Lynn Schmidt: Politically speaking, it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Democratic President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said that then-Republican Rep. Gerald Ford “is so dumb that he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” The media sanitized the word that Johnson originally used and changed it to walk. The origins of this idiom may have more to do with completing simultaneous motor activities but has been generalized to characterize the inability to perform two tasks simultaneously as a sign of limited intelligence. This was not the first time politicians engaged in negative partisanship and certainly wouldn’t be the last. Negative partisanship is the …