Daily Archives: August 13, 2012

The new stylebooks are here! The new stylebooks are here!

9 Replies

I exchanged Tweets this morning with Paul Colford, director of media relations at The Associated Press. He was busily promoting the AP’s new U.S. Elections Style Guide, with tidbits such as this:

Election Day is uppercase; election night is not. See @AP’s new U.S. Elections Style Guide: http://bit.ly/Mrvs5u

I replied that I thought that had always been the rule, which caused Mr. Colford (see how I violated AP style there by calling him “Mr.”? I’m such a rebel) to respond that there was lots of other good stuff there.

I started looking into the subject, and saw that a whole new AP stylebook came out a couple of months ago, and I didn’t even know it. I’m not sure I even would have known it had I still been working at a newspaper. Aside from the fact that as editorial page editor I had long been deviating from AP style intentionally for years, I sensed that it wasn’t as big a deal as it had once been even among the mullahs of style orthodoxy.

(For those who have not spent their adult lives as journalists, perhaps I should explain: The AP stylebook is the guide to proper spelling and usage most widely accepted in print journalism. Newspapers that didn’t have their own full stylebooks — the vast majority — used it as their official bible, only issuing addenda for exceptions, local place names and the like.)

In my long-ago days as a copy editor (which was so long ago that I forget whether it is properly spelled that way or “copyeditor,” a lapse on my part that may be some sort of PTSD symptom), things were different. My colleagues and I who spent our days around the horseshoe-shaped desk at The Jackson Sun were really excited about the 1977 edition. We actually had a party at the managing editor’s house to distribute them. And there was much in this new release to satisfy the socially-challenged pedant. That was when the stylebook went, for the first time, from being a slim paper pamphlet that resembled the tracts that fundamentalists passed out with titles like “The Antichrist in Rome” to the thick, rich, spiral-bound volume that made it seem more like the Ultimate Answer to All Questions.

But that was then. In my last years at the paper, think I had one somewhere around my desk, but I almost never consulted it, and it was probably badly out of date. On the rare occasions when I looked something up to see what the style was so I could decide whether I wanted to follow it or not, I did so electronically. And yet I see one can still order the spiral-bound version.

Which is kind of nice. But it feels like almost as much an artifact of the past as those phone books that once so excited Navin Johnson.

Ryan may be best of all possible picks for Romney

55 Replies

This Tweet said it as well as anything else over the weekend:

Yes, for a presidential candidate who leaves everyone somewhere between cold and lukewarm, Paul Ryan is the perfect running mate: Someone beloved by both the Tea Party and the Club for Growth.

For those of you color-blind in that range, Nikki Haley is a Tea Party Republican, while Mark Sanford is a Club for Growth Republican. Nikki makes hearts go pitter-pat at snake flag rallies; Sanford sent shivers of pleasure down the spines of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. The shorthand distinction: One is populist, the other not.

By contrast, the least helpful, indeed most idiotic, thing I’ve seen on the Ryan selection was in the HuffPost: “David Axelrod: Paul Ryan Pick Evokes Memories Of Sarah Palin.”

That headline was a bit misleading. To his credit, all Axelrod was saying was that then, too, one saw excitement among the base. But what Axelrod is missing, or intentionally underplaying, is the breadth of Ryan’s appeal. Not just Tea Party — Club for Growth, too.

Of course, no one in his right mind would suggest Palin and Ryan live anywhere near each other on any measurement of intelligence or gravitas. The one famous for “I can see Russia from my house!” basically doesn’t live on the same intellectual planet as the one current officeholder in American who has ever, to my knowledge, used the word “subsidiarity” in a sentence — for which I honor him, even though his emphasis in using the word would not have been mine.

With Ryan, there’s a bonus, from Romney’s perspective: He gets the cultural conservatives, too, which is a whole other part of the base that casual observers sometimes erroneously lump in with the others. Since Romney isn’t beloved of any of these groups, Ryan brings much that he needs.

This morning, the Palmetto Family Council got so overexcited that it Tweeted this:

We now have a solid pro-life ticket for President… Mitt Romney Picks Pro-Life Rep. Paul Ryan as VP Running Mate…http://fb.me/DVLjuPF0

Um… are you sure about that folks? I mean let’s see… this is Monday… Is Romney pro-life on Mondays?

The Democrats seem a bit shaken up as well. I suspect that, however much they may trash the Ryan selection publicly, they know he’s about as good a pick as Romney could have made. The reasons they give to think otherwise are weak. Politico reported this morning that “On his three-day bus tour, Obama will hit Paul Ryan as a leader of GOP opposition to the farm bill…” To which my reaction was, um, isn’t that kind of a good thing?

The only gamble is, how well does Ryan play among us swing voters? That remains to be seen. But I suspect he’ll do as well on that score as anyone else Romney could have chosen that his party would have accepted.