A couple of posts back, I confidently predicted that most educated Americans would be able to name at least five of our nation’s Founding Fathers. But after reading the results of a survey by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, I’m now considerably less sanguine.

According to ISI, the average American college senior is appallingly ignorant of the basic facts of America’s heritage. Only 45.9 percent know that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution. Only 47.7 percent know that Ft. Sumter came before Gettysburg and Gettysburg came before Appomattox. Only 45.9 percent know that the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” comes from the Declaration of Independence. Only 42.7 percent know that NATO was created to resist Soviet expansion.

ISI’s findings are based on the results of a 60-question civic literacy exam administered to approximately 14,000 college freshmen and seniors nationwide. The average overall score for seniors was only 53.2 percent.

Harvard seniors scored highest on the exam, but their overall average was only 69.5 percent –- a D+

Even more remarkable was the finding that at certain Ivy League schools –- Cornell, Yale, Duke and Princeton –- seniors scored lower than freshmen, suggesting that by attending these universities, students lose basic knowledge of America’s history and institutions.

In contrast, some of the nation’s less prestigious (and less expensive) schools appear to do a better job of teaching their students the basics of citizenship than the elite schools. The 25 colleges in survey ranked lowest by U.S. News and World Report increased students’ civic knowledge by an average of 5.2 points, while the 25 colleges ranked highest by U.S. News and World report increased that knowledge by only 2.3 points.

You can take the 60-question exam yourself on an ISI web site: www.AmericanCivicLiteracy.org. So far, over 100,000 visitors have done so. The average score is 73 percent –- a better showing than Harvard’s seniors.

I have not read Heroic Conservatism, former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson’s political memoir. Frankly, I can’t suppress my gag reflex long enough to get past the title.

But according to one reviewer, Mr. Gerson refers to fiscal conservatives as “small minded, cold, and uninspired.”

Apparently, Mr. Gerson feels that anyone who wants to spare the taxpayers’ wallets is a Scrooge.

For an appropriate reply, I quote from the 1925 inaugural address of the GOP’s all-time champion of fiscal conservatism: Calvin Coolidge.

On taking office, Mr. Coolidge said this: “I favor the principle of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its practical form…” [Emphasis supplied.]

Coolidge had such regard for “the men and women of this country who toil” that he halted the 21-gun salutes customarily fired as the presidential yacht drew up alongside George Washington’s Mount Vernon. “It costs money to fire so many guns,” he fretted. “So have them play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

In contrast, Mike Gerson wrote speeches for a president who was responsible for the greatest expansion of federal entitlements since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and who, for more than half of his time in office, didn’t veto a single spending bill. He let Republican pork-barrel spenders in Congress run hog wild.

Real conservatives have always been fiscal conservatives. Ronald Reagan hung Calvin Coolidge’s official portrait in the cabinet room during his presidency. The liberals and intellectuals scoffed, but that was Mr. Reagan’s way of demonstrating his commitment to give the American taxpayers the best possible value for their dollar.

If the Republicans are to have even the slightest hope of recovering their credibility on fiscal matters, they need to imitate not “heroic” conservatives, but conservatives like the president known to history as “Silent Cal” –- a man of few words but much sense.

Commentators have been comparing Mitt Romney’s speech in College Station, Texas with a speech that John F. Kennedy gave to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association when he was running for president in 1960.

The comparison is apt –- but only up to a point.

Both Kennedy and Romney agreed that their candidacies should not be defined by their religion. Both reaffirmed the separation of church and state. And both took pains to point out that in their public careers they had not used their offices to favor positions held by their respective churches. In particular, John Kennedy pointed to his stands against appointing an American ambassador to the Vatican and unconstitutional aid to parochial schools.

But now comes the big difference: John Kennedy said that the “real issues” that should decide the 1960 campaign were “not religious issues.” In contrast, Mitt Romney said this: “There are some who feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of their Creator.”

In other words, the big difference between the two candidates is that John Kennedy drew a bright line between religion and politics, and Mitt Romney, as he has done from the beginning of his campaign, tried to blur that line in order to promote his candidacy. In the statement just quoted, for example, he virtually said that anyone in this country who doesn’t take religion seriously is un-American.

Kennedy’s declaration was the more forthright of the two. As he put it, the question for the voters was, “not what kind of a church I believe in, for that should be important only to me -- but what kind of an America I believe in.” [Emphasis supplied.]

In talking about the kind of America he believed in, Kennedy said that he believed in an America “where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice…” [Emphasis supplied.]

Romney, in contrast, said, “Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.” Atheists and agnostics, presumably, can expect to be cast into outer darkness by a Romney administration.

