You want calm like in Midwest? I'll give you @#$% calm!!!
By Beth Teitell
Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Maybe this is just the Boston driver in me talking, but boy was I @#$% mad when President Bush's Supreme Court nominee John Roberts was praised for his ``Midwest calm.''

How come we never get any such regional compliments? Let someone from Massachusetts try to go national, and it's all ``Northeast liberal'' or ``East Coast elite.''

The best we can hope for is ``Yankee ingenuity,'' or, if we're really lucky, ``scholarly.'' Yippeeee!

Not to take anything away from Roberts, but of course he's calm. What do Midwesterners have to get riled up about?

That's not my jealous smear of flyover country, by the way, it's the sentiment of a Boston City Council staffer (who calmly insisted on anonymity). ``It's more intense to be in the city than on the range,'' he said.

Yeah. On a tear, I called Patricia A. Brannan, a classmate of Roberts at Harvard Law School ('79) and a former colleague in the Washington office of Hogan & Hartson, and calmly demanded she come up with an equivalent (positive) Boston stereotype.

``What I meant by that is certainly not to say anyone's better than anyone else,'' began Brennan, a fellow Midwesterner and the source of the praise. ``But I do think when you grow up in a place (that was largely agricultural) there is a sense of the seasons passing and doing one thing at a time.

``I always felt working with John that there was a way of thinking about things before he spoke and looking at things carefully before he talked about them.''

Thinking before shooting one's mouth off? Looking carefully at an issue before going on the attack? Let him try to defend that behavior in the upcoming confirmation hearings!

Meanwhile, before I knew what I was saying, I heard myself asking Brannan if she'd come across any Bostonians in her time at Harvard (yes, of course) and if she'd say they were ``calm.''

``I don't know,'' she said, allowing herself a small laugh, ``but there's certainly a thoughtfulness, and an intellectual weight one associates with the great city of Boston . . .''

In other words, smart, which equals smarty pants, which equals Al Gore (East Coast elite) and John Kerry (Northeast liberal).

But maybe we Bostonians have something better than Midwestern calm. Northeastern Moxie. There's Roberts, calmly listening to some long, involved case in court, while his counterpart from Boston would roll his eyes and be the first to say, `Oh, fah cryin' out loud. Yah killin' me heah!''