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 tendency to support a political party or candidate primarily based on a dislike for the opposition and the increasingly negative feelings about the opposing party and its candidates. Negative partisanship is not only bad for our country, but just as LBJ did with Ford, it insults our intelligence.
People who reject negative partisanship dismiss the concept that you cannot hold two competing ideas at once. They know they can engage in critical and nuanced thinking. This group, of which I consider myself a member, is then attacked with whataboutisms or bothsiderism. Whataboutism is the tactic of defending your tribe by highlighting a similar accusation against an opponent. Bothsiderism and whataboutism rely on an unfair moral equivalency.
