and keep working for the same people, but now for wages.

In high school I took every History course taught, both required and elective. I studied American history in college at Harvard and started a Ph.D. program in American history at Yale and got a Master's Degree before dropping out with the dream of making the world a better place through politics. By coincidence, my brutally intense year-long graduate seminar course on American History at Yale was taught by David Bryon Davis, a leading authority on slavery and abolition, author of 17 books on the Civil War and slavery, including one that won the Pulitzer Prize shortly before my time studying with him.

I never heard of Juneteenth. It never came up. 

I consider my ignorance anecdotal evidence about what a public school system in the western U.S. found worth teaching and what academic historians thought significant. Juneteenth was not one of them. Now--suddenly, at least to me--it is important enough to become a federal holiday. The vote to establish the holiday passed unanimously in the Senate and 415-14 in the House.

I am happy to learn of the new holiday. I cite my ignorance--and perhaps that of readers--not to suggest my disapproval of the new holiday. Rather, I consider its prior national obscurity an essential element of the holiday being possible. Most people didn't care very much, so why not?

The 14 House members who opposed it were all Republicans. A few said they objected to it's being called "Independence Day" rather than "Emancipation Day." One said that it was just stirring up bad feeling about racial conflict long past. A couple of them said the holiday was part of a greater leftist agenda to push Critical Race Theory. Still, the overwhelming majority of GOP officeholders went along.

A Juneteenth holiday is a simple gesture, like naming a courthouse or post office building. It is a harmless way for Republicans to try to show Black voters they are not anti-Black. 

The holiday is a victory for Biden. He got his photo-op. Biden delivered something. It is a thank-you note to Black voters. This holiday would not have glided through if were Trump president.

The holiday is a symbolic victory for Democrats, but too little to be meaningful, and may backfire on that account. It is like bringing a bottle of very cheap wine to a dinner party. Worse, this holiday makes more remote something that might have had genuine, tangible benefit to the Democratic enterprise of making voting easier to do--making Election Day a federal holiday. Insofar as Democrats still represent the working poor, especially the harried working mothers of the country, then an Election Day holiday might enhance voter turnout. Republicans oppose it, which demonstrates that it is something worth fighting for. Democrats gave it up.

The holiday is a soft and indirect bank shot on behalf of racial justice, far enough in the past and obscure enough that few feelings are hurt. After George Floyd's murder people wanted to do something, but anything meaningful was off limits.

Juneteenth is 166 years old, and the moment involved asserting "absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property" while in fact leaving freed Blacks in peonage. But it did end legal slavery in Texas and that is good. It seems so little, but that is what Congress in 2021 can agree on.

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Supreme Court Pleases Democrats, Protects Republicans

Republicans wanted to commit political suicide.

The Supreme Court saved them from themselves. 

Democrats are happy. The signature achievement of the Obama administration survives.  

Republicans may not be happy, but should be. They dodged a bullet and improved their chances of winning back the House and Senate.

The Supreme Court just announced a 7-2 decision to preserve the Affordable Care Act--"Obamacare"--by deciding that Texas and 17 other states, plus two other state officials, lacked standing to object to the law. The premise of the lawsuit was that by having made the tax payment zero for failing to purchase individually mandated health insurance, there was no tax. Therefore the ACA, authorized under Congress' taxing power, was now unconstitutional. The lawsuit argued that this section was intrinsic to the operation of the ACA and therefore the entire act must be thrown out. 

We see a number of things taking place.

1. The Supreme Court can find whatever justification it wants for deciding any way it wants. There is always an arguable justification for anything. The Supreme Court--Justice Roberts in particular--did not want to kill the ACA, so in a 5-4 decision in 2012 he voted with liberals to say the Congressional taxing power made the law Constitutional. This year the Supreme Court majority did not want to kill the ACA, so it used "standing" as the excuse for deciding against the Texas suit. We have confirmed something we learned back in the Bush v. Gore decision after the 2000 election. Any illusion the public may have that the Supreme Court is bound by the written word is shown to be naive. The Supreme Court can make political decisions whenever it wants to, and it just did.

2. Republicans in red states do what is necessary and popular to satisfy Republican voters in a Republican primary. Texas, which led this lawsuit, demonstrates this. The Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, led an improbable lawsuit last December. It was beloved by Trump but widely considered outlandish. The lawsuit demanded that electoral votes in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania be thrown out because pandemic-related changes in voting rules were not specifically authorized by the state legislatures in those states. Those states objected, and the Supreme Court declined to hear it. The Republican primary nomination for Attorney General of Texas is sharply contested by the son of Jeb Bush, George P. Bush, who is doubling down by attempting to be even more Trump-positive than Paxton. The politics in Republican primaries are a push to the Trump-populist right. GOP orthodoxy requires adamant opposition to the ACA, as well as to a demand that Congress, the Vice President, the Supreme Court--someone--reverse the results of the 2020 election. Both positions are minority positions, seen from a national context, but it is essential policy to survive within red states' GOP primaries. 

3. Democrats got what they needed: The ACA is preserved, for now at least. Thirty million people continue to have health insurance because of it. The working poor, previously uninsured and vulnerable, will stay covered. Rural hospitals stopped bleeding money and closing because the health care they had provided to people who were without any ability to pay was now, under the ACA, reimbursed. 

