Linkmeister

Moans and groans

One of the things that annoys me most about campaign coverage is the emphasis reporters place on a candidate's changing his position. Has the reporter never done so himself? How many of us make decisions based on insufficient data, only to reconsider, modify, or even reverse said decision when the facts warrant it?

Gephardt is attacking Dean in Iowa with ads saying Dean once (in 1993!) called Medicare "one of the worst federal programs ever." Well, as far as bureaucratic complexity and confusion goes, it may well be (speaking as one who's had to try to figure out the bills), and that's what Dean meant. Dean has gone from thinking NAFTA was good to thinking it needs revisiting; how many other programs have needed fine-tuning after their initial implementation? A few, I'd imagine.

Clark was attacked yesterday by the Republicans (who based their attack on a report by Drudge, an unreliable source if ever there was one) for ostensibly switching from supporting the war in Iraq to opposing it. That report has been thoroughly debunked by the folks at Campaign Desk, a brand new and very welcome media watcher from the Columbia Journalism Review. It's so new that all its current balloon-puncturing stories are still on the front page, so just scroll a bit to find its analysis of the Drudge misrepresentations and the RNC's pickup and broadcast of same. Clark did not say he supported the war; what he said, as the Washington Post reported, was that "force might be necessary, [but that] it should be a last resort."

President Bush, on the other hand, doesn't change his mind; he just obfuscates. As Al Gore put it yesterday, "Indeed, they often use Orwellian language to disguise their true purposes. For example, a policy that opens national forests to destructive logging of old-growth trees is labeled Healthy Forest Initiative. A policy that vastly increases the amount of pollution that can be dumped into the air is called the Clear Skies Initiative."

Posted by Linkmeister at January 16, 2004 10:55 AM