Elissa Slotkin: You're not going to get me to defend democratic messaging. We can have a whole autopsy about that.
Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, the American people want something different out of their government. Can we have a little bit more alpha energy? pic.twitter.com/h8li6EAbmq
"You're not going to get me to defend Democratic messaging. That's not going to be ever something that I'm going to defend. That's part of the problem and why we lost the last election. We can have a whole autopsy about that. I think, for me, what is important, going forward, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, is like: the American people, they're telling us something, they want something different out of their government. They want, they want some alpha energy from their leaders. And they certainly — whether you agree with him or not — are getting that from some of the Republicans. And my plea to my own party is, like, can we have a little bit more alpha energy?Punch and believe in what we believe in. Show people that we give a shit, and be simple about addressing the needs that they care about the most. And that has been a struggle to be a part of that change."
That came at the end of her interview with Maher and felt prepared and tacked on. There was no time left to explore the term "alpha energy," which just felt ridiculous. Was she saying Democrats need to talk and act more like Trump because they need to get elected and the voters are pretty damned stupid and self-interested?
You often talk about the need for Democrats to bring back “alpha energy,” along the lines of Michigan sports coaches. What is something Democrats do that is the opposite of alpha energy?
In the Midwest, alpha energy is about emotion. Whether you’re a coach and you know what your team has put into the game, or you’re frustrated that they didn’t give it their all, you’re not speaking from wonky details. You’re speaking about your gut and your emotion. I think Democrats have lost that.
We respond to people’s pain with a long list of wonky policies.
Alpha energy is synonymous with being bold. Call the tough play, take a risk, be bold. And don’t be so damn scared of your own shadow.
Yeah, my first guess was right: She's saying Democrats need to talk and act more like Trump because they need to get elected.
Did she answer the question "What is something Democrats do that is the opposite of alpha energy?" Only vaguely. They're "speaking from wonky details" and not "speaking about your gut and your emotion." Her statement of the problem is, ironically, lacking in the quality she's saying they need.
And what is that quality again? And frankly, I think the idea is based on gender stereotypes but mixes up the male and the female up so we're served an unwholesome stew.
"To day is a tree found in several communes in Mu Cang Chai such as Kim Noi and Mo De, and in Pung Luong Commune. The trees bloom at elevations above 1,000 meters. The H'Mong people there call them pang to day, or wild peach blossoms. It is one of the most distinctive flowers in Vietnam's northwestern mountains when spring approaches."
Reports VnExpress. Nice photos at the link. Great name for the tree — "to day." I love the idea of pre-spring, but it wouldn't apply very well to the forests of the Upper Midwest of the United States.
I'm seeing "Exploding trees possible across Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota" (KKRC Sioux Falls). That does not mean "exploding" with flowers. "[S]ap and moisture inside trees freeze rapidly... it expands, creating immense pressure within the trunk.
If temperatures fall quickly enough, this pressure can cause the tree to split or explode with a sound like a gunshot or thunderclap...."
"The new, clear articulation of why voters should reject Mr. Trump caught on fast and turned the spotlight on the plain-spoken Midwesterner behind it.... Mr. Walz leapfrogged better-known contenders in part because Ms. Harris viewed him as an Everyman figure from Minnesota whose Midwestern-dad-vibe balanced out her Bay Area background, according to three people familiar with the vice president’s thinking...."
It's an episode of "The Ezra Klein Show." From the transcript, here's the "dad" part:
KLEIN: Let me ask you about political geography. There’s a sense of, particularly, the Midwest as “That’s where people are normal. Then they get weirder on the coast.” You’re a former Army guy, right? You’re a former football coach. You’ve got real good Midwestern dad vibes. And so you can talk about the weirdness of Trump and Vance in a way that I think a lot of Democrats would not feel they could and also in a way that they’re like, “Oh, right, maybe we’re not the weird ones.” But I always think this is a very unhealthy dimension of our politics, a sense that there are sort of “real” Americans here, not “real” Americans there, beyond the coast. I’m curious how you think about this, both from the perspective of what it’s allowed you to say — maybe that would not have landed coming from others — and also just, like, what you do about it.
The emphasis there is on the geography, the "Midwestern" part of "Midwestern dad." I wanted the "dad" part, but I'll soldier on:
There's this in the center of the front page of the website:
The Biden "Tall Tales" story is in my screenshot because it's so absurd. The effort to make Biden's stumbling and lying lovable. Look, they even juxtaposed pandas...
