Today’s Washington Post has a long page one article arguing (much more than reporting) that Bush’s campaign ads represent “unprecedented negativity.”
You’ll need to look at the whole thing to determine whether you think the case is made. I certainly make no claim myself to having scrutinized all these ads and compared their charges to Kerry’s record, but it does seem to me that in several cases the article’s charges are not supported by the evidence it presents.
Take, for example, the charge of “unprecedented negativity.”
Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented — both in speeches and in advertising.
What scholars? The first one quoted hardly supports this charge.
In terms of the magnitude of the distortions, those who study political discourse say Bush’s are no worse than those that have been done since, as Stanford University professor Shanto Iyengar put it, “the beginning of time.”
And the only other one that speaks directly to this charge isn’t that much better: “The balance of misleading claims tips to Bush,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in part because she says the Kerry team has been more careful and in part, the article acknowledges, “because Bush has leveled so many specific charges (and Kerry has such a lengthy voting record)” and because Bush has run so many more ads so far.
Or look at a typical example of what the article easily and often refers to as as “distortion” or “untruth”:
The campaign ads, which are most scrutinized, have produced a torrent of misstatements. On March 11, the Bush team released a spot saying that in his first 100 days in office Kerry would “raise taxes by at least $900 billion.” Kerry has said no such thing; the number was developed by the Bush campaign’s calculations of Kerry’s proposals.
This is supposed to be an example of “a torrent of misstatements”? As reported here, the Bush spot did not claim that Kerry said he would raise taxes by $900 billion. It claimed, based on and analysis of Kerry’s various proposals, that taxes would have to be raised by that amount to cover their cost.
If that analysis was wrong, incorrect, untrue, then the article should have shown how and why.
Read the whole thing.
