Liberals Read More Than Conservatives?

Leave it to Pat Schroeder, the liberal former Congressional Representative from Colorado and current president of the American Association of Publishers, to make something like reading, political. Here are her comments from a recent interview:

"The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes’. It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page."

Then, of course, it takes a conservative woman, author and publisher, Mary Matalin, to bring something like common sense into the discussion when she said "As head of a book publishing association, she probably shouldn't malign any readers," It seems that the APP might want to reconsider their choice of association president since I didn’t notice “Alienate conservative readers” anywhere in their mission statement.

While the AP-Ipsos poll apparently found that liberals out-read conservatives, the truly disheartening news was that 27% of respondents had not read a single book during the last year. How are we to have a vigorous and informed debate of the issues if citizens do not read? And those that did read were reading mainly popular fiction and religious books, not political works.

So, in rebuttal to Ms. Schroeder I would say “Patsy – I’d be willing to bet that once you subtracted the pop-up books the liberals counted in their responses, the conservatives would have a commanding lead.”

After all, there is something to be said for quality over quantity.