Membranophonist’s Ramblings

From a New York Times letter to the editor:

While “spreadsheet people” may be Republicans by and large, George W. Bush is not a spreadsheet person; his fiscal policy cannot withstand a quantitative analysis.

Nor is he a paragraph person - one could not find the prose to justify his conflation of Iraq with the war on terror. So what is President Bush?

David Brooks’s framework leaves out an important group, what we label the PowerPoint or bullet-point people.

Bullet-point people traffic in the meaningless business-speak of the management consultant, language that eschews equally the nuance and hard numbers of reality. Bullet-point people can get by when confined to the ranks of mediocrity, but as the leader of our country, this bullet-point person is woefully ill equipped.

Stephen Caldwell
Laurel Tripp
Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 11, 2004
The writers are, respectively, a management consultant and a sociology professor.