"In Airbnb, we’d stumbled on an ideal data set for drawing that elusive line between culture and geography. More importantly, once we’d looked at more than half a million Airbnb listings and built a database powerful enough to answer 'Where is the Midwest?' we could use it to answer a much more difficult follow-up: 'What is the Midwest?' What cultural touchstones make it different from the rest of the country? .... By this measure, Iowa is the most Midwestern state in the union, followed by Indiana and Wisconsin.... By this measure, the most Midwestern thing on Earth is the walleye, a drab but delicious freshwater fish whose primeval bulging eyes and snaggled teeth would look at home in one of those Nebraska fossil beds.... Two of the next three most-Midwestern words, 'Heartland' and 'Lutheran,' seem like gimmes.... 'Conservatory' and 'orchestra' seem odd, but Google Trends confirms that both are unusually popular in Midwestern states. If you think you know why, let us know!
Three others are probably artifacts of the sort of property- and hospitality-focused Midwestern English you’d expect from an Airbnb listing — 'rehabbed' for renovated, 'blacktop' for asphalt and 'supper' for dinner.
Several other freshwater fish join walleye on the list, including bluegill and the bass varieties of smallmouth and largemouth...."
Well... it's an interesting idea — using the words found in Airbnb to figure something out. But the glaring deficiency is that Airbnb is aimed at outsiders:
"... a 'classic neighborhood tavern'... or perhaps a 'classic Midwestern supper club'... sold on the premise that it seems like the kind of no-frills local joints that once dotted the highway exits of Wisconsin.... I invited my friend from Madison to join me at Emmett’s on Grove.... When I asked if the restaurant resembled something from the Badger State in any way, my friend struggled to perceive any similarities, aside from the booths and the overall roominess. Nothing about the décor screamed 'Midwest' to me, but the ability to order a side of ranch with our pizza certainly nodded to the region’s culinary sensibilities. (This is not a criticism.) Our servers were also extremely polite, another midwestern trait, but that could have been our luck. We stayed true to the nostalgic vibe and split a simple pepperoni pizza, plus some arugula salad and — why not? — a baked potato because my friend’s mom eats one every day, and it felt like an authentic thing to do."
The headline and the text don't match up too well unless you stress "feel like" and take note of who's doing the feeling. But that's what restaurants do, create an ambience, and they're working with whatever's in the mind of customers who probably lack experience with the place the restaurant is purporting to evoke.
The writer of the article (Tammie Teclemariam) orders pepperoni pizza and deems it "true" in some sense having to do with her own feeling of nostalgia, which seems attached to absolutely nothing except perhaps her own past experience with pizza-eating. Ironically, pizza is the most iconic New York City food. Then she adds a potato and deems it "authentic," but I've never heard of anyone eating potato with pizza.
Donald Trump’s biggest bet is on masculinity.... Midwest people love football, a sport that rouses feelings of toughness, strength and power.... On Wednesday, the President made sure to remind everyone that two weeks ago he called Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren to make the case for the conference to reverse its decision to cancel football season....
There were also "300 phone calls with Big Ten administrators, players, parents and coaches" by "White House representatives."
Almost certainly, Wednesday’s development will impact Trump’s approval rating in the Midwest. The Big Ten includes Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, three states that Trump narrowly won in the 2016 election. Now, during one of the darkest times in recent American history, he’s helped bring back excitement and energy to those states when they needed it most....
ADDED:
The decision to hold the football season right now has wide-reaching impacts beyond athlete and student safety and will impact the health and safety of many people in Dane County. thehttps://www.publichealthmdc.com/news/statement-about-decision-to-hold-badger-football-games pic.twitter.com/CynInfyi6o
So how often has "chunk" come up over the 16 years of this blog? Oh, maybe 50 or 100, but the most interesting thing is that one time, back in 2015, it came up twice in one day and I made it the word of the day:
The word "chunk" somehow devolved from "chuck" — the squarish cut of meat — and "chuck," like "cluck," is the English speaker's reproduction of the sound a chicken makes.