Romney’s omission of any mention of non-believers was deliberate -- and telling. This is not a man who, if he were elected, would be president of all the people. Rather, this is a cynical huckster, sending America’s evangelicals a coded message. The message is this: Even if you think my Mormon beliefs are heretical, wacky or both, I’m really on your side. If you vote for me you will have a friend in the White House, who will support you in opposing the secularization of our national life.

It is astonishing, and more than a little disturbing, to note how easily Romney transitioned in his speech from saying, “I do not define my candidacy by my religion,” to talking specifically about his belief in Jesus Christ as “the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.”

Nearly fifty years ago, John Kennedy said that the kind of America he believed in included “a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition of holding office. “

If a candidate for president sincerely believes that, then his religious beliefs should not be considered in determining his fitness for office. That is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind in Article VI when they stipulated that government officials should be bound by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution, but that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

If, however, a candidate is a political fan dancer –- affirming the separation of church and state one minute, and flashing his devotion to Jesus the next –- then his religion is fair game as far as I’m concerned. If Mr. Romney’s opponents want to use his unorthodox Mormon beliefs to undercut his support among the evangelicals he is so artfully courting, then he has only himself to blame.

As Mr. Romney himself said in Texas today, “Americans do not respect believers of convenience. Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.”

Amen.

I hadn’t planned on doing a follow-up post on Mitt Romney’s “Faith In America” speech of last Thursday, but Peggy Noonan’s gushing endorsement of the speech in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal got under my skin like a tick.

Ms. Noonan says that Romney’s staff told her that a first draft of the speech was ready last March. If so, it was ready directly after a campaign appearance on February 17, in which Romney declared that “We need to have a person of faith lead the country.”

In his speech on Thursday, it will be remembered, Romney said this: "I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith, nor should he be rejected because of his faith.”

Which is it, Mr. Romney?

Similarly, in New Hampshire, just a couple of days before his speech in College Station, Romney declined to answer an interviewer’s question on how Mormon teachings differed from those of other Christian denominations. He said, “I’m not running for pastor-in-chief … I’m not a spokesman for my church.”

But he said in his speech on Thursday, "There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.”

In other words, a man who, as a young Mormon missionary in Europe could explain the basic teachings of his church in French, is unable or unwilling to do so in plain English as a candidate for president. He is, however, willing to answer the question of what he believes about Jesus Christ if, by so doing, he can imply that Mormon beliefs are more similar to those of orthodox Christianity than they actually are.

You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Romney. And that goes as well for what you said about how you watched your father march with Martin Luther King.

If you want to score political points by talking about your father’s solidarity with the civil rights movement, then you better be prepared to explain why the Mormon church excluded blacks from its priesthood until 1978.

When George Romney was marching with Martin Luther King, he was probably the most prominent and visible Mormon in America. Did he ever protest, publicly or privately, the Mormon church’s discrimination against blacks?

What about Mitt Romney himself? He was a Mormon missionary at the height of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s. Is there any evidence that he questioned his church’s dogma on this issue at the time?

I am not implying that the Mormon church is more guilty of racism than any other religion. I’m just saying Mr. Romney can’t point to the image of his father marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Dr. King and then drop the subject before embarrassing questions start cropping up.

Mr. Romney’s problem is not his faith, but his falsity. He’ll talk about his faith in Jesus Christ as “the Son of God and the Savior of mankind” if that will win him votes among evangelical Christians, but he’ll duck any serious discussion of his Mormon beliefs for fear of offending those same people.

His speech of last week was too clever by half. It’s not going to save his candidacy.

I just read the on-line preview of the New York Times magazine’s profile of Mike Huckabee, which will be published this Sunday. It made me sweat bullets about the future of my profession.

The article begins with Mr. Huckabee’s remarkable surge in Iowa, despite the fact that the former Arkansas governor has spent less than $400,000 in the state, and his paid staff there is “not much bigger than a softball team.” Indeed, Mr. Huckabee’s entire presidential campaign is being run on a shoestring budget. “He has almost no money or organization,” says the article. “He has no national finance chairman, no speechwriters and a policy staff of three.”

He has no speechwriters???!!!

What is politics coming to?

Admittedly, there are people who would be very glad to see the last of political speechwriters.

Twenty years ago, in an excellent book entitled, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson argued that if public figures went back to writing their own speeches, they would be clearer thinkers and better leaders.

She wrote:

Throughout history, theorists of communication have noted the educative value of forging thought into language … What is less noted is the value of sustained contact with a set of ideas. As he considered their meaning in speech after speech, on occasion after occasion, Daniel Webster’s concept of both the Constitution and the law matured. So too did Lincoln’s grasp of the meaning of war, union, liberty, and country. The Gettysburg Address expresses an intricate universe in memorable language because Lincoln had absorbed the legacy of the founders, understood the principles upon which government must rest, and had fathomed the importance of fraternity to the body politic. Had his earlier speeches been ghosted, his address at Gettysburg might have been little noted nor long remembered.

