How intelligent is Palin?

Yes, we know that Sarah Palin is spirited and confident and has great instincts and a winning personality. But is there a single person in the general American public outside Alaska who has any idea how intelligent she is? It’s impossible to know, for the simple reason that she’s a complete neophyte on the national stage and we’ve never seen her discussing political and other issues in a normal, non-scripted way. Her reply to Charles Gibson when he tried to hurt her on the God issue was good, but her other answers to him were tightly scripted. Her substantive speeches, such as her undelivered speech on Iran that was published in yesterday’s New York Sun, are obviously written by others. The idea of a person giving a national speech about Iran who never thought about Iran before last week seems strange. She gave a speech on the finance crisis last week that was just blather and embarrassing cheerleading.

As I’ve indicated before, there is as yet no evidence that this candidate for vice president of the United States can discuss national and international issues with any intelligence, or, indeed, whether she is intelligent at all, in the sense of being able to reason about and understand complex subjects. I’m not talking about being a Brainiac. I’m talking about discursive thinking that goes beyond cheerleading and patriotism and appeals to general American ideals and enthusiasm for the use of military force.

- end of initial entry -

Paul Mulshine writes:

Excellent point. And as a journalist I am appalled that they are keeping her from the press. It seems to me you shouldn’t be in politics if you’re not confident you can handle any question any time.

And of course this just puts more pressure on her not to screw up in that debate.

By the way, Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer agrees with me that her comment about “perhaps” getting into a war with Russia over Georgia ranks as a world-class gaffe. The press seized on that silly Bush Doctrine remark instead.

Also my latest on the sheep-like aspect of her followers.

Doug E. writes:

Here’s a link to the Governor’s debate in Alaska. Lasts about 1 hour.

LA replies:

I look foward to seeing it. The bit I saw a few weeks ago was impressive and you could see why she won the race. She had more on the ball than her opponents. Yet G.W. Bush showed impressive political talent as governor of Texas. His intellectual weaknesses became much more evident, and damaging, as president.

TW writes:

I don’t know how intelligent she is, but she is clearly smarter than Paul Mulshine. Mulshine seems to take her statement that if Georgia was a NATO member and Russia invaded that we “perhaps” would have a war with Russia as an endorsement of the idea. What a childish, uneducated read!

As anyone who is slightly familiar with NATO would determine, that is the *meaning* of NATO: an attack on one member is an attack on all.

So like it or not, our treaty agreements mean that war is the likelihood if a NATO member is attacked. Any other “understanding” of NATO flies in the face of how it has been understood for over fifty years.

Sarah may or may not be intelligent, but she is clearly better acquainted with international affairs and our binding military commitments than Paul Mulshine.

LA replies:

I told Paul Mulshine, in an e-mail and a comment that I tried unsuccessfully to post at his blog, that I thought he was swinging a bit wild in a column saying that on the basis of Palin’s mispronunciation of nuclear and verbiage she was not intelligent enough for the office. I said there are these American regionalisms, which doesn’t mean she can’t be criticized for them. Lincoln, though he had been a prominent lawyer and political figure in Illinois for many years, pronounced certain words with a hick accent.

I agree with you on NATO. When Palin spoke of war, she was simply spelling out the inherent, statutory meaning of an attack on a NATO member. Everyone acted as though she was proposing war. So that is another example of Palin having a better understanding than those who are attacking her for her lack of intelligence, as when Charles Gibson tried to trip her up on her reference to God.

September 24

Paul Mulshine writes:

I have to disagree with you on regionalisms versus mispronunciations. When my kids, who were born in Pennsylvania, make fun of me for using the New Jersey pronunciation “warsh” for “wash,” that is a regionalism, in the same sense that we in America pronounce “garage” or any of a thousand other words differently from the English. But “pundint” and “verbage” are simply mistakes by someone who can’t read simple English words. There is no region in which people say “verbage.” It’s just a mistake, one that no person above a certain quite middling level of intelligence could make.

As for TW, who commented on NATO, of course that’s what a treaty requires by its very definition. The gaffe was in suggesting war with Russia as a possible outcome, as Trudy Rubin noted. It is simply not done by responsible elected officials. Can TW find another such example by any head of state at any time?

LA replies:

First, I should have edited TW’s comment where he said, “What a childish, uneducated read!” about your article. That was going a bit over the line for one VFR commenter speaking to another. Sorry about that.

