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Times Watch for
February 4, 2004
"Striking Contrasts" Between Bush and Kerry
As Sen. John Kerry piles up Democratic primary victories, Wednesday's piece by Elisabeth Bumiller and David Halbfinger, "Military Service Becomes Issue in Bush-Kerry Race," frames the potential Kerry-Bush race to Kerry's advantage.
The story opens: "The contrast could not be more striking. In March 1969, John Kerry, a 25-year-old Navy lieutenant, reached down from the boat he was piloting in Vietnam's treacherous Bay Hap River and in a spray of enemy fire pulled a soldier out of the water to safety. For his valor, Mr. Kerry won the Bronze Star with a combat 'V' and his third Purple Heart. That very same month, George W. Bush was on far-safer ground in Valdosta, Ga., learning to fly fighter planes for the Texas National Guard, a coveted post that greatly reduced any risk that he would be sent to Vietnam--and one that he might not have obtained had his father not been a member of Congress."
The Times sees the reemerging controversy over Bush's National Guard service (put back on the agenda by radical filmmaker Michael Moore) as an example of Kerry being as "brutal" as Bush: "Mr. Kerry's campaign advisers say the dispute, and the intense Republican response, keeps Mr. Kerry's military record as a central focus of the campaign and allows him to show he can engage in the same kind of brutal political warfare as the Bush White House….Mr. Kerry is showing no signs so far of backing off. In recent days, he has been assisted by former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a triple-amputee from his service in Vietnam who has been virtually sainted in Democratic eyes after being defeated in 2002 when Republicans questioned his patriotism."
But did questions of Cleland's patriotism really lead to his defeat? As the MRC's Brent Baker put it upon Cleland's defeat in his 2002 Senate race: "His decision to put protecting unionized federal workers from any performance or competence scrutiny ahead of national security is what gave his Republican opponent an opening to attack him." And the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which might have been expected to line up behind a Vietnam War veteran, endorsed Cleland's opponent, Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss.
For the rest of Bumiller and Halbfinger, click here.
• Elisabeth Bumiller | George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Sen. Max Cleland | David Halbfinger | Sen. John Kerry | Patriotism | Vietnam War
Left-Wing Praise for Paul O'Neill
Yesterday, Times Watch
pondered the double standard whereby Michael Tomasky, executive editor of the liberal American Prospect magazine, reviewed an anti-Bush book by Ron Suskind
(based on conversations with Bush's ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill).
Turns out, we hadn't seen anything yet: Wednesday's Arts section features another review of the Suskind book, this time by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the even further-left Nation magazine.
Heuvel paints the Bush White House in even darker tones that did Tomasky (no slouch himself) writing: "Mr. O'Neill is describing the takeover of the Republican Party--and consequently of the executive branch--by what is portrayed as a group of single-minded right-wing ideologues with loyalty only to their narrow and rapacious political self-interest…. He discovered that his friends were not the men (and women) he thought they were, and the Republican Party to which he had proudly belonged had been taken over by political extremists. There was no comfortable place anymore in George W. Bush's Washington for the old fashioned moderate Republican who sought to temper a love of capitalist competition with a dose of compassion for those it left behind."
For the rest of vanden Heuvel's review, click here.
• Books | Nation Magazine | Paul O'Neill
Wednesday's story by David Halbfinger, "Buoyed by Triumphs, Kerry Looks Past Rivals to Bush," suggests Sen. John Kerry doesn't have to move to the center for the general election--he's already there: "The classic Democratic path--running to the left in a primary and tacking back to the center in a general election--appears not to apply much in Mr. Kerry's case: after all, Mr. Kerry has run well to the right of Howard Dean in favoring retaining the middle-class tax cuts, on trade, on the war in Iraq, and on gay marriage."
(Note: the online version of Halbfinger's story attributes the thought to Kerry's "aides." The wording of the rest of the sentence is also slightly different. The online version: "The classic Democratic path--running to the left in a primary and tacking back to the center in a general election--appears not to apply much in Mr. Kerry's case, his aides say: after all, he ran well to the right of Howard Dean [on] tax cuts for the middle class, trade, the war in Iraq and gay marriage.")
After stubbornly refusing throughout the campaign to call Howard Dean a liberal, the Times now centers Kerry by suggesting he is well to the right of the (still non-liberal?) Dean.
For the rest of Halbfinger on Kerry, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Howard Dean | Sen. John Kerry | Labeling Bias
"Conservatives" vs. "Supporters of Gay Marriage"
Wednesday's story by James Dao, "Ohio Legislature Votes To Ban Same-Sex Unions," repeats a common Times pattern of labeling bias, pitting "social conservatives" against plain old "supporters" of gay marriage--not "social liberals."
Dao writes: "Social conservatives said that the president's remarks had galvanized their movement against gay marriage. Supporters of gay marriage contend the president's speech was part of an election-year strategy to energize the Republican Party's conservative base. 'Religious extremists want to make this the wedge issue of the 2004 election' said Timothy Downing, the president of Ohioans for Growth and Equality, a nonprofit group that has lobbied against the bill. 'They want the country to be afraid of gay and lesbian couples to help their candidates and help their fund-raising.'"
For the rest of Dao's report on gay marriage in Ohio, click here.
• James Dao | Gay Rights | Labeling Bias | Ohio
Bush's "Threats To Our Way of Life"
Wednesday's column by Nicholas Kristof (carrying the overworked title, "Sex, Lies and Bush Tapes") claims Bush fiscal policy poses the real threat to the American way of life: "If we're serious about confronting threats to our way of life, we don't have to hunt them in the caves of eastern Afghanistan. We can find a serious threat in the West Wing of the White House as the Bush administration charts its fiscal policy. President Bush's budget policies have mortgaged America, yet instead of repairing the damage, he is intensifying the harm by trying to make his tax cuts permanent. And this week he presented a budget that is so dazzlingly deceitful it does not even attempt to include the bills for our presence in Iraq."
Then Kristof comes out for the fiscal conservatism of…Bill Clinton: "Mr. Clinton had egregious personal failings, and I deplored what I felt was his dishonesty. But as a steward of the economy, he combined fiscal conservatism with a willingness to stand against protectionism."
Clinton was indeed a more principled free-trader than Bush has been--but a president who pushed for universal health care can hardly be described as a "fiscal conservative."
For the rest of Kristof's column, click here.
• George W. Bush | Bill Clinton | Columnists | Nicholas Kristof | Labeling Bias | Taxes
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org