"Polls on the Move"? More Like: "Clear Lead for Bush" -- September 7, 2004 -- TimesWatch.org

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Times Watch for September 7, 2004

"Polls on the Move"?
More Like: "Clear Lead for Bush"

Bush and Kerry both hit Ohio the Saturday after the Republican convention, leading David Halbfinger and Richard Stevenson to file "With Polls on the Move, Bush and Kerry Take Their Economic Message to Ohio." The headline would more accurately read, "Polls Show a Clear Lead for Bush as Candidates Take Their Economic Message to Ohio."

Those poll results are revealed halfway into the story: "A Newsweek poll, conducted on Thursday and Friday, found that Mr. Bush was backed by 52 percent of registered voters, with Mr. Kerry at 41 percent and Ralph Nader at 3 percent. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points. The poll's results were similar to those of one by Time, which also gave Mr. Bush an 11-point lead."

Compare that to the pro-Kerry spin in a headline that appeared after the Democratic convention, after which the Kerry campaign received a historically low bounce: "Polls Show Tight Race With a Few Gains for Kerry."

For more from Halbfinger and Stevenson, click here.

Polls, Schmolls, Says Nagourney: Part I

Adam Nagourney is the lead writer on the paper's comprehensive Week in Review story analyzing the goals of both campaigns in the push toward November 2. Like some of his colleagues, Nagourney dismisses the latest polls showing Bush with a big lead: "This presidential campaign has been marked by a succession of what were considered Big Moments, anticipated by both sides as a way of unlocking a stubbornly deadlocked contest. And while the verdict is out on Mr. Bush's convention--beware polls taken over the Labor Day weekend, which can be quite unreliable--it seems safe to say that at least going into last week, none of these once reliable big moments have proved to be very big at all. Even some Republicans were conceding that Mr. Bush's convention--described by Republicans and Democrats alike as a success--might not ultimately make that much of a difference."

By contrast, Nagourney suggested the Democratic convention was having a positive impact before it was even over:
"As the convention moved to its last two days, Democrats, and even a few Republicans, noted its unusual display of coherence and harmony and suggesting--should it last--that that could influence the campaign."

Near the end of his Sunday piece, Nagourney argues the post-convention polls aren't that important anyway: "With the post-convention-poll-bounce thing now over (Senator John Kerry did not really get one; President Bush very likely did), it is time to start speculating about an arguably more important phenomenon: the post-debate poll bounce."

For the rest of Nagourney and Co. on the final two months of the campaign, click here.

• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Sen. John Kerry | Adam Nagourney | Polls

Polls, Schmolls, Says Nagourney: Part II

Adam Nagourney again plays down the apparent success of the Republican convention in "On Labor Day, Nominees Have Work to Do."

He writes on Tuesday: "With the presidential race down to a two-month stretch, Republicans and Democrats are in unison on two points: President Bush is in a more commanding position than many in his own party forecast only a month ago, while Senator John Kerry is struggling to catch up. Mr. Bush seems to have hit his political stride at the very moment that Mr. Kerry is facing fundamental questions about his candidacy."

But Nagourney quickly pivots: "Yet if history is any guide, the contest is far from settled. For all of Mr. Bush's success at his convention in New York last week, the underlying dynamics that have made Republicans view him as an endangered incumbent for much of this year remain very much in place: the nation's unease about its future, the deaths in Iraq and the unsteady economy."

Nagourney then makes an apparently indirect reference ("chaotic…Internet") to the Swift Boat Veterans story, a story the Times has never wanted to cover but which eventually spread from the Internet and into the media mainstream: "If there is any lesson about this election, conducted in a supercharged atmosphere created by 24-hour news cycles and the chaotic power of the Internet, it is that dynamics and public opinion change fast."

He further tries to calm any pro-Bush excitement: "Polls taken right after a convention offer an inflated sense of a candidate's standing. In this case, getting reliable results may be trickier because much of the polling was done over the Labor Day weekend, when many people are away. Aides in both campaigns said the most accurate measure of the race would not come until sometime this week, when voters return from their Labor Day vacations and memories of the Republican convention start to fade."

Times Watch will see how the Times reacts if those polls also show Bush with a significant lead.

For the rest of Nagourney, click here.

"Questioning Kerry's Patriotism," Again

On the trail of the Kerry campaign, David Halbfinger pens a front-page piece on Saturday, "Kerry Urges Voters to Look Past Bush's 'Last-Minute Promises.'"

Halbfinger claims, without evidence, that Kerry's patriotism was questioned at the Republican convention last week: "Since accepting the nomination at the end of July, Mr. Kerry has for the most part avoided harsh political attacks on the president, instead emphasizing his expansive plans and offering gauzy-sounding talk of sunrises and grabbing onto dreams. [Ed. note: Halbfinger must have missed this and this.] But he returned to the offensive after his character, voting history and even his patriotism were questioned by Republicans in New York this week, and after Democrats faulted him for a hesitant, halting response last month to televised attacks on his military record."