I see your point about statesmen not naming the actual consequence (war) of an invasion of a fellow NATO member. But I don’t know that I agree. Through the whole history of NATO, we knew that NATO meant that if the Warsaw Pact nations invaded West Germany, we would be at war with the Warsaw Pact. It was a constant subject of discussion. So I think that Sarah P.’s calling attention to the real meaning of admitting Georgia to NATO was useful, though I concede that the way she did it was clunky and showed her to be a neophyte. Of course I completely oppose the policy itself.

As for “verbage,” I just googled “” verbage regionalism “” and guess what. None of the results, of a bunch I looked at, is discussing “verbage” as a regionalism. So I guess you’re right. Rather people are talking about regionalisms, AND in the course of the discussion they happen to use “verbage” incorrectly.

In Googling “verbage” by itself, I came across this surprising result:

2 dictionary results for: verbage
Free On-line Dictionary of Computing—Cite This Source—Share This

verbage spelling, jargon
/ver’b*j/ A deliberate misspelling and mispronunciation of verbiage that assimilates it to the word “garbage”. Compare content-free. More pejorative than “verbiage”.

“Garbage” is the last thing “verbage” would remind me of; it makes me think of herbage.

In any case, what does it say about Palin that she says “verbage” and “pundint”? She’s been in local, state, and now national politics since she got elected to the Wasilla city council in 1992. Presumably she reads newspaper articles about politics. She must have seen and heard the word “pundit” many times. So I think these mistakes do raise legitimate questions about her intelligence—though I emphasize that as far as I am concerned they are questions, not, as Mr. Mulshine would have it, answers.

Before I get e-mails accusing me of Ivy League prejudices against Palin, let me point out that I think that Yale and Harvard graduate George W. Bush’s use of “nucular” is a sign of lack of intelligence. He’s the leader of the greatest military power on earth. He deals with questions of nuclear weapons all the time. But he doesn’t know how to pronounce the word. Or else he does know how to pronounce it, and he thinks that mispronouncing it makes him a man of the people. Well, I’m a people too, and when I hear the president of the U.S. say “nucular,” it tells me that he’s either stupid or contemptuous. Either way it offends me.

Paul Mulshine replies:

As Trudy Rubin noted, intelligent people do not casually allude to war with Russia.

As for that use of “verbage,” I find it appalling, right up there with “pundint.” These people are clearly products of the public schools and their whole-language reading program.

I might believe Palin had deliberately mispronounced “verbiage” if I believed she had deliberately mispronounced “pundit.” But there is little chance of that. Again, if we lampoon that sort of thing when Sean Penn does it, we have to do the same when she does it.

And in the broader scheme, there’s a reason they’re keeping her away from the media. If you or I were to sit down with her for an hour, we would not come away impressed with her intellect. Given your views, you might even be more disappointed than I. As my late uncle the Catholic priest put it, “O tempora! O mores!”

Clayton R. writes:

It really needs to be pointed out that the word “verbiage” has two acceptable pronunciations. (See, for example, Merriam-Webster Online.) Although “pundints” is a problematic pronunciation for several reasons, there are in fact perfectly good reasons why the “verbage” pronunciation is not. That Mr. Mulshine does not know this is, I suppose, clear evidence of his lack of intelligence.

Obviously, however, this suggestion is as unfair to him as his is to Mrs. Palin.

LA replies:

I’m not convinced that that dictionary’s inclusion of the alternative pronunciation makes it ok. It could be a reflection of the tendency among dictionaries today to approve mistakes if enough people make them. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s entirely possible that some dictionaries give “aks” as an alternative pronunciation of “ask.” If that were the case, would we therefore be cool with a candidate for naitonal office saying “aks”?

LA continues:

Well, here we are. Under “ask,” Merriam Webster Online dictionary has the following:

Main Entry:
ask
Pronunciation:
'ask, ‘ask; dialect ‘aks\
Function:
verb
Inflected Form(s):
asked 'as(k)t, ‘as(k)t, ‘ask; dialect ‘akst\ ; ask-ing

So, Clayton, let me aks you, if a VP candidate said “aks” for “ask,” would you give him or her a pass, because a dictionary includes “aks” as a dialect pronunciation of “ask”?

LA writes:

For those who missed it, here is Paul Mulshine’s column attacking Palin over her pronunciation of “pundit” and “verbiage.”

Clayton R. replies:

For one thing, “verbage,” unlike “aks,” is not a dialect pronunciation. It is one of the two dominant pronunciations of “verbiage,” as I thought almost everyone knew. Besides, even if one doesn’t know something so widely known (which is in itself rather odd), an understanding of how the English language works clearly shows the difference between an ignorant mistake, on the one hand, and simply a different pronunciation, on the other. Put simply, vowels within words are often silent in English, but sounds that are in no way represented by the letters of a word are not, and therefore should not, be pronounced. To do so adds something to the word that is not there, as in the ignorant “warsh” for “wash.”—A mistake just as bad as, if not worse than, “pundint.”

