QandO

June 08, 2004

Name Calling
Posted by Jon Henke

This Gadflyer column seemed reasonable until he got to the part about conservatives needing "heroes to exalt as much as they need villains to rail against". (sigh) I really really hate psychoanalysis as political commentary. If I wanted that, I'd let Michael Savage tell me about how "liberalism is a mental disorder".

I'm not interested, so this stuff turns me off, whether it comes from the left or right.

However, author Paul Waldman did make two points worthy of mention...
1: The Left's Nearly Ronald Reagan...

"But there was one speaker who made had the rafters rocking, whose arrival was greeted with an explosion of shouts and cheers, whose speech could barely be heard over the screaming: Howard Dean."

Dean is...
* A gifted speaker, who can motivate his party to move in a new direction.
* Percieved as a "rebound candidate", after a difficult period.
* Calling for major changes in core political ideology.

Of course, he's the Anti-Reagan. Instead of free markets, lower taxes, de-regulation and less government intervential, Dean calls for protectionism, re-regulation, market intervention, and socialized medicine.

As I said at the time, and Ezra writes today..."Dean’s tone was one of attack and partisan division". Dean could take the anger so far, but no further, and the activists with which he surrounded himself eventually became his greatest liability. He could never shake the image of far-left demagogue.

2: The Name Game...

One will hardly see thousands of Democrats naming their firstborns "Clinton." But in 2003, "Reagan" was the 202nd most popular name given to girls in the United States, according to the Social Security Administration.

Popularity of the name Reagan
Year Rank
2003 202
2002 201
2001 223
2000 285
1999 348
1998 328
1997 387
1996 455
1995 595
1994 730
1993 998

Popularity of the name Clinton
Year Rank
2003 737
2002 735
2001 697
2000 639
1999 669
1998 594
1997 505
1996 526
1995 475
1994 406
1993 324
1992 218
1991 203
1990 217

Of course, to be completely fair, cultural cycles probably play a larger part in name popularity than Presidential popularity and "The name Bush is not among the top 1,000 names for years 1990-2003."

Link via Pandagon, where Ezra engages in the unfortunate and ridiculous rhetoric about...

So while our great orators let their rhetoric soar around the specific, hopscotching from fact to argument to evidence; his built up from the general, consciously converting oversimplifications into policy statements. While studies back us up on welfare, his invocation of the welfare queen with her Cadillac was a much stronger retort than our Brookings report. It’s less honest but more effective, a devil’s trade we rarely make.

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