Obama Is Selling Drugs?
Editors like reading. Not only do we learn about new topics, but also the writing sometimes amuses us. I was recently reading an interesting article on RealClearPolitics.com and came across this amusing, yet perplexing, sentence.

She will now be free to have lunch with Billy Shaheen, the unpaid Clinton adviser (and spouse of former New Hampshire Gov. and now Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen) who was forced to resign when he speculated about how the Republicans might use rumors that Obama had both used and sold drugs in a general election campaign. [http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/nasty_twists_in_democratic_rac.html]

Obama is selling drugs? According to this sentence, someone is spreading rumors that presidential candidate Obama has been using and selling drugs while campaigning--not as a youth, not some time before his presidential campaign, but actually while he has been running for the presidency. I assume that this is not true, but that is what the sentence says.

The sentence says, "...rumors that Obama had both used and sold drugs in a general election campaign." Like most readers, we tend to think that a phrase describing an action is linked to the most recent verb. Thus, the phrase "in a general election campaign" seems to refer to when Obama "used and sold drugs." Most likely, the phrase "in a general election campaign" is supposed to refer to

1. when Shaheen speculated about how Republicans will use the rumor, or

2. when the Republicans will use the rumor.

I really don't know which interpretation is correct. This sentence is not clear.

To be fair, I like this website, and the writer is a good one. The article, with the exception of this sentence, was well written. The problem is that she tried to put too much information in one sentence and lost the meaning of what she was writing. Too much information is between the phrase "in a general election campaign" and the action it is describing, whichever one it is.

We have an editing strategy that fixes this problem. Our strategy is to find the words and phrases that describe an action and place them as closely as possible to the action they describe. When we apply this strategy, the following two revisions result.

1. She will now be free to have lunch with Billy Shaheen, the unpaid Clinton adviser (and spouse of former New Hampshire Gov. and now Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen) who was forced to resign when he speculated in a general election campaign about how the Republicans might use rumors that Obama had both used and sold drugs. [Describes when Shaheen made the speculation]

2. She will now be free to have lunch with Billy Shaheen, the unpaid Clinton adviser (and spouse of former New Hampshire Gov. and now Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen) who was forced to resign when he speculated about how the Republicans might use in a general election campaign the rumors that Obama had both used and sold drugs. [Describes when the Republicans might use the rumor]

Both of these sentences would benefit from further revision, but at least they no longer claim that Obama is using and selling drugs while out kissing babies and shaking hands--much to our relief and, we assume, to Obama's.