It was kind of scary to read this quote from Jim Merrill in this morning’s paper, regarding the governor‘s State of the State speech tonight:
"It could maybe be a little less erudite and a little more grass-roots."
Less erudite? How is that possible?
I mean, the governor’s a smart guy and all that, but he’s a pretty lame public speaker. Well, at least he’s pretty lame when he has a speech to read. His past SOS efforts have been kind of painful to listen to.
The odd thing is, he’s fine talking to a group without notes. He tends to repeat the same
catchphrases a lot, but then, what politician doesn’t? The odd thing is how badly he stumbles through a speech he has prepared in advance.
Even odder than that is that this is one of the few things he has in common with predecessor David Beasley. Mr. Beasley was fine getting up in front of a crowd and connecting with them, but his speeches were unbearable. But for a different reason. Mr. Beasley always seemed phony in prepared addresses, as though he had over-rehearsed. Gov. Sanford seems like he’s never seen these words before in his life, and isn’t at all comfortable with them.
Well, we’ll see how it goes tonight.
Oh, you want to know the substance, instead of just the style? Well, I don’t know much about that, although I suppose I’ll know more after a briefing over at the governor’s place in — well, in about 40 minutes. I guess I’d better stop and move that copy for tomorrow’s page…
Related Posts
Why don’t you just post your review of Sanford’s speech in advance?
Given the choice between Sanford, the below average speech reader, and George Bush, the below average intellect who can ONLY read prepared texts, it’s a no brainer.
It’s going to be amusing watching The State
attempts to derail Sanford’s re-election bid this year. This one is in the bag…
People make the oddest assumptions.
Steve needs to read the purloined SAT scores and pilot tests of President Bush. He scored quite high, as he did on his graduate entrance exam for Harvard Business School. Sanford is also an MBA and a successful investment banker, who just might know a bit more about the state budget and operating efficiency that the typical foghorn legislator.
GW Bush made over 300 points higher on the SAT than Senator Bill Bradley.
Al Gore was expelled from divinity school, and flunked out of law school.
Bill Clinton dropped out of Oxford.
But you have to admit, if you’re going to drop out, Oxford is a pretty classy place to do it.
… Case in point, I dropped out of USC after only one semester. I did this in spite of the fact that my SATs were higher than either Bush’s or Gore’s. (By the way, while Mr. Bush did quite well, credible sources say Mr. Gore’s were quite a bit higher. I can testify, from my Tennessee days, that Al Gore is a very smart man. Boring, but smart. I’ve had less interaction personally with Mr. Bush — in fact, none at all beyond his meeting with our editorial board in 2000. He did quite well in that session — to my shock, better than John McCain did, although not as well as Sen. McCain on other occasions when I’ve spoken with him.)
Anyway, after dropping out, I spent the spring of 1972 living with my parents. I spent every morning playing pickup basketball, and every afternoon on the golf course — or was it the other way around? Anyway, I put the time to good use, by my standards. I DID get a job, delivering pizzas, and lasted exactly 8 hours. It just wasn’t for me. At $1.25 an hour (no tips all night, since my only customers were sailors and marines in their barracks), my total earned income for 1972 was $10.
But I was tanned, rested and ready when I started over at Memphis State in the fall.
Anyway, that anecdote should help illustrate what high SATs are worth.
You have to admit that side comments about dropping out (before flunking out) of Oxford being “classy”, in order to avoid the fact that G.W. Bush is smarter, better-educated and more successful than most politicians, that you may have a problem with good facts about a president, and governor, whom you dislike but cannot refute.
Let’s be clear, my tongue-in-cheek remark about a "classy" dropout aside:
George W. Bush is not a dummy, but he is not smarter than Bill Clinton.
He’s a better MAN than Bill Clinton, but he’s not smarter. Clinton is one of the smartest politicians any of us have ever seen. Scary smart. "Wicked smart," as someone from the south side of Boston might put it.
The only still-active politician I can think of who might be smarter than Slick Willie is President Bush’s good friend — and my political hero — Tony Blair.
Brad, Clinton is a smooth talker, always was, but he really isn’t a smart man. For one thing, he let his lower head make decisions that his upper head should have been making. Just one more factual example would be WACO. Any political leader with common sense would not have burned those 80 some babies, women, and men by attacking American citizens with a TANK on national television. Clever, yes, smart, no way.
Brad,
How is Bush a better “MAN” than Clinton? Clinton was bad, but Bush is even worse. Clinton lied about having sex with an intern in the White House. The Bush Administration on the other hand, has lied about Iraq causing 9/11 while starting a disastrous, unnecessary war that has killed tens of thousands of people. U.S. credibility has been ruined throughout the world based on Bush’s misrepresentations of the truth. The Bush Administration is the most corrupt and incompetent administration in U.S. history, yet you think that Bush is a better “MAN” than Clinton? The fish rots from the head.
