It’s written at the reading level of a seventh grader who is simultaneously looking at her phone while popping Adderall

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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Everything You Need to Know About the Election is in the GOP Platform It’s written at the reading level of a seventh grader who is simultaneously looking at her phone while popping Adderall Joel Stein Aug 5   READ IN APP   Listen now · 1:05 One of the weirdest things about me that I’m willing to tell you about¹ is that I’ve read a decent number of party platforms. I assure you that I did not do this out of any actual interest. To justify being sent to political conventions, I had to pitch articles for Time magazine. And while most of them could be about the parties I went to², I was worried that might not be enough to justify my expense report. But I couldn’t write about politics since the actual political writers demanded those stories. I needed to find something that our political reporters were not interested in. Which was policy. So I read the party platforms, which are not just presented at the conventions, but often written there. I particularly studied the 2008 Democratic platform, which was 57 pages long and took me 757 pages to read. While awful and completely non-binding, the platforms are important because, like a company’s mission statement, when there are internal differences, they are referenced by the organization’s most annoying people. The platforms establish long-term goals. The Democrats had Medicare in their platform for four election cycles before 1965 and advocated civil rights starting in 1948. I’m pretty sure that since 1940, the Libertarian Party platform has been asking for girls. Subscribe to The End of My Career so I can sell your data to China. Upgrade to paid In 2012,  I got Elaine Kamarck, who wrote the Democratic platform in 1980 and crafted much of the policy in the 1996 and 2000 platforms, to teach me how to write one. Her main advice was to be very, very boring. The document is a compromise between all the party factions, and, like all great pieces of literature, a committee votes on each part of it.  “The process junks up your beautiful writing,” Kamarck said. “You’ll have two paragraphs of beautiful prose and a very clunky sentence about Mexico trucking written by the Teamsters.” I did not find those two paragraphs of beautiful prose. When I sent her my first attempt, her main criticism was that it needed to be much drier. The 2024 GOP Platform is not dry. It is even less dry than the 2020 GOP Platform, which didn’t exist. The party decided that they could not write one in 2020 because of Covid, which is the exact opposite reaction to Covid that every other writer in the world had. “Not able to write during Covid” was also not a great talking point for a party that was furious that kids weren’t back in school. The reason the Republicans didn’t issue a 2020 platform was because Trump wanted to change the way platforms were written. He wanted to modernize them so that, as Jared Kushner said, they were reduced “down to a single card that fits in people’s pockets.” Or maybe even a trucker cap. This year, they basically did it. The document is written in the style of a text from a very angry ex-boyfriend. Words are randomly capitalized or written in all caps. The third sentence of the preamble is: “But now we are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE” and page five offers, “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy Independent, and even Dominant again.”³ There are more exclamation points (8) than question marks (0) or semicolons (0), as in “We trust Parents!”  There are only two monetary amounts named. Other than getting rid of the Department of Education, and strengthening ICE, no federal departments are named. No specifics are given, such as how they plan to accomplish their promise that the “United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit.” The platform is only 23⁴ pages long and four of those pages are pictures of Donald Trump. The writer/texter of the document also didn’t seem to spend a lot of time figuring out the party’s priorities. In the list of “twenty promises” (Sometimes numbers are spelled out and sometimes they aren’t. Shut up, nerd!), “NO TAX ON TIPS!” comes in at number six, while “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE” is number eight. Number 17 is “KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS” while “SECURE OUR ELECTIONS” is 19. These are not the plans of a serious country. The document spends a lot of its space⁵ on supporting unrestricted artificial intelligence development, so I gave the platform to ChatGPT and asked how it might improve it. It came up with these suggestions: Adjusted the tone to be more professional and formal. Ensured consistent use of terms and capitalization (e.g., "Common Sense" vs. "common sense"). Reduced redundancy by eliminating repeated ideas or phrases. I know America is changing. We don’t attend the theater, read poetry, or read things that aren’t poetry as much as we once did. We enjoy an occasional Hulk Hogan appearance at our political conventions. My 15-year-old son suggested I get a T-shirt that says, “Please bear with me, I’m from the past,” but I don’t like shirts with words on them. Soon, I’m sure, the only political parties that I can identify with will be the Whigs and the Bull Moose. But for now, the GOP platform is all I need to MAKE My Choice! Subscribe to The End of My Career so I can sell your data to China. Upgrade to paid 1 So the 102nd weirdest thing about me. 2 The 2012 competing gay Republican parties were weak. 3 The platform’s consistent use of the Oxford comma is jarring and can only be due to anger at Vampire Weekend for their support of Democratic candidates. 4 AP style is to spell out one through ten, and capitalize starting at 11, so lay off nerds! 5 Two sentences Thank you for paying to read my column. Wait: This is for the people who didn’t pay? Then I owe you nothing. You are the ones contributing to the end of my career. If you want to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get one extra post a month – which often won’t even be that good – upgrade to a paid subscription here: Upgrade to paid   Like Comment Restack   © 2024 Joel Stein Unsubscribe