Damned if you do, damned if you don't

It seems like since the moment John Kerry threw his hat in the ring for this presidential election, the media has made a big fuss over his propensity for prefacing statements with caveats and qualifiers. From May 18 to July 23, Slate even had a department called "Kerryisms" (subtitled "the senator's caveats and curlicues") in which they footnoted all the qualifiers in 36 Kerry quotations. Point being, one of the prominent criticisms of John Kerry in this campaign is his tendecy to provide complex answers. I even fell prey to this before the first debate when I predicted that Kerry would go over the time limit more, on the logic that I hadn't heard him give a short answer yet.

So he's stopped. He's reigned in the footnotes and qualifiers and simplified his responses. The reaction: now the media cites him for inaccuracy and/or vagueness.

A brief perusal through some of the fact checks of the first two presidential debates shows that Kerry is called to the carpet for a new tendency to not qualify his statements. They cite him for claiming that the economy has lost 1.6 million jobs without indicating that those are only private-sector jobs, and for referencing "sneak and peek" searches in a discussion of the USA PATRIOT Act without stating that those were permissible before the PATRIOT Act. After the first debate, media fact checkers cited Kerry for saying that the war in Iraq has cost $200 billion and that the President is spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" in bunker-busting nukes without saying that the figures include money that has been or is expected to be appropriated but that has not, technically, been spent yet. Certainly, without the footnotes, those figures are false. Kerry could have easily used figures that could be accurate without qualifiers (total net job loss is over half a million, the Iraq war cost-to-date is $120 billion, and the bunker-busting-nuke budget is about $35 million). Still, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. The media faulted him for using so many qualifiers to support the accuracy of his figures, then for not using enough.

The media have also faulted Kerry for telling people "I have