MLK

It's Martin Luther King Day, a holiday, and I thought I'd invest a minute or two exploring what people know about MLK.  Here's my favorite from 2007:

In a recent survey of college students on U.S. civic literacy, more than 81 percent knew that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was expressing hope for "racial justice and brotherhood" in his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

That's the good news.

Most of the rest surveyed thought King was advocating the abolition of slavery.

Oops.  Not that he wouldn't have advocated the abolition of slavery, if it still existed at that time in the U.S., but still, ya gotta wonder.

Beyond knowledge, we can also look at what people think about King.  One good source is this 1999 poll that asked about the greatest people this past century.  King finishes just behind Mother Teresa in the "admire most" score.  As an aside, Bill Clinton wins in the "do not admire" contest -- in a landslide.  A distant second is, um, Billy Graham? 

Of course King's name comes up in a host of other ways, from the controversy over having a holiday in his honor to standard survey questions asking whether King's dream is alive today.  There are too many of those to touch on here, especially when I should be prepping for tomorrow's classes.

Remembering W

And now begins a host of books, magazine articles, online stories, and no doubt a glob of academic journal pieces on remembering President George W. Bush.

In a recent CBS News/NYTimes poll, 93 percent of Dems disapproved of how W did his job in the past eight years. No real surprise there, but 34 percent of Republicans disapproved. A third of GOPers. If we turn to the self-described "independents" for an answer, we find nearly three-fourths disapproved.

All in all, it's gonna be a tough few years for Bush's legacy.

Asked where W will rate historically, an ABC/WashPost survey found nearly a third described his two terms as "poor" and one-in-five said "below average." Only 4 percent said history will judge Bush as "outstanding." Hell, Bill Clinton gets an "outstanding" from 13 percent of adult Americans in a recent poll. Time heals all wounds. A quarter of adult Americans said Reagan will be remembered as "outstanding."

The journals I read, in political science and mass comm, will soon be filled with retrospective studies of what people know about Bush and his presidency and what they think and what it all means. It's the last part that matters, whether the attitudes people have about Bush and his two terms translate into something else -- confidence or lack of confidence in the political system, faith in the U.S. economy, and hope for Obama's presidency.