Last week, Stuart Taylor admonished newspaper reporters for reporting the facts, because they have a liberal bias, and demanded that they put their thumb on the scale to make sure that the wholesale lies of the McCain campaign be balanced by elevating the distortions of Obama's ads on immigration to the same level. A new CW was being born. Today, Ruth Marcus obliges:
But a series of new Obama attacks requires a rebalancing of the scales: Obama has descended to similarly scurrilous tactics on the stump and on the air. On immigration, Obama is running a Spanish-language ad that unfairly lumps McCain together with Rush Limbaugh -- and quotes Limbaugh out of context. On health care, Obama misleadingly accuses McCain of wanting to impose a $3.6 trillion tax hike on employer-provided insurance.
Both campaigns are distorting their opponent's positions in those 30-second ads, but Marcus is distorting a bit to make her point.
As Ezra points out, the 3.6 trillion dollar number comes from the McCain campaign, but Marcus was too busy being fair and balanced to sort that out. Of course, she may simply be confused because they keep offering different numbers. Moreover, the tax credit McCain provides would cover less and less as time goes on because the credit increases at a slower rate than premiums do. Marcus also decries "privatization" as "incendiary" language but it's only incendiary because people really hated the idea of privatizing social security, since that's exactly what it was called before Bush figured out people didn't want their benefits privatized.
Judging by Mark Halperin, John McCain's tire swing is going to get crowded again pretty fast. The focus on ads rather than actual statements by the candidates ignores the whoppers McCain and Palin continue to offer on the campaign trail, but it allows pundits to draw an equivalence and appear "balanced."
--A. Serwer
