Jay GreesonIn Chattanooga, we do a lot right.
The Tennessee Aquarium. Free downtown music events. Snack cakes (hey, if Nick Saban is a Little Debbie fan, who are we to argue?).
But, our city's transformation has been noticed with Wi-Fi waves around the world.
Whether it's "Best town " whatever polls or "Coolest place to get a pancake breakfast while waiting just under two hours in the North Shore," we rule the interwebs.
Of course, that and $4 will get you a small cup of Joe at one of the hip downtown coffee shops.
Our latest www.win may deliver a sense of shock and awe shucks for a lot of us.
Livability.com, a website that ranks cities on a variety of metrics, has crowned Chattanooga atop a recent list.
Nope, this is not the Best Outdoors Town; we already own that one.
This is not the private school capital of the world, although if that contest pops up, we need to make sure we're entered.
Livability.com has crowned Chattanooga as the nation's best place to live for moderates.
Yes, moderates. Political moderates, to be more precise.
"Politics is one of those things we all hear about, but never really consider when choosing a new place to live," said Livability.com Managing Editor Christopher Pilny. "Yet, it's as important as affordability, the quality of schools, walkability and other traditional measures of a community's livability. We like to think we're open-minded and receptive to other ideologies, but the fact of the matter is, we tend to surround ourselves with people who think like us."
Oh, brother.
Where to start?
Let's go here first: Whether you love the newspaper or loathe it, the fact that the Times Free Press is one of the last publications in the country to have two editorial pages can't hurt the perception that a healthy competition of ideas is a good thing for a community.
That fact did not fall into the purview of Livability in this study. According to the website, the study crunched numbers and voting results and something Livability called the "determination of the status of moderates," according to the website's story:
"We started with data about the political leanings of each city. We looked at the split of Romney vs. Obama votes in each county. Then we looked at the political data from each city's residents, courtesy of our good friends at Esri. Leanings were measured along a 5-point conservative-to-liberal scale. We also analyzed data about how often people engage in political activities like voting and attending meetings and rallies.
"That gives a pretty good indication of where liberals, moderates and conservatives are located. We wanted to go a step further, though. We wanted to find cities where the residents have more in common than just their political affiliations. For this, we turned to our friends at Simmons Research to find a group of products and services that each group is likely to buy. And from this we created a basket of goods: A restaurant, a retailer, a car brand, a magazine and a TV network that each political ideology tends to favor. Simmons analyzed these goods to find specific brands customers were swayed to buy, one way or the other, on the political spectrum. Then they flipped that around and found cities where customers were skewed toward buying those products."
So there you have it - and if you are wondering about the "bread basket of goods," apparently Chattanooga's are pretty partial to Freeform (formerly ABC Family), Kia, Little Caesar's Pizza, Victoria's Secret and Maxim.
And according to those analytics, Chattanooga is to political moderation what Saban is to college football.
OK.
Whether you agree with that, well, take that up with Livability. And if you want to argue with a website that calculated we are tolerant and somewhat respectful in a political landscape that is cutthroat and defined by underhandedness more than understanding, well, that's your choice. But if you choose that option, then the fact that you can't talk politics with anyone without it becoming an argument may be a "you" problem.
That said, there are two other conclusions to this revelation.
First, does this completely prove that Mark Twain was forever right with his claim that there are three types of untruths: Lies, damn lies and statistics?
Second, as someone who has always believed that we could get more done by meeting on common ground, here's hoping that modern- day moderation does not become interchangeable with indifference.
Our schools, our crime, our infighting among some local officials, our income inequality - all of those seem like issues that moderation will not solve.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6434.