Voting in an election that never happened

FACTUAL ERROR

A factual error crept its way into an odd letter in the Charlottesville Daily Progress today, in which the writer remembers voting in an election that never happened.

 The letter, submitted by Albemarle County resident Hubert Hawkins, makes an argument about retaining Virginia's tradition of open primary elections, in which any voter, regardless of party affiliation, can participate in either the Democratic or Republican party's primaries for nominating candidates for the general election. (Virginia voters do not register by political party, so "party affiliation" is determined by the voter's own individual preference and observations of primary voting patterns and recorded financial contributions to candidates and party committees.)

Mr. Hawkins tries to undergird his point by reminiscing about the only time he crossed party lines to vote in a Republican primary:

Years ago when Oliver North opposed John Warner in the Republican primary, I was a Democrat who never sought to meddle in Republican elections. But I knew that my senator was going to be a Republican, no matter who won the party’s primary, because my party had no competitive candidate. So I voted in the Republican primary, fearful of what outcome might ensue from the victory of such a controversial character as North.

I have never regretted my vote, and I have always been grateful that Virginia law allows all voters to participate realistically in the future of the state and nation without restrictions on what party they may have belonged to.

The problem with that example? Oliver North never challenged John Warner for the Republican Party of Virginia's nomination for the U.S. Senate, in a primary or through any other method.

John Warner, Larry Sabato, Mark Warner

John Warner ran unopposed for the GOP nomination in 1990, and he had no Democratic opponent in the November election. Nancy Spannaus, a devotee of political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, was the only other candidate on the ballot that year. Warner beat Spannaus by sweeping every county and city and earning 80.9 percent of the vote.  The absence of a Democratic general election candidate that year may be what Mr. Hawkins is trying to recall in his letter to the editor.

 In 1994, Oliver North sought the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate and winning it in a convention against former Reagan administration official James C. Miller III. There was no primary election that year, and John Warner was not on the ballot. North went on to lose the general election to incumbent Democrat Chuck Robb in a three-way race that also included independent J. Marshall Coleman. That election was the subject of a popular documentary film, A Perfect Candidate.

 In 1996, Jim Miller challenged John Warner for the nomination in a primary election but Warner won and went on to face Democrat Mark Warner in the general election.

After serving one term as Virginia''s governor, Mark Warner eventually won John Warner's U.S. Senate seat in 2008, after John Warner decided to retire.  The two of them remain on friendly terms (as seen in this video from earlier this year) and, in fact, John Warner has endorsed Mark Warner's re-election bid this year.

Regardless of what one thinks about the merits of Mr. Hawkins' argument about open primaries, it's important that the person making that argument have his facts straight. For that matter, it is the responsibility of the newspaper's copy editors to ensure that such factual errors do not make their way into print.

It's easy enough to, as they say, "look it up."

(Adapted from a post to Rick Sincere News and Thoughts.)

Historical howlers in Sunday's Washington Post Metro section

An article in the print edition of the Washington Post on Sunday, July 27 (p. C5), includes three glaring errors that would have resulted in a failing grade on an elementary school history test, yet only one of them has been subsequently corrected on the newspaper's web site.

The article, written by Ileana Najarro with a print-edition headline "Wolf is making his last push for holiday," explains how retiring U.S. Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA10) is advancing legislation that would make Washington's Birthday a federal holiday celebrated on the actual date of his birth, February 22, rather than floating each year on the third Monday in February.

One of Najarro's errors relates to how the holiday came to be celebrated on a date other than February 22:

President Rutherford B. Hayes established Washington’s birthday in 1879 as a holiday for the District’s federal workers, Wolf said. The holiday was extended to all federal workers six years later, but it wasn’t until 1971 that it was moved to the third Monday of February as part of President Gerald Ford’s Uniform Monday Holiday Act.

Gerald Ford did not become President until August 1974. The law was passed when Lyndon Johnson was President. Johnson signed it on June 28, 1968, and it took effect January 1, 1971, when Richard Nixon was President. Ford did sign a bill in 1975 that amended the Uniform Monday Holiday Act to restore Veterans' Day commemorations to November 11, regardless of its day of the week.

A second error, also not corrected, misplaces the origins of George Washington:

Sitting in his office, [Wolf] spoke of his geographical connection to the first president: Both were originally from Philadelphia, and both have held office in Winchester.

It used to be said that "every schoolboy knows" some fact about U.S. history. One such fact is that George Washington came from Virginia. He was born in the Northern Neck, in Westmoreland County near Fredericksburg. In later years, Washington made his home at Mount Vernon, just down the Potomac River from the city that bears his name. As a military officer, Washington did maintain an office in Winchester during the 1750s in a building that still stands near Cork and Braddock Streets.

