As Gavin Newsom considers a presidential run and promotes his new book, he draws provocative attention to his dyslexia — and not in an ideal way.
Newsom’s discussion of his bad test scores and inability to read a speech famously prompted President Donald Trump to dismiss the California governor’s presidential prospects for having a “mental disability,” which implies a serious impairment to one’s intellectual capacity.
Dyslexia doesn’t affect intelligence; it confounds our ability to assess it in conventional ways, such as using standardized tests.
After all, dyslexics (and suspected dyslexics) include a host of people few would tag as dummies, including Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Richard Branson, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Agatha Christie, Steven Spielberg, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Woodrow Wilson, David Boies, Charles Schwab, and John Chambers of Cisco Systems.
There were a few problems with Newsom’s characterization of dyslexia in his recent interview with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens. By telling a largely African American audience, “I’m like you,” while talking about his substandard SAT scores, he was simultaneously viewed as pandering to and insulting his audience.
Newsom also risked conflating dyslexia with a lack of intelligence. By emphasizing his poor test scores and reading struggles, the governor left listeners questioning his qualifications for office.
In an age when there is a fashion for claiming disabilities, real and imagined, nobody wants to elect a president we feel sorry for. We want to elect a winner, provided he or she is enough like us to lead us. This could be problematic for Newsom because of the pre-existing suspicion that he’s little more than a gelled haircut.
I’m touchy about public discussions about dyslexia. Just a few years older than Newsom, schools didn’t know much about it when we were growing up.
When I was in fourth grade, my mother had me tested to find out why I read so poorly and struggled to pay attention. The only thing I remember about the tests is that one of them involved assembling a puzzle. I struggled to make sense of it.
Afterward, the woman administering the test asked my mom whether there might be a family business where I could someday do manual labor. In other words, based on the test, she didn’t think I was very smart — and I knew it.
I learned to read by studying a fact book about U.S. presidents I had at home. I was comforted by familiar words that I learned from their shapes more than anything else, words like “president” and “White House.” I might not have been academically gifted, but I became scholastically shrewd.
I found people, mostly outside of school — neighbors, older kids — who knew more about a subject matter, and I’d pepper them with questions as if I were making conversation. Sometimes I’d tee them up to say, “I’d be happy to take a look at your homework.” Well, if you insist… These interactions shaped my approach to problem-solving.
I competed in public speaking and debating, won tournaments, and got better-than-expected grades — something a fraud could do if he were clever. I felt blessed and cursed when I got into Dartmouth. Surely, they had made a mistake and would discover the con I was pulling.
When I told a dean in my senior year that I was considering applying to law school, she told me it was a bad idea because I didn’t “think that way.” What did that mean?
Someone at Dartmouth Medical School tested me. One of the tests involved a puzzle, not unlike the one inflicted upon me years before. I was told I was dyslexic. I dropped law school like a cinderblock.
In the years since, I worked in the White House Office of Communications, founded a leading crisis-management firm, and wrote 12 books. None of these required puzzles or standardized tests as credentials.
Which brings us back to Newsom, who teed up the dyslexia narrative, which, I assure you, will remain around his neck.
He will need to tell us a story about how he got where he did and why he’s qualified to go further.
If Trump frames dyslexia as an intelligence deficit, so will many voters. Newsom has begun sharing how dyslexia became a strength, but he must go past the disability-is-a-gift old saw, because nobody wants to hear it.
Newsom will need to guide us on how his dyslexia helped him develop traits such as big-picture thinking, creativity, and persistence, if he wants to cast himself as the kind of leader voters want to elect, and not just a figure of pity.
Eric Dezenhall is the author of Wiseguys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents and the Deals They Made (HarperCollins).
This story originally appeared on NYPost