Novelist William Faulkner expressed the same idea a bit more succinctly when he said, “I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”

Even though I would starve if public figures wrote their own speeches, I have to admit that there’s a lot of merit to the idea.

I just devoted a couple of posts to Mitt Romney’s major address on “Faith In America.” Mr. Romney has spent roughly $11 million on political consultants, and he’s obviously hired some very talented speechwriters. His speech on faith was very clever. But as I opined in my last post, it was too clever by half. It’s not going to win over the Republican Party’s evangelical base.

For proof, look at a Gallup poll taken immediately after Romney’s speech. The poll showed that 18 percent of Republicans would never vote for a Mormon –- just one point lower than in March. All the fancy packaging by Romney’s spin doctors has not made him any more appealing to the GOP’s evangelicals -– especially when he’s pitted against an ordained Baptist minister like Mr. Huckabee.

Mr. Huckabee’s years in the pulpit have obviously helped him hone his oratorical skills. Will they be enough to take him to the nomination and beyond –- or will he end up having to hire his own speechwriters after all?

Teddy Roosevelt was one of our more pugnacious presidents. In 1904, to take just one example of his high-handed executive style, TR backed a coup in Panama (then ruled by Columbia) to create country that would consent to America’s digging the Panama Canal.

In a speech he made later, Teddy boasted: “I took Panama and let Congress debate that while I went ahead and built the canal.”

Following Teddy’s sensational disclosure, Secretary of War Elihu Root chided him: “Mr. President, you have shown that you were accused of seduction … and proved that you were guilty of rape.”

Yet the same president who could bend international law to build a vital waterway had no tolerance for torture. The Panamanian revolution had been bloodless. Not so a rebellion against American rule over the Philippines, which the U.S. had acquired in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

The Spanish occupiers had used “the water cure” as a technique for interrogation and punishment. American forces adopted the practice and used it liberally against captured Filipino insurgents. This was probably the first instance where Americans made use of what we now know as “waterboarding.”

According to Talbot D'Alemberte, president emeritus of Florida State University and a past president of the American Bar Association, TR was outraged when he learned that American soldiers were engaging in such atrocities. In an article published last week in the Miami Herald, Mr. D’Alemberte quotes a cable that Roosevelt shot off to American military commanders in the Philippines. The cable read as follows:

THE PRESIDENT DESIRES TO KNOW IN THE FULLEST AND MOST CIRCUMSTANTIAL MANNER ALL THE FACTS . . . FOR THE VERY REASON THAT THE PRESIDENT INTENDS TO BACK UP THE ARMY IN THE HEARTIEST FASHION IN EVERY LAWFUL AND LEGITIMATE METHOD OF DOING ITS WORK. HE ALSO INTENDS TO SEE THAT THE MOST VIGOROUS CARE IS EXERCISED TO DETECT AND PREVENT ANY CRUELTY OR BRUTALITY AND THAT MEN WHO ARE GUILTY THEREOF ARE PUNISHED. GREAT AS THE PROVOCATION HAS BEEN . . . NOTHING CAN JUSTIFY . . . THE USE OF TORTURE OR INHUMAN CONDUCT OF ANY KIND ON THE PART OF THE AMERICAN ARMY.

Mr. D’Alemberte goes on to say, “At Roosevelt's insistence, military men implicated in torture and abuse, including even those of high rank, were prosecuted and sanctioned.”

This was a hundred years ago. It is a pity that our current president doesn’t read more history.

So Mitt Romney “saw his father march with Martin Luther King,” eh?

Well, sort of.

According to what the Romney campaign is saying now, Mitt’s father, George, then governor of Michigan, made a “surprise” appearance at a small march in Grosse Point in June of 1963 -– several days after Dr. King led a much larger march in Detroit.

A spokesman for the Romney campaign says that the two marches were part of a “series” of events co-sponsored by Dr. King and the NAACP.

So, figuratively speaking and making a very wide stretch, George Romney and Dr. King “marched together” in 1963.

But did Mitt Romney actually “see” his father march? “I ‘saw’ him in the figurative sense,” a defensive Romney is now telling reporters –- while apologizing for any “confusion” he may have caused.

Did Romney really believe he could get away with telling a whopper like that in the age of the Internet? Any political points he may have scored by claiming solidarity with Martin Luther King have certainly been more than offset by the damage he has done to his already shaky credibility.

More and more he is being perceived as a man who will say anything to further his campaign for president.

