In the civics textbooks (and in self-important gatherings of journalists), we are told that the newspapers are the factual sticklers that hold politicians accountable. But the deeply held media principle that Barack Obama floats above the grubby world of politics like an idealistic space cowboy means the civics textbooks aren't in use.
Instapundit highlighted how The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz noticed that the nation's leading newspapers (The New York Times, USA Today, and Obama's hometown Chicago Tribune) all avoided the substance of Barack Obama's flip-flop on the D.C. gun ban. Patterico added the L.A. Times to the list (complete with video of Obama on DC's local ABC channel.) Yesterday I noticed the same thing online at Time.
Kurtz called it Pretzel Logic:
Barack Obama is under hostile fire for changing his position on the D.C. gun ban.
Oh, I'm sorry. He didn't change his position, apparently. He reworded a clumsy statement.
That, at least, is what his campaign is saying. The same campaign that tried to spin his flip-flop in rejecting public financing as embracing the spirit of reform, if not the actual position he had once promised to embrace.
Is this becoming a pattern? Wouldn't it be better for Obama to say he had thought more about such-and-such an issue and simply changed his mind? Is that verboten in American politics? Is it better to engage in linguistic pretzel-twisting in an effort to prove that you didn't change your mind?
Regardless of what you think of the merits of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling overturning the capital's handgun law, it seems to me we're entitled to a clear position by the presumed Democratic nominee.
After showing all the newspapers skipping out on the public record, Kurtz lamented:
That's all we get? He said/he said journalism?
Even if you wanted to maintain that it wasn't really a flip-flop, what about giving the readers the facts?
The Washington Post did include this half-sentence deep in a story: "Obama, who has advocated strict gun-control laws and who spoke favorably about the District's handgun ban before yesterday's ruling..."
Deep in a story is also a cop-out. In fact, the Post only describes Obama as "calibrating" a position, not flip-flopping.
Democrats have lamented their inability to win more votes in rural America, and particularly in parts of the West and the South, and many have tried to calibrate their positions on guns to make themselves more acceptable to voters in those regions.
That "calibrating" is easier when reporters strenuously avoid obvious factual changes in positions.
