Liberals apparently learn little from what they read

Debra Saunders:

When a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll found, as reported by the Associated Press, that "liberals read more books than conservatives," the president of the Association of American Publishers promptly shoved her foot in her mouth.

Pat Schroeder, the former Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, proclaimed, "The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes.' It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes,' on every page."

She also told AP that liberals "can't say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion."

Maybe you shouldn't pay any attention to me. According to Schroeder, as a conservative, I've got a bumper sticker for brains. Silly me, I looked into the poll -- which liberals have hailed as proof of their intellectual superiority -- and there's not a lot there in "the whole picture." The poll found that among people polled who read at least one book in the last year, liberals read nine books and conservatives read eight.

When I called Michael Gross, associate vice president of Ipsos public affairs, to find out more about the Ipsos poll, he told me the one-book difference "is within the margin of error, it's not a statistically significant difference."

The poll also found that moderates who said they read at least one book a year, on average, read five books a year. By Schroeder's lights, moderates must be really simple-minded sloganeers.

As a conservative, I am not proud to read that 34 percent of conservatives -- as opposed to 22 percent of liberals and moderates -- said they had not read a book within the last year.

Then again, because the poll did not ask people if they read newspapers or magazines, Gross noted, "I don't think it says anything about people's general level of information."

Then there's the quality issue. A person could read nine romance novels in a year and qualify as Aristotelian by Schroeder's logic.

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In her rush to brand the right as a bunch of illiterates, Schroeder had the poor sense to go after an avid reader, Karl Rove, who has been winning a heated competition with Bush as to which of the two can read the most books. Rove recently told Rush Limbaugh that he beat Bush last year. The Score: Rove, 110 books; Bush, 94.

If Schroeder really wanted to show how big-picture her thinking is, she might have pointed out the Rove-Bush book competition as an example of what conservatives can do. That is, she might have tried to promote book sales.

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There is no happier liberal conceit than the notion that lefties are sophisticated thinkers, while conservatives are pea-brains. So eager are Dems to believe those self-laudatory stereotypes that Schroeder glommed onto the poll results without understanding what they were. And were not.

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At least we still have Patsy Schroeder and Patty Murray around to prove that liberals are not as smart as they think they are. Speaking of books about taxes, Schroeder should read Neal Boortz and Congressman Linder's book about the fair tax. Then again it may be too complicated for her. Schroeder is somewhat infamous for shooting off her mouth before harnessing her "giant" intellect.

In the debate over the Republican budget bill after the 94 election, she heard Rush Limbaugh's tongue in cheek monologue and sending his mom a new can opener to use on the dog food she was going to have to eat because of the "cuts" the GOP was pushing. She "rushed" to the floor to denounce him, missing completely the ridicule he was heaping on her side of the argument.

It looks like she rushed her argument on who reads the most too.