"Chunk" is a notably American word. Here are some of the quotes collected by the (unlinkable) OED:
1856 E. K. Kane Arctic Explor. II. i. 15 A chunk of frozen walrus-beef....
1833 J. Hall Legends of West 50 If a man got into a chunk of a fight with his neighbour, a lawyer would clear him for half a dozen muskrat skins....
a1860 New York in Slices, Theatre (Bartl.), Now and then a small chunk of sentiment or patriotism or philanthropy is thrown in....
1894 Congress. Rec. 13 July 7445/1 Just one moment, my friend. You are a lawyer... Yes, a chunk of a lawyer.
1907 Chicago Tribune 8 May 7 (advt.) It's really ridiculous the way we've knocked chunks off these Spring overcoat prices.
1923 P. G. Wodehouse Inimitable Jeeves xiii. 148 Eustace and I both spotted that he had dropped a chunk of at least half a dozen pages out of his sermon-case as he was walking up to the pulpit.
1957 T. S. Eliot On Poetry & Poets 49 Crabbe is a poet who has to be read in large chunks, if at all.
As for other uses of "chunk," there's Trump on June 12, 2020, also going on about Seattle: "They took over a city, a city, a big city, Seattle, a chunk of it. A big chunk."
And I myself used the word only yesterday: "We — some of us — prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on the flat surface of the embedded video on Twitter as protesters drag down another stately chunk of metal."
This is also me, on July 5, 2018: "You know, out there in New York, California, and Massachusetts, they may think of the Midwest as a big undifferentiated chunk of flyover country, but to those of us who live here, our state (and even our region within the state) is quite specific."
In 2017, I wrote: "The corpse of Salvador Dali was exhumed to cut out some body parts to test to determine whether he was the father of a woman who's seeking a chunk of his estate." You can see that I used "chunk" there to create a poetic connection between the estate and the fleshly corpse.
Well, that wigged art blonde
With his wheel in the gorge
And Turtle, that friend of theirs
With his checks all forged
And his cheeks in a chunk
With his cheese that says "ouch"
They’re all gonna be there
On that 82-million-dollar couch
In October 2008, I said: "The most honest admission in the book, to my ear, was the confession that he spent a huge chunk of his formative years watching TV sitcoms with his (white) grandfather." I had just read Obama's "Dreams From My Father."
And speaking of "From My Father," I have something from my "Records From My Father" series. I said: "Unfortunately, this record, my 5th choice for this Records From My Father series, has a chunk taken out of it, and so I can't listen to Count Basie's 'One O'Clock Jump' or Dinah Shore singing 'Buttons and Bows.'"
What were all the other things? Mostly "chunk" appeared in quotes. The chunks tend to be of food, of time, of land or rock, and of money. I was pleased to see that in these years, I'd never once used (or even quoted) the trite phrase "chunk of change."
Writes Lara M. Brown, the director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, in The Hill.
In 2016, President Trump broke through Hillary Clinton’s “blue wall.” He won three states that Democrats had carried since the 1980s: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin....
[N]ow, less than four years later, all three of those states have shifted again and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is leading Trump....
According to Pew Research Center’s analysis of the exit polls, [Hillary Clinton] earned only 37 percent of the white Catholic vote.... As poorly as Clinton did, the largest percentage point decrease for a Democratic candidate occurred between 2008 and 2012, which suggests that white Catholics had “soured” on Obama’s presidency before Trump declared for the presidency. Clinton should have seen this coming...
While it remains unlikely that Biden, a Catholic, will be able to pull a majority of white Catholics towards the Democratic Party in November, were he to garner 45 percent of their votes, it seems likely that Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin will again be colored blue....
The wall that Trump may have erected by November is not along the country’s southern border, but a blue one across the Rust Belt.
First, "were he to garner 45 percent of their votes" — I just have to note the use of that word, "garner."
Second, I've said it before, and sometimes I think I'm the only one who feels this way, but "Rust Belt" is an offensive term. On November 9, 2016, I wrote:
When we ceased to operate to generate power for the Democratic Party, it was back to the old insult.
If you call us the "Rust Belt," you are saying our time has passed, that we once prospered because there was manufacturing, but it's gone and it's not coming back. That's not what Donald Trump said to us when he campaigned through the Midwest in 2016. Where is the optimism?
I have a little trouble with "Midwestern zest for consensus."
I don't think these coastal elites who characterize midwesterners know much at all about them/us. (Should I say "us"? I've only lived in Madison, Wisconsin, a special island in the sea of the midwest, and I didn't begin living here until I was 33 years old, past my formative years, which were spent in Delaware and New Jersey, but I did grow up with a midwestern mother, though her midwest was that other college town, Ann Arbor, and I did go to college in my mother's midwestern hometown.)