Halbfinger dashes cold water on the polls showing Bush with a substantial lead: "A new hint of the pressure Mr. Kerry is under to fight back at Mr. Bush came in a Time magazine poll released Friday that showed the president with a 52 percent to 41 percent lead among likely voters. But some experts on surveys cast doubt on the poll's findings because it was conducted as the Republican convention was under way."

Richard Stevenson on Saturday did the same: "A new poll conducted by Time magazine showed that Mr. Bush had pulled ahead of Mr. Kerry by an 11-point margin. Some experts said that finding was most likely skewed by the fact that it was conducted during the Republican convention."

For the rest of Halbfinger on Kerry, click here.

Dowd Defends Times Against Bush's Quote "Distortion"

Maureen Dowd, of all people, rises to defend the historical honor of her paper by accusing George Bush in his acceptance speech of distorting words from a Times column penned in 1946 on rebuilding of post-war Germany. Dowd's defense is rather ironic, considering her own history with misleading quotes.

She writes: "George W. Bush roused the base at his convention with a liberal-media-elite-bashing line. Painting himself as the noble agent for 'the transformational power of liberty' abroad, he said 'there have always been doubters' when America uses its 'strength' to 'advance freedom': 'In 1946, 18 months after the fall of Berlin to Allied forces, a journalist in The New York Times wrote this: 'Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. European capitals are frightened. In every military headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed.' End quote. Maybe that same person's still around, writing editorials.' She isn't. Anne O'Hare McCormick, who died in 1954, was The Times's pioneering foreign affairs correspondent who covered the real Axis of Evil, interviewing Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Patton. She was hardly a left-wing radical or defeatist. In 1937, she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, and she was the first woman to be a member of The Times's editorial board. The president distorted the columnist's dispatch….She wanted the U.S. to commit more troops and stay the course--not cut and run. Mr. Bush Swift-boated her."

For the rest of Dowd on Bush's "distortion," click here.

Reviving an Anti-Bush Sr. Urban Legend

In Kate Zernike's otherwise-entertaining Sunday Week in Review piece, "Who Among Us Does Not Love Windsurfing?" (a reference to Kerry's infamously stilted campaign line, "Who among us does not love NASCAR?") she revives an anti-Bush Sr. urban legend, the myth that during the 1992 campaign, George H.W. Bush marveled at a grocery-store scanner as if he'd never seen one before: "Like the helmeted Michael Dukakis peeking out of the tank, or the first George Bush bewildered at the grocery scanner, the photo of Mr. Kerry windsurfing played into the negative stereotype his opponents are trying to play up--in this case, that of the out-of-touch, elitist Massachusetts liberal."

This particular urban legend (which itself first appeared in the Times) has been thoroughly debunked. But that hasn't stopped the Times from dredging it up again, now and in the past. Rick Lyman used it in the October 5, 2003 Week in Review: "During a visit to a national grocers' convention in Orlando, Fla., he appeared almost giddy about the wondrous technology of supermarket scanners, apparently unaware that they had been quite familiar to American shoppers for more than a decade."

For the rest of Zernike's piece, click here.

Democratic Heartburn on the Times' Front Page

There's a heaping helping of Democratic angst on Sunday's front-page story courtesy of Adam Nagourney and Jodi Wilgoren's "Worried, Democrats Urge Kerry to Turn Up Intensity of Campaign."

The paper paints a picture of a disillusioned Kerry camp, with Democrats coming out of the woodwork to counsel the suddenly struggling campaign: "In interviews, leading Democrats--governors, senators, fund-raisers and veteran strategists--said they had urged Mr. Kerry's campaign aides to concentrate almost exclusively on challenging President Bush on domestic issues from here on out, saying he had spent too much of the summer on national security, Mr. Bush's strongest turf….The remarks suggested something of a reassessment by many Democratic leaders who had, almost unanimously, praised Mr. Kerry's convention when he left Boston in July."

(So had the Times, for that matter.)

And the word "unsubstantiated" returns: "Most of all, Democrats were perturbed with what they described as the Kerry campaign's unsteady response to the Vietnam veterans groups making unsubstantiated charges about the combat medals Mr. Kerry won while in Vietnam."

For the rest of Nagourney and Wilgoren, click here.

Gee, Every Single One of Them?

Rick Lyman's story about Vice President Dick Cheney on the campaign trail in Oregon contains this strange opening line: "In his first public appearance after the Republican convention, Vice President Dick Cheney stood by every one of the administration's foreign and economic policies in a speech here on Friday that drew unflattering comparisons with the positions of Senator John Kerry."

Shocking!

For the rest of Lyman on Cheney, click here.

• Campaign 2004 | Dick Cheney | Rick Lyman | Republican Convention

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org