10/18/2004 11:08:08 AM|||Nathan Moore|||

Mark Halperin has reworded the more key parts of the memo distributed two weeks ago in today's The Note, insinuating with a preemptive strike strategy that "one side" in the presidential campaign is more wrought with distortions than the other.

Of course, it's up to the president and Senator Kerry to defend themselves. But with all of these allegations flying on both sides of the fence, it goes without saying that the stakes are very high for the country and the campaigns — and the media's responsibilities are quite grave for these last two weeks.

The press has the responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest. That's why unbiased vigilance is required every day, the rest of the way, for both sides. Further, the press cannot be afraid to point out when one campaign is more aggressively misrepresenting the facts than the other, even when charges of "unbalanced press coverage" come flying in from partisan observers.

The error in this thinking accusing the Republicans of more campaign evils, is that the "distortions" cited just a few paragraphs before in today's The Note seem to be more egregious from the Kerry camp

As with the more extreme Bush lines attacking Kerry, there is some truth underlying the charges, but the Bush people have a good case to call them lies and scare tactics.

The military is currently overextended; any incumbent administration bears some responsibility for things such as the vaccine supply; and President Bush has never acknowledged that the very purpose of the type of Social Security reform he supports is to lower the guaranteed minimum benefit paid to future beneficiaries in order to take pressure off of the trust fund, and that in the transition period there would be an enormous shortfall that would have to come from general revenue or some changes in benefits.

But the president has said repeatedly that he has no intention of reinstating the draft (and Congress wouldn't go along with it, even if he did); the roots of vaccine shortage are not unambiguous; and the Social Security scare tactics that are de rigueur for Democratic campaigns — and are just starting to be trotted out — are, as the Bush campaign rightly points out, based on the thinnest of "sourcing" from a journalist whose record of going after the Bush Administration is well established — and the president has ruled out any cuts in benefits or private accounts for current retirees or those close to retirement.

Of course, the mirror image of all this continues to be the Bush campaign's attacks on Senator Kerry on health care, taxes, and the right to use unilateral force.

All three Bush charges are under girded by some reality — Senator Kerry's proposals on health care would indeed be enormously expensive, and there are real questions about how parts of it would be effectively administered; Senator Kerry's overall philosophy — despite occasional flirtations with fiscal restraint— has been to increase taxes to pay for bigger government; and the Bay Stater's frequent "votes and quotes" before and after he entered the presidential race put him clearly on the opposite of a divide from President Bush regarding the balance between unilateralism and multilateralism.

But the hyped-up rhetorical charges ("government takeover" of health care; Kerry will have no choice but to raise taxes on the middle class; and "global test") go well beyond the evidence and remain central to the president's closing message.

The president's campaign continues to try to win by distorting, taking things out of context, and making purposeful misstatements about Kerry's record and statements. Kerry's campaign is now doing many of the same things. Both campaigns should expect equally aggressive reporting on misrepresentations.

The overtones of self-righteousness throughout is enough to make this freelancing pundit gag. The conclusions are tainted from Halperin's starting point left of center. Only through a primally skewed perspective can one somehow say that Democratic demagoguery vis a vis the draft and Bush's assertions that Kerry is too multilateral are equivalents. The public record indeed supports Kerry's "need" for multilateralism - he's anchored a large part of his foreign policy platform to this promised difference with George W. Bush.

The draft? Well, it was proposed by a Democratic congressman as a political ploy. The President and SecDef have repeatedly said they don't want it. Talk to anyone in the military, and you'll see that they don't want it. In fact, the allegations regarding the draft, as well as the Wisconsin conspiracy and the social security attacks I rementioned this weekend, are grounded in zero identifiable facts.

Taxes? The President is distorting Kerry's affinity for the People's money? Hardly! Promising free healthcare for everyone? How else are we going to do it, besides heavy government subsidies?

I do enjoy reading The Note, but this sidebar inserted by Halperin et al was a little too much.

|||109811574840697690|||Moore Thoughts on Halperin