It's partly my annoyance at the blithe stereotype of midwesterners as blandly nice. Is that even true? And what is this interest in superficial getting along really about? Would it really make you want a leader who acts like that too, or would you want a leader who's willing to take on the hard fighting that you won't do yourself?
Anyway... "zest" bothers me too. "Zest for consensus" — seems like too wacky a state of mind to be present throughout an entire region.
The original meaning of "zest" is the outer peel of a citrus fruit, the bright-colored part that you use to make a "twist" for a drink or grate into some dessert recipe. From there comes the figurative meaning: "Something which imparts excitement, energy, or interest; a stimulating or invigorating quality which adds to the enjoyment or agreeableness of something... Enthusiasm for and enjoyment of something, esp. as displayed in speech or action; gusto, relish" (OED). Here's the highest peak of usage, from John Keats:
O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,
Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life’s purposes,—the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!
Compare the zestiness of consensus to the zestiness of a warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast. Oh, no! This just popped up in my head:
There's your million-pleasured breast. There's your pugilist in the field.
ADDED: Can you beat the fighter with the nonfighter? There's this fantasy that what we need now is Mr. Rogers and that Pete Buttigieg is Mr. Rogers....
(That's just one of many articles you'll find if you google Buttigieg is Mr. Rogers.)
The more serious risk to backing away from the Midwest... is that the party could endanger its newly won House majority and all but concede a long-term Republican majority in the Senate....
“If you can’t make the case to — and you don’t show up for — rural voters, you’re never going to have the Senate, so you’re never going to be able to govern,” said the former agriculture secretary and Iowa governor Tom Vilsack....
[Sherrod] Brown... quick to point out that no Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio.... [said] “I don’t want to wake up the day after the election in 2020 and win the popular vote by 4.5 million and lose the Electoral College.”
ADDED: What, exactly, did Evers mean by "rational"? I think — and I've been living in Wisconsin and watching the politics here for 30+ years — he means reality-based and not caught up in left-wing ideology. And notice that the key is not to be rational but to be "viewed as rational."
A good response to Evers is then how the hell did Trump win Wisconsin? He couldn't have been viewed as rational... or could he??? It's a valuable thought experiment for Democrats: What if Trump won Wisconsin because the people there viewed him as rational? Is that something you can get inside and really imagine?
It's so much easier to think that the people of Wisconsin (and other midwestern places) are just dumb or uneducated or bigoted, and when you think that lazily it's no wonder you're tempted to write off the Midwest and go looking for votes in the south (not that you think the people there are so sharp, just that their dullness slides in your direction).
But if you could get your mind around why Tony is right — and you ought to presume in his favor, because he beat Scott Walker — you might figure out how to reach the minds of the people who live here. Perhaps such mental labors are too tedious for you. Go back to sleep. Here, Scott Walker has a pillow for you....
I'm the person who once said, "Why aren't the Democratic candidates better? I'm just going to be for Amy Klobuchar," so I guess I have to read this, even though I expect it to be boring. (I've often said I like elected officials to be boring, but that doesn't mean I want to consume their boring words, and I'm also wary that a boring candidate will not make it to the position of elected official.)
Let me put the quote in context. Unboringly enough, the context is Insect Inferno.
Klobuchar was asked how she (in getting reelected Senator) was able to speak to Trump voters. She says "you have to show up," and she visits all 87 counties in Minnesota every year:
One time I found myself in a business called Insect Inferno because we had run out of places to visit. It was near the Canadian border, a Trump county, and I was in this truck, and it said, on the outside of it, “Insect Inferno: we kill bedbugs with heat,” and the whole concept was they would drive around and you put mattresses in them and then they’d put the temperature up to three hundred degrees. So when I was in there they put it up to only a hundred. But, again, I thought to myself, You go not just where it’s comfortable but where it’s uncomfortable. And to me that means being there....
Insect Inferno?! Have you ever heard of insect politics?
Later in the interview (after some grilling — mild grilling — about the Kavanaugh hearings), Klobuchar is asked , "On a scale of one to ten, where are you in terms of running for 2020?" Her answer:
Well, as I have said before, I am considering it, but I never rate, scale things. So I’m not going there, but I have been talking to people in my state and people around the country about it. I think that there are a lot of good people considering this, but I do think you want voices from the Midwest....