Washington also served his country in Philadelphia, presiding over the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and moving there from New York as President before the capital was established in its present location.

The sole error that was corrected reads, in the print edition, like this:

Although the holiday is still recognized as Washington's Birthday, it's come to be known as Presidents' Day, with several states honoring all presidents at once. Wolf said he abhors this "hijacking" because Washington's birthday is honored equally with that of President Richard M. Nixon, who was impeached.

Andrew Johnson was impeached. Bill Clinton was impeached. Richard Nixon resigned before articles of impeachment could be brought before the House of Representatives for a vote.  If any newspaper's editors should know this, it would be those of The Washington Post.

The Post's correction of this error appears at the top of the page on its web site:

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that President Nixon was impeached. He resigned before he could be impeached. This version has been corrected.

The "corrected" paragraph says that Nixon "resigned in disgrace."

So... Where were the copy editors?  How did sloppiness like this make it through the Metro section's editorial process?  Will the other errors also merit corrections in print or on the Post's web site?

Note:  The web headline for Najarro's article is: "Rep. Frank Wolf’s final acts include restoring Washington’s Birthday."

Even Letters Deserve Editors

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

One of the jobs of the editor of the letters page in a newspaper is to check the facts of the letters from readers that the paper chooses to publish and correct errors, if necessary.

The letters editor of the Washington Post fell down on the job the other day. In a letter from Wes Pedersen of Chevy Chase (Maryland) about the origins of John F. Kennedy's enthusiasm for space exploration, we learn this:

In truth, Mr. Kennedy's lunar zeal was pressed upon him by his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who explained the political and public relations importance of a dramatic move that would raise Americans' morale in the wake of the surprise orbiting of the Earth by Russia's unmanned Sputnik. Earlier, as House speaker, Johnson had been the foremost advocate of funding for NASA.

Vice President Johnson may have whispered something in JFK's ear about lunar voyages, but he did not do so as Speaker of the House -- or even as former Speaker of the House.

Washington Post editors should know that LBJ served as Majority Leader of the United States Senate. He had a short term in the House of Representatives but never rose to the post of Speaker.

Reports of His Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Bad Punctuation, Major Factual Error

From Sunday's Washington Times comes this egregious paragraph in a review of Michael Dobbs' recent book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. UPI editor Martin Sieff writes:

But Mr. Dobbs also challenges. And demolishes many hoary myths that have obscured the true history of the crisis on the U.S. side over the decades as well. Most of all, he destroys the image of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy's brother, as a wise, consistent force of moderation throughout the crisis. On the contrary in its early stages, RFK was one of the most unstable, shoot-from-the-hip advisers surrounding the president. "On the first day of the crisis, he was one of the leading advocates for invading Cuba and even ruminated aloud about staging a 'Sink the Maine'-type incident as a pretext for getting rid of Castro," Mr. Dobbs writes. Bobby Kennedy also played a much smaller role in the resolution of the crisis than Theodore Sorensen, the recently deceased lifelong hagiographer of the Kennedy clan, claimed, Mr. Dobbs proves.

A competent copy editor would have caught those sentence fragments at the beginning of the paragraph.

Theodore Sorensen himself must be amused by the last sentence, which describes him as "recently deceased." His admirers might be dismayed, however, to learn that the former White House advisor, who made a public appearance in Charlottesville last week, is reportedly dead.

While in Charlottesville, Sorensen talked about his experiences during the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to The Hook, a local weekly newspaper:

Sorensen, speaking to invited guests of the UVA center named for his late benefactor brother, alternated between defending "his president like a Rottweiler refusing to let go of a pant leg," as the Washington Post recently put it, and prompting guffaws (as did his sister, Institute board member Ruth Sorensen Singer, in her introduction).

For instance, the televised address Sorensen wrote for Kennedy did much more than explain the American naval blockade of Cuba. In recent years, Sorensen said, myriad men have approached him "to thank me for making that speech so scary that they could convince their girlfriends it was their last night on earth."

I am surprised that the Washington Times web site has not yet posted a correction to Sieff's, um, fatal error.

It's Madison, Not Monroe

Factual Error:

In a tribute to the late Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) in Tuesday's Washington Times, Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation writes:

On the Fourth of July in 1826, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson - Founding Fathers and presidents - both died. On the Fourth of July in 1831 James Monroe - primary author of the Constitution - died.

He's correct about the dates and the men who died on Independence Day in 1826 and 1831. He's wrong about James Monroe's claim to fame.

The primary author of the Constitution was James Madison, who went on to become the fourth President of the United States. Monroe, who succeeded Madison to the presidency in 1817, was not even present as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. (Monroe did, however, serve in Virginia's convention to vote on ratification of the Constitution.)

