NYT gripes

So I was writing an essay on the State of the Union yesterday, and using the NYTimes's handy little word-finding tool to find the accurate reference for things like "switch grass."

In their transcript of the thing, every single page had a careful correction appended: "Correction: Excerpts yesterday from President Bush’s State of the Union address misstated a word from the speech in some copies. Mr. Bush said, “Some in this chamber are new to the House and the Senate, and I congratulate the Democrat majority” — not Democratic majority."

It was weird and it broke up the flow of the piece to read that at every page. Plus, I foolishly thought, it really wasn't that significant a difference. Why would they take such care to make the correction clear?

Today I discovered why. There is a difference between saying "Democrat" and "Democratic" -- but only to Republican sneaky operatives.

Ezra of Tapped has a post today explaining it all:

"DEMOCRAT." The right's grasping, stubborn use of "Democrat" rather than "Democratic" is, without doubt, childish, stupid and demeaning to our civic discourse. But does it matter? I realize that everyone knows that "Democrat Party" is a vicious slur, but is there any polling on the term, or focus groups quantifying its lethality? I'm genuinely curious about this. After all, Americans hear the term "Democrats" constantly, and the party seems to be doing fine. And given the absurd doggedness with which the Republican Party seeks to publicize the label, it'd be rather rich if the slur had no actual effect, but was merely a way for conservats to tweak their opponents.

Update: Ankush answers my question:

this is from a comment written last summer in The New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg:

[Frank] Luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—Democratic Party. “Those two letters actually do matter,” Luntz said the other day.

So the results from one focus group by Frank Luntz (I know, I know) from six years ago suggest that the label "Democrat Party" doesn't do anything but annoy Democrats. I highly doubt things are much different today.

--Ezra Klein

So there you have it. Bush said "Democrat" for "Democratic" because that's been focus-group proved to annoy Democrats. And there goes the NYTimes, making extra-sure none of us missed that he said it, but failing completely to mention just why it's important to make that correction.

This is why I hate daily journalism: they'll give you lots and lots of information, but no context or explanation for why they're telling us. Silly me. I thought that was what journalists did -- explain the news, too, not just say what happened.