The interviewer (Susan B. Glasser) observes that the 2016 election was determined by the voters of the Midwest, and Klobuchar — quite unboringly — comes out with an anecdote and a metaphor:
But I do think, on the Midwestern front, my husband is the third of six kids, and his mom, they grew up in a trailer home and... they would go out on vacation. And oftentimes when they came out of the gas station she would have them each count off to make sure they were all in the car, because my husband was always the sweet, quiet one, and she was afraid he would be left at the gas station. And the Midwest was left at the gas station, and we’re not going to let that happen again. And I think that is more than a metaphor just for the Midwest. It was a lot of middle-class voters, it was a lot of citizens that felt that they weren’t getting a fair shake in the system, that they were, like, having to ration their insulin, like a kid that died, a Minnesota restaurant manager recently was doing, they weren’t feeling like they were treated right. And I think our party and whoever is our nominee has to be able to respond to those people in a way that we weren’t doing in that last election.
"Brat," meaning bratwurst, commissioned by Johnsonville Sausage, the Wisconsin manufacturer of brats. There's a lawsuit accusing Indiana's associates of taking advantage of him in his old ages, the NYT reports, and the revelation of "BRAT" seems
[A] company that had long acted as Mr. Indiana’s business agent, Morgan Art Foundation, accused [Michael McKenzie, an associate of Mr. Indiana, who worked with the fabricators of "BRAT"] and the artist’s caretaker in Maine of isolating him from his old friends and business connections so they could market unauthorized or adulterated versions of his work....
McKenzie noted that Indiana had renamed himself after his home state and was into midwesternness, and brats are a big Wisconsin thing, but no one seems to be saying that Indiana had a special love of brats. I guess the question is whether Indiana chose to make money by trading on "LOVE."
It seems particularly prostitute-y when LOVE is for sale.
I feel sorry for Johnsonville Sausage, which bought something cool for itself and now finds a cloud hanging over it.
Pop art has always had playful reference to commercial art, so are commissions like "BRAT" really a sellout?
Here's a photo of one of Indiana's "LOVE" sculptures I took the last time I was in Indianapolis:
Indiana did many versions of "LOVE." Here's a list at Wikipedia. If he did all those, why wouldn't he do "BRAT"? How serious was he about "LOVE"? And, more importantly (from a Wisconsin perspective), how serious are brats?
"The answer: Often, they don’t. In Trump Country, people have learned to take a wait-and-see approach to the president’s extreme and categorical statements... I believe this explains the low-key response so far to the threat of a trade war with China among the farmers who stand to lose the most.... This distinction between the president’s words and his deeds might seem to cut against the Midwestern mythos of straight-talking folks who say what they mean and mean what they say. But there is another kind of mythical Midwesterner, the sort that Meredith Willson celebrated in 'The Music Man,' whose flinty exteriors cloak a soft spot for fast-talking flim-flammers. Trump entertains them and, besides, they never really expected a marching band."
Writes David Von Drehle in "Folks in the Midwest have Trump all figured out" (WaPo). I guess David Von Drehle has "folks" in the Midwest all figured out. He seems to live in the Midwest. Me too, but only on the island of Madison, so I know basically nothing about the Midwest Midwest, except from the viewpoint of people who are horrified to be surrounded by it. And last I looked "Music Man" was a Broadway musical, but it was written by a man who grew up in Iowa (albeit more than 100 years ago).
That said, I have something of the midwestern attitude toward Trump that Von Drehle described. Settle down, give the man a chance. See what he actually does. And, good lord, isn't he entertaining! Let's be kind to our guest, even if he's rough and weird.
And I can't help connecting this to the previous post, the notion that the whole truth must be told at a slant. By the way, I have always seen the feminine in Donald Trump.
The funny thing is, Trump seems to be delivering clear speech and stating the harsh truth straight on. That flummoxes some people when much of what he says turns out to be wrong.
Scott Walker needs a comeback strategy? I'm here in Wisconsin, and to me, it looks as though there's no chance he could lose. But to the Washington Post (and the readers it visualizes), I guess Scott Walker is the guy who ran for President, seemed very strong but then had to drop out.