Why is it that you and Mr. Mulshine persist in regarding as a mistake one of the two common pronunciations of a word?

Clayton R. continues:

Merriam Webster dictionary does not misspell its own name as “Mirriam Webster,” as you do in your reply. [LA replies: I’ve fixed the misspelling, thanks.] Nor does any guide to the English language approve of using “then” in the sense of “than,” as I have seen you do on more than one occasion. (I am joking, of course, and mean no offense. I’m making a point.) [LA replies: Now you’re talking, not about mistakes (i.e. not knowing the correct spelling), but simple typos. And just to be clear, when I typed “Mirriam,” that was a mistake, not a typo.]

Readers let such things slip by on the assumption that they are honest mistakes. My point is that I simply don’t think much can be accurately concluded about a person’s intelligence from a few mistakes here and there. To be evidence of a lack of intelligence, mistakes must be both frequent and widespread, not merely the consistently unusual pronunciation of a word or two. (I do not regard the “verbage” pronunciation as unusual, however.)

And, no, I wouldn’t give a pass to a VP candidate if the mistake were as bad as “aks”!

Clayton R. replies:

I know that when you write “then” when it is correct to write “than,” it’s merely a typo. I know this because of the general quality of your writing and thinking. When many people (including not only those replying to blogs but also some of my former 8th grade students) make that same mistake, however, they do so because they don’t know any better. They truly think their math teachers were talking about “greater then” and “less then.” I have verified this through observation and questioning. It’s a mistake for most people, not a typo. It is widespread mistakes of precisely this kind that, in adults, are indicative of lower intelligence. Highly intelligent people notice such mistakes in their own thinking, speaking, and writing, and as they grow older, correct them.

September 25

Robert C2. writes:

Regarding the pronunciation of the word “verbiage”, Palin’s “verbage” does not seem so egregious when you consider the silent “i” in the words “marriage” and “carriage.”

James P. writes:

Paul Mulshine insists that suggesting war with Russia is possible is a gaffe, “simply not done by responsible elected officials. Can TW find another such example by any head of state at any time?”

Sorry, wrong. I will cite President Kennedy’s address to the nation during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis:

“It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

And,

“Any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed, including in particular the brave people of West Berlin, will be met by whatever action is needed.”

Kennedy’s speech during the 1961 Berlin Crisis states that the purpose of NATO is collective defense, and that an attack on one party will mean war with the USSR—which is essentially the same point Palin made:

“Thus, our presence in West Berlin, and our access thereto, cannot be ended by any act of the Soviet government. The NATO shield was long ago extended to cover West Berlin—and we have given our word that an attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all.”

And also,

“So long as the communists insist that they are preparing to end by themselves unilaterally our rights in West Berlin and our commitments to its people, we must be prepared to defend those rights and those commitments. We will at all times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us. Either alone would fail. Together, they can serve the cause of freedom and peace.”

I will also observe that usually the President speaks of peace, while heavy-handed threats are left to cabinet officials—e.g. when Dulles spoke of massive retaliation, and the Gilpatric speech during the Berlin Crisis. Nonetheless, responsible U.S. officials alluded to the possibility of war with the USSR many times during the Cold War. How could it be otherwise? We spent many billions of dollars preparing for the possibility of war with Russia, how could our elected officials never speak of it? I suggest that Mr. Mulshine examine the Congressional testimony of any Secretary of Defense from 1950 to 1990—when they discuss U.S. preparations to defend Western Europe, they speak very explicitly about the possibility of war with the USSR (they have to, since they are addressing the issue of what we would do about it!).

Perhaps “intelligent people do not casually allude to war with Russia,” but I do not believe Palin’s allusion was casual. She was asked what we would do if Georgia were attacked—not a casual subject—and she replied that military force would be on the table as an option. That was exactly the proper response!

LA replies:

On a side point, I note this excerpt from President Kennedy’s 1961 Berlin speech:

“So long as the communists insist that they are preparing to end by themselves unilaterally our rights in West Berlin and our commitments to its people, we must be prepared to defend those rights and those commitments.”

In fact, every appearance of “communist” in the linked version of the speech is in lower case. There’s no way that the original text of the speech in 1961 put “communists” in lower case. What this indicates is that contemporary publications are going back and lower-casing past uses of the word “Communist.” The Orwellian practice of lower-casing “Communism,” which can have no other intent than to lessen the historic importance and threat of Communism, is bigger than I said it was.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 23, 2008 12:59 PM | Send