Bloops

BEWARE OF ABSOLUTES -- "No President since FDR has won re-election with an unemployment rate above 7 percent." Or so said a report by NBC News July 6. This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't really go very far. It neglects to mention the number of presidential re-election years since FDR when the jobless rate was indeed above 7 percent, and it does not indicate how many incumbents were defeated  under that cloud. It's also wrong, since Ronald Reagan was re-elected in 1984, when the jobless rate was 7.5 percent.
   There have been 20 presidential elections since 1936, when FDR faced a Great Depression-era unemployment rate of an estimated 25 percent. (No one knows for sure, since there was no system for gathering the data.) Since then, there have been seven re-election campaigns, and only two (1980, 1984) when the unemployment rate was above 7 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In 1980, incumbent Jimmy Carter (jobless rate that year 7.1 percent) lost to Ronald Reagan. However, there were many other factors that contributed to his defeat.

ABSOLUTES, PART TWO -- A few months ago, pundits were fond of saying that Jimmy Carter was "the only Democratic incumbent President to lose a re-election bid since 1888." True, but in stressing that fact, the pundits neglected to mention the five Republican incumbents who lost. They Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.
   Nitpicker's note: Gerald Ford was never elected, but he did lose his bid to continue the term he picked up when Richard Nixon resigned.
   Using the years since FDR as a guideline, that leaves only two presidents -- Carter and Bush Sr. -- who have lost re-election bids.

RAIN, RAIN -- NBC reported that firefighters in the American West were hoping for a "monsoon" to help douse the many wildfires wreaking havoc in the region. Heavy rains would help, of course, but monsoons only occur in Southeast Asia. Unless the government of India has found a way to export their weather.

BEARING UP -- On July 3, the Philadelphia ABC affiliate carried footage of "three bear cubs hibernating in a car." Not to put too fine a point on it, but "hibernate" comes from the Latin word for winter, when bears sleep through the cold season. Bears do not "hibernate" in midsummer.

K-MAN QUESTION -- Our West Coast island correspondent asks when to use the pronouns "who" and "that." Older style manuals said to use "who" for people and "that" for everything else. However, animal lovers do not think of their dogs and cats as things. So, let's modify the rule to specify "who" for living creatures and "that" for inanimate objects.

HAPPY THOUGHT -- From Nora Ephron: "When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you."