By the way, Tony Blair and Clinton were/are close friends too (Blair is a so called “Third Way” sell out. Il Duce himself, another kind of “Third Way” man, would love this guy). Bush, Blair, and Clinton all share belief in the same failed neo-liberal economic theory that is throwing the planet into chaos. Almost all of our foreign policy problems have to do with forcing the rest of the world into global free market capitalism (and calling it “democracy”) via Pax Americana, the IMF, and the WTO. People worldwide resent corporations, with the full backing of the US and European governments, coming into their countries, and then co-opting their own cultures and governments. Most of the world’s denizens will never willingly agree to the new corporatist colonialism.
I know that you are a bright man, but somehow you missed the big lessons from the twentieth century:
1. Unregulated capitalism evolves into corporatism and fascism.
2. Unregulated capitalism is antithetical to both democracy and Christianity.
Social Democracy, of course, is consistent with both democracy and Christianity. Why you can’t see this is beyond me.
Bill Clinton may have been smart when he was young, but years of failing to apply himself have resulted in his merely being a clever con artist.
I thought it was the Christian Democrats, not the Social Democrats, whose philosophy was more consistent with both democracy and Christianity.
But then, I’m no great expert on German politics.
Was Mark referring to German politics? I thought he was being more general.
For the record, the Christian Democrats (CDU) have traditionally drawn their main support from a Roman Catholic base. The Social Democrats (SPD) have been more Protestant (Lutheran/Reformed). The evangelist who took over “the mantle” from Billy Graham in 1993, Ulrich Parzany, is a Lutheran pastor, and was a member of the SPD for many years.
However, some of the issues like abortion have pushed a lot of Protestant evangelicals toward the CDU (though there isn’t much of a stand there on that issue). In the meantime, reunification brought a lot of atheists and agnostics from the East into the SPD. So the landscape is changing.
In general more conservative Christians tend to be less right-wing in Germany than here, and not very pro-military, either. That’s understandable, given Germany’s past.
Then there are the Liberals, and the Greens, who years ago advocated $3.00 per liter gas tax. There were a lot of evangelicals in the Greens when it first started, but they moved out fairly quickly (but not over the gas tax).
The Liberals and Greens are encouraging in the sense that they prove a small party can have clout way beyond its size. Another reason to think about a third party here.
There are other little splinter parties, too, including the little Partei Bibeltreuer Christen, or Party of Bible-believing Christians, who of course never get anywhere near the 5% needed to get into parliament, even at the provincial level.
I lived for years in a village where evangelical Christians tended to vote SPD. Then when we moved to the south, it was the opposite.
Herb,
Once again you are right. I was talking about both the good ole U.S. of A. with its Social Democratic tradition in conjunction with Social Democratic tradition the world over. The New Deal was heavily influenced by Social Democracy, as was just about every positive advance in the US for the past two hundred years. MLK and a host of Protestant reformers preached the Social Gospel until the end of the heyday of the civil rights movement. Granted, Liberals have historically made great contributions for the people, but real Social Democrats (not the free market “Third Way” people who have stolen the moniker “Social Democrat”) put the teeth into liberal economic reform. Liberals, liberal Christians, and Social Democrats are responsible for the abolition of child labor, the 40 hour workweek, the weekend, paid vacation, sick days, paid holidays, pensions, company sponsored health insurance, trade unions, civil rights, Social Security, the equality of women, the preservation of the first and fourth Amendments, etc, etc. The list could go on and on.
Social Democracy has existed since Jesus (of course Jesus did not call it Social Democracy) taught its precepts two thousand years ago. From time to time, it makes resurgence against capitalism, oligarchy, fascism, aristocracy, monarchy, communism, slavery, and every other kind of undemocratic despotism/political economy.
The CDU mentality (and its corresponding “centrist” philosophy in the U.S.) never works because it is based on a faulty premise ab initio-that equality of opportunity is only necessary for a just society, despite the mountains of empirical evidence that suggest otherwise. Today, we can prove that unregulated capitalism is inherently unfair and damaging to most people using stochastic economic models. Using democratically determined divisions of labor in conjunction with re-distributive taxation, we could solve most of our problems, but unfortunately, that’s probably not going to happen given the corporate control of the entire culture (including the editorial pages).
Look at The State for example; Brad always gives plenty of room to the Chamber of Commerce (Brad is the mouthpiece of the Chamber) and to his investment buddies (every once in a while he give the Libertarians and the reactionaries some space), but you won’t see any Social Democratic theory on the Editorial Page of The State.