When George Romney destroyed his own presidential bid by claiming that he had been “brainwashed” on the Vietnam war, he was derided as the candidate with “the jaw of iron, the heart of gold and the brain of mush.”

Mitt is evidently a chip off the old blockhead.

In keeping with a little custom of my own, I reprint my annual holiday greeting to my readers and fellow-speechwriters:

It was December of 1939. Attempts to achieve peace on earth through appeasement had failed, and a woefully unprepared Britain had declared war on Hitler. While his subjects hung blackout curtains over their windows in preparation for air raids, King George VI struggled to compose his Christmas radio broadcast.

Unhappy George! A shy, stammering man for whom public speaking was torture, he had reluctantly assumed the throne three years earlier when his older brother had skipped off to marry an American divorcee. Salvaging the monarchy’s prestige had seemed a daunting task then, but it was nothing compared to the burdens of being a wartime king. The Christmas broadcast was only the beginning of what would be demanded of him in the years ahead.

Fortunately, the King had help. Someone (it had to have been a speechwriter) gave him some lines from an obscure book of poetry that had been published about thirty years before. They expressed perfectly the message of hope that the King wished to give his people, and he used them with great effect at the end of the broadcast:

I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied,
“Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way.”

The King concluded: “May that Almighty hand uphold and guide us all.”

The poem made the broadcast. One might almost say that it made King George.

It is impossible to exaggerate the effect that this brief radio address had on British morale, or on the British people’s affection for their King. Forever after, the lines he quoted on the air during that fateful broadcast were associated in the public mind with George VI. When the King died in 1952, they were engraved on his tomb.

The author of the quote was later identified as one Minnie Louise Haskins, a retired lecturer at the London School of Economics. But the person who sent the quote to the King remains unknown. That is as it should be. Speechwriters should remain anonymous, but that doesn’t mean that there are no heroes in our profession.

I wish happy holidays to speechwriters everywhere –- you’ve earned them.

During my Christmas travels, I took along the new edition of The Public Relations Writer’s Handbook (JosseyBass, 349 pages, $40.00) as airplane reading.

On the whole, I thought it was a helpful guidebook, but there was a sentence in the chapter on speechwriting that made me wonder if the cabin had suddenly lost air pressure. “In the United States,” say the authors, “several thousand corporate speech writers earn high on the pay scale for public relations employees.”

Huh? Several thousand corporate speechwriters?

I wonder where the authors got that figure.

I don’t know if there are any authoritative figures on the number of fulltime corporate speechwriters in the U.S., but my own experience tells me that there are not even a few hundred of them –- and the number appears to be dwindling even as you read this.

What makes me think so?

For one thing, I’ve been a featured speaker at the last five national speechwriter conferences in Washington, D.C. According to my friend David Murray, who organizes these conferences, attendance tops out at 250. Of those who attend, only about a quarter are regular speechwriters. Another quarter are sometime speechwriters looking for inspiration. And just about half are generalists looking to add speechwriting to their communications toolbox.

I grant you that measuring attendance at these conferences is not a scientific way of estimating the number of speechwriters in the U.S. But have a look at the Internet job boards and see how few job searches are being conducted for fulltime corporate speechwriters these days. Surely if there were thousands of such positions, the ordinary process of attrition would mean that there would have to be dozens –- even scores –- of speechwriter job searches advertised every month.

If anyone out there has hard figures on the number of fulltime corporate speechwriters in the U.S. –- or perhaps some better estimates than mine –- I’d be grateful if you’d send them along.

By the way, for information about the next speechwriter conference, which will be held over February 13-15 in Washington, D.C., see the Ragan web site at www.ragan.com. I can’t guarantee that there will be thousands of speechwriters on hand, but I think you’ll find the event to be both professionally and personally rewarding. I’ll be speaking again at this one and would love to meet you.

Hilary Clinton’s last-ditch effort to “humanize” herself before the first primaries reminds me of one of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s rare attempts to tell a joke.

According to historian Paul Johnson, who was present, Mrs. Thatcher was once obliged to sit through what he described as “a long, wearisome dinner with ten speeches.” She was so obliged because she discovered –- to her chagrin -– that she was scheduled to speak last.

As the other speakers droned on, Thatcher’s patience wore to tatters. When her turn at the podium finally came, she was furious. She began: “As the last of ten speakers, and the only woman, I have this to say. The cock may crow, but it’s the hen who lays the eggs.”

As Johnson remembers the event, he was the only one to laugh. Everyone else was aghast. Mrs. Thatcher told him later that her father had told her that joke. Apparently, the joke supplied by Mrs. Thatcher’s father did as much to humanize the Iron Lady as the campaign commercial by Hillary’s mother did to humanize Lady Macbeth of Little Rock.

Some people, apparently, simply cannot be made to seem warm and fuzzy.