And it simply will not go away. Occasional WEEKLY STANDARD contributor John J. Pitney Jr. of Claremont McKenna College has been trying valiantly for years to exterminate the most widely circulated bogus quotation in hack-punditdom: “America is great because America is good,” and so on, inevitably attributed — mistakenly — to Alexis de Tocqueville (probably crafted by some 20th-century ghostwriter). It’s been a year and a half since THE SCRAPBOOK last reported on the progress of this war. Things are going badly, it seems. According to the following sample of recent speechmakers, columnists, and other mistaken sorts, America remains great because America is good, and it remains the case that Tocqueville said so. Except that he didn’t.
* Arianna Huffington led her syndicated column with the quotation on May 16.
* Sanford N. McDonnell, chairman emeritus of McDonnel Douglas Corporation, used it in a speech at a national conference on ethics last November.
* Also in November, at a campaign rally in Roswell, Georgia, secretary of state candidate John McCallum called it a “quote . . . I know the speaker knows as well.” He’d just been introduced by Newt Gingrich.
* Chattanooga Free Press editor and publisher Lee Anderson, in a signed editorial last September, identified it as one of Tocqueville’s “penetrating observations.”
* Two days earlier, during a floor appearance in the House, Rep. James Traficant of Ohio invoked the “Tocqueville” quotation in support of the notion that “Today’s debate is not just about Bill Clinton.”
* Which brings THE SCRAPBOOK to . . . the president himself, who told Boys’ Nation delegates at a Rose Garden ceremony last July that “I’m convinced” Tocqueville was right, when he said . . .
Not that THE SCRAPBOOK disagrees with the sentiment. It just thinks America will be even greater when its columnists and speechwriters stop abusing Tocqueville.