4. Republicans got what they needed, but not what they wanted. The ACA is complicated and incomplete. It is not wildly popular but it gives two groups of people what they desperately need. It gives people who work in jobs without health insurance--primarily the working poor--access to it. It also gives middle and upper-middle-income people who are uninsurable because of a pre-existing condition access to affordable health insurance. This includes people in "the donor class," who may well be personally acquainted with office-holders. Some people in their fifties and early sixties in age are ready to retire early, but do not dare to, because they need to continue health insurance attached to a job. It includes small business owners who, because of a pre-existing condition, cannot get insurance. Both these groups are sympathetic victims to Republican officeholders. Political doctrine had gotten disconnected from political interest. 

5. The Supreme Court saved Republicans from electoral disaster in 2022. GOP fingerprints would have been all over the death of the ACA. Fox would have called it a victory. Texas would have crowed that you now have the glorious freedom not to have health insurance. GOP officeholders are stuck with their words of opposition. Death of the ACA would have thrown the health care industry into chaos. It would have given Democrats a perfect issue going into the mid-term elections: Look what the GOP did to take away something you need.

The Rolling Stones understood today's news perfectly: 

You can't always get what you want,

But if you try sometimes you might just find

You get what you need. 

 

In Praise of Eighth-Grade English Teachers

I write a daily political blog. It helps to have diagrammed sentences.

Today's blog post is a respite from politics. Instead, it is a post about writing a blog about politics.

I want to express my gratitude to my eighth-grade English teacher, Ray Lewis. We learn our native language's grammar rules without understanding what we know. Mr. Lewis gave me the names and reason for what sounded right in the grammar-voice in my head. 

From Gettysburg Address

Diagramming sentences was standard educational practice in the early 20th century, but was near the end of its run by my Junior High School era. Most students hated it and educators were concluding that diagramming didn't teach sentence structure. It only taught people how to do something useless in itself--to diagram sentences. The growing theory was that students learned to write better by writing, not diagramming. If a reader remembers diagramming as useless tedium and wants justification for hating it, read this: Click: The Atlantic. "The wrong way to teach grammar."

My strongest memory about diagramming was that when facing a complex sentence, the first thing to do was to discard all the phrases and meanderings. Find the central action of the sentence: Subject and verb, and maybe object. Example: Boy throws ball. Descriptions of the boy and the ball and how he threw it were all secondary add-ons.

Mr. Lewis and diagramming sentences came strongly to mind yesterday when I considered this sentence, which appeared in Rick Millward's Guest Post yesterday.

"Overcoming what are basically fatalistic, or what some call "realist", attitudes requires an enormous a leap of faith and a commitment to optimism that seems naive in these times, but completely necessary if we are to survive as a species."

We will get back to that sentence in a moment.

Ray Lewis, 1962

Mr. Lewis was a veteran teacher in the Medford School system. I attended those schools, entering first grade in 1955 and graduating from Medford High School in 1967. Notice that I said graduating from high school, not that I "graduated high school," a construction that sounds "wrong" in my ear. Dictionaries still frown on that construction, but it is no longer described as incorrect. Graduate can be a transitive verb, but it is something schools do to students. Example: "Medford High graduated 700 students." A student herself graduates from Medford High. Usage has changed out from under me in the past fifty years. Intelligent, well-educated people, who use good grammar generally, now commonly say they graduated a school. A dominant theory of language rules are that they describe how people communicate, they don't prescribe how people should communicate. Language changes. Words get new meanings. "Reboot" no longer has a primary meaning of changing shoes. 

Diagramming sentences was commonly taught in the eighth grade. Let me stop my story again to make another grammar point. Notice that in the first paragraph of this post I wrote "eighth-grade" with a hyphen, but in the sentence just above I wrote "eight grade" with no hyphen. What's going on?

As my eighth-grade teacher explained, when an adjective and a noun are a single unit, acting as an adjective, they take the hyphen. ("What kind of teacher was it? An eighth-grade teacher.") Eighth-grade is a unit, together modifying the word teacher.) But when I wrote that diagramming is taught in the eighth grade, eighth is the adjective modifying grade, a noun that could stand alone. (When is it taught? In a grade. Which grade? Eighth grade.) There are two parts of speech and not a unit. No hyphen.

Is there a grammatical error in Rick Millward's quoted sentence? 

The sentence is long and there is a tricky spot: "attitudes requires." That sounds wrong, especially if read aloud. After all, attitudes are plural, so it needs a plural form of the verb--require-- and the words are adjacent. Are you sure that require wouldn't be better?

That brings me back to Mr. Lewis. Establish what word is the subject, which the verb. The subject of that sentence is overcoming, not attitudes, and it is singular. Attitudes is the object, not the subject. That gets clear when one thinks of it as a diagramming problem and simplifies the sentence to its barest. "Overcoming requires leap." Subject, verb, object. Everything else dangles off that core.

The sentence is correct as written. [Except for the extra article "a" in the "enormous leap of faith."]

Thank you, Mr. Lewis. Thanks, too, to Tam Moore, the journalist who wrote a Guest Post last week. He regularly sends me a list of grammar and proofreading errors he finds in my posts, and I can usually correct them before the posts get sent out as an email. He is good that that job, even on complex sentences like Millward's. His observation as a journalist was that the sentence was too long and complex, though grammatical. The goal in journalism is clear communication. Short sentences are better.

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