Where are the copy editors at the Washington Times?

Senator Douglas Must Be Miffed

Factual Error:

In a Washington Post Book World review of Daniel Mark Epstein's The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, Catherine Allgor writes (on page BW05):

For Mary Todd Lincoln, as for many First Ladies, the most active politicking took place in the years before her husband won the highest seat in the land. While Abraham was a senator, Mary sought patronage posts for him, wrote his letters and used her own correspondence to outline his position on slavery to Southerners.

Allgor is identified as a professor of history at the University of California at Riverside, so surely she must know that Abraham Lincoln never served as a senator.

Lincoln was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives and of the U.S. House of Representatives early in his political career, and in 1858 he engaged in that famous series of debates with Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas in an attempt to win election to the United States Senate -- but Lincoln lost that time, only to defeat Douglas two years later in the presidential election of 1860.

Perhaps the error is found in the book under review, and Allgor's repetition of it is an oversight. Perhaps she wrote "senator" when she meant to write "candidate."

However it found its way into Book World, however, it was up to the copy editing team at the Washington Post to check this new fact and delete it before publication.

Constitutional Fact Check

(This is cross-posted from my other blog.)

Perhaps it is understandable, if not entirely excusable, when a historian makes a factual mistake in something he writes, when the mistake deals with more recent events than those he is describing.

But one would think that a prestigious newspaper like the Washington Post would have fact-checkers on staff to make sure that errors do not end up in print, especially on the heavily-visited op-ed page.

In a piece published Wednesday, "Three Cheers for July Second,"Andrew Trees -- who used to teach at a tony New York private academy, Horace Mann School, until a racy roman à clef called Academy X got him in hot water -- talks about the how John Adams predicted that our big national holiday would be celebrated on July 2, the day the Continental Congress voted for independence (two days before the Declaration of Independence was subsequently approved). Trees makes this suggestion:

I propose we make July 2 a national holiday to celebrate the Founders for some of their greatest but least appreciated attributes -- their mistakes.

Irony alert: Later in his article, Trees writes about the originally proposed amendments that led to the Bill of Rights:

The Bill of Rights as we know it also is not what was initially proposed. The original first two amendments, one of which concerned the number of constituents each member of Congress had and one regarding congressmen's salaries, were never ratified by the states. What we think of today as our First Amendment freedoms were actually third on the list.

"Never ratified by the states"? Um, perhaps the first one, but not the second.

What could have been the First (or Second) Amendment eventually became the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, ratified on May 7, 1992. It is the most recent amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the one that took the longest path from proposal to ratification. It reads, according to the National Archives:

AMENDMENT XXVII

Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992.

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.

Trees may have missed this development, focused as he was the "delicious, malicious stuff" (in Jonathan Yardley's words) recounted in Academy X. If he didn't learn about the 27th Amendment while writing his book, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character (could that require another irony alert?), then at least the Post's opinion pages staff should have caught the error.

Or maybe it's just one more mistake for us to celebrate on July 2.

Let's Start with These Examples

Poor Word Choice:

In an article on how new media is being used in the presidential campaign, Washington Times correspondent Kara Rowland wrote in the print edition of July 1 (one day before Rowland's birthday, as it happens):

...despite some aesthetic differences, the functionality of the two campaigns' official Web sites are virtually identical. Visitors are greeted by pictures of each man looking confidentially out into the distance.

"Confidentially"? Doesn't she mean "confidently"? Or are Barack Obama and John McCain being somehow conspiratorial in they way they look "out into the distance"?

Factual Error:

I do not want to pick on the Washington Times in this first substantive post, but on the same page as Rowland's article (July 1, 2008; page B4) is the jump of an article about a Colorado congressional race, in which one of the candidates is openly gay.

Valerie Richardson reports:

If elected, Mr. [Jared] Polis would be the first openly gay man to win a House race without the benefit of incumbency. Both of the known homosexual men to win House seats - former Rep. Gerry Studds and Rep. Barney Frank, both Massachusetts Democrats - disclosed their sexuality after having first won election to Congress.
Rep. Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin Democrat, was the first openly gay woman to be elected when she won in 1998.

This news will come as a surprise to former U.S. Representatives Steve Gunderson (R-Wisconsin) and Jim Kolbe (R-Arizona), both of whom were re-elected after they revealed their sexual orientation to their constituents. Gunderson was re-elected once after coming out in 1994 (he retired at the next cycle) and Kolbe was not only re-elected several times after coming out in 1996, he became chairman of the foreign operations subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. Kolbe retired after the 2006 election.

Where were the copy editors at the Washington Times?