David Broder Rushes To GOP's Defense, Omits Key Facts To Attack New York Times
March 15, 2007 -- 9:08 AM EST // //
Okay, so today we've finally discovered what it takes to get Washington Post columnist David Broder to defy his cherished gentleman's code among D.C. insiders and go on the attack against journalistic colleagues: A story that questions the political health of the GOP.
In his column today, Broder rushes to defend the GOP against a New York Times piece from Tuesday noting that the condition of the GOP is less than perfect right now. To do this, however, Broder omitted key facts about the Times piece in a way that, to put it charitably, is highly questionable indeed.
Tuesday's Times story was a fairly straightforward report on a big poll the paper did that was full of bad numbers for the GOP. It was entitled, "G.O.P. Voters Voice Anxieties on Party’s Fate." Broder didn't like this -- not one little bit. In response, he attacked the Times, thundering:
Months before the first votes are cast in the campaign of 2008, some in the media are conducting last rites for the Republicans. The rush to bury the GOP is as hasty as it is premature....The headline atop Page 1 of Tuesday's New York Times read, "GOP Voters Voice Anxieties on Party's Fate." It sounded like a death knell for the party that has held the White House for 26 of the past 38 years. But the evidence was thin....
I would say that the problem seems to lie in the eyes of those political observers who are impatient to judge an election that is many months, not weeks, away...the only thing we know for certain about the 2008 election is that we know none of the vital facts that will determine its outcome.
Broder accused the Times piece of sounding like the "death knell" of the GOP and said the paper's rush to judgment was premature. But -- and here's the highly questionable part -- guess what Broder didn't tell his readers: The Times piece didn't sound the death knell of the GOP at all. In fact, the Times aired exactly the same point that Broder did -- that it would be premature to use such data for a long-term prognosis -- not once, but twice. It said this:
And by a 20-point margin, respondents said that if the election were held today they would vote for an unnamed Democrat for president rather than a Republican. Such questions are hardly predictive of the outcome of an election so far away, but they do offer an insight into the health of the party today.
And it also quoted someone else making the same point:
Republican strategists said they were not surprised about the poll’s findings, though they said Republicans were too pessimistic in concluding now that the party could not win in 2008.“People should be concerned — we’ve had a tough last year and a half or so,” said Glenn Bolger, a Republican strategist. “But if you go back in time to 1991, the Democrats had a lot of the same concerns, both about the candidates running and their possibility of winning. And it turned out pretty well for them.”
Broder was so eager to attack the Times for publishing bad poll numbers about the GOP that he snip-snip-snipped those inconvenient facts away. Snip!
It's amusing to ponder what it is that enraged Broder so much about this piece. One guess might be that in Broder's Bipartisan House of Worship no one can whisper aloud that one party is doing far better than the other, because that risks upsetting things and interrupts the priests' invocations of bipartisan rapture. Of course, when the GOP was dominant people weren't just whispering about it, they were cackling and even throwing beer cans at the shrine. And the priests didn't seem to mind so much back then.
Update: Slightly edited from original for accuracy.
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