Sarah’s Pompom Palaver

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

WASHINGTON

I had hoped I was finally done with acting as an interpreter for politicians whose relationship with the English language was tumultuous.

There’s W.’s gummy grammar, of course, like the classic, “Is our children learning?” And covering the first Bush White House required doing simultaneous translation for a president who never met a personal pronoun he liked or a wacky non sequitur he could resist.

Poppy Bush drew comparisons to Warren G. Harding, whose prose reminded H. L. Mencken of “a string of wet sponges. ... It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.” When Harding died, E. E. Cummings lamented, “The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.”

Being mush-mouthed helped give the patrician Bushes the common touch. As Alistair Cooke observed, “Americans seem to be more comfortable with Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax and because, when they attempt eloquence, they do tend to spout a kind of Frontier Baroque.”

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