I may be wrong, but I thought that story was about the difficulty of fundraising when Jeb Bush was so far ahead in money terms. When it comes being the governor of Wisconsin, Walker is secure. But WaPo's James Hohmann frames the story as Walker "claw[ing] his way back."
I was confused — clawing his way back from what? — until I eventually remember the old presidential race, the one where Jeb Bush prevented all the non-weird candidates from getting any traction. That was the one thing Jeb could do, stand there seeming like the normal guy and until the rival dull people drifted away.
But in Wisconsin, we like dull, normal people. I know I voted for him in 2010 (when he first ran for governor) because of the impression he made in this ad. And, actually, the WaPo article with the headline that puzzled me is really more of an effort to explain midwestern style to WaPo readers.
The governor....
eats ham and cheese sandwiches from a brown paper bag for lunch most
days. This is part of his political identity. He routinely tweets
pictures of the simple meal....
[At a tailgate party across the street from Lambeau Field] it was dipping below
30 degrees... Walker, in jeans, already had four layers on to keep warm,
including a Packers jacket. “Now I’ll have another layer,” he exclaimed.
Midwesterners talk a lot about layers, especially this time of year.
As
he mingled, posing for selfies and talking about tapping beer kegs, his
go-to small talk was about cold-weather gear. “I really like your
gloves,” Walker told one gentleman. “I’ve got an extra pair if you need
some,” the man replied earnestly. (This is also a very Midwestern thing
to offer.)
By the way, who's running against Walker? I've been feeling that he's destined to win because the Democrats have no one. WaPo says Democrats are "lining up" to run against Walker:
The head of the state firefighter’s union announced on Monday. He joins a field with no clear front-runner that includes the state schools superintendent, a Milwaukee businessman, a state representative from Eau Claire and a former state Democratic Party chairman.
WaPo sure isn't helping the folks in that line gain name recognition. It names none of the Democratic Party candidates, but it does name some party spokeswoman who offers what I regard as lame spin: “A year ago, people were saying that Democrats didn’t have any candidates. Now they are saying we have too many. We are very happy to have so many quality candidates in the race. It shows that Walker is vulnerable.”
ADDED: I proofread this post by reading it out loud to Meade. When I got to the last line — "It shows that Walker is vulnerable" — Meade said, "He's vulnerable. And sensitive. That's what women love about him."
Said Bob Dylan about Marlon Brando. It was 1965, and Dylan was talking to Allen Ginsberg and had just gotten done telling Ginsberg that Marlon Brando "thinks about the universe, like you."
"I'm visiting small towns in Iowa, and just stopped in Wilton, population 2,800," says Zuckerberg, presumably somewhere on the path to running for President. He seems to be wondering why people even live in Wilton, Iowa. I mean, his theme is economic mobility demands geographic mobility. Boldface added:
Research on economic mobility shows that your ability and willingness to move for better opportunity often determines whether your quality of life will be better than your parents'. In many places, people are less likely to move, and that contributes to less upwards economic mobility.
However, in many places in Iowa and across the Midwest, people are raised with values that lead them to be more likely to move to other places for college or jobs, and therefore have greater upwards mobility...
The people I met in Wilton shared these values around mobility....
Wilton is doing better than some other towns in Iowa, and Zuckerberg met some people in Wilton who'd moved to Wilton from somewhere else in Iowa. Zuckerberg — who's lived his life in the Northeast and northern California — has found a way to say Honey, how come you don't move?* to Iowa people without seeming to reject Iowa. But Iowans better at least be willing to move somewhere else in Iowa if they want to escape blame for your downward mobility.
In Z's political rhetoric, willingness to blame the individual is expressed in the positive: You people of the Midwest have values. Your values will get you moving economically, because your values will make you face up to the reality that you need to mobilize out of the Midwest to a thriving economic hotspot like Wilton, Iowa.
I'm making a new tag: Zuckerberg rhetoric. I only make a special "rhetoric" tag for a person when I'm seriously following a run for President and I expect a lot of material.
By the way, Mark Zuckerberg is only 33 years old, not old enough yet to be President, but old enough to run. Anybody who wants to support him will have to give up the argument that it was ridiculous for Trump to think he could begin a political career with the office of President and that a lifetime of experience in business isn't transferable to the presidency. (And Zuckerberg is less than half Trump's age, and his career in business is only 13 years long, and Trump had half a century in business.)
______________________
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
પોસ્ટ્સ
