×
VOCAB LESSONS. For reasons Jared Bernstein will elaborate on in a coming issue of the magazine, I'm unimpressed with Nicholas Kristoff's glowing column on Bryan Caplan's book suggesting that American voters are simply too stupid to vote like Libertarians. Indeed, even if I agreed with him on what the economic research suggests for American policy, I'd suggest that he's way overstating the role information has on voter preferences. All that said, this bit in Kristof's column is really quite funny:
It’s true that nobody ever made money betting on the high level of campaign discourse. When George Smathers successfully ran for the Senate, legend has it (he denied it) that he took advantage of his constituents’ limited vocabulary by alleging that his opponent was “a shameless extrovert” who had “before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.”Not only that, but the miserable cur actually called Smathers' wife pulchritudinous! To her face!--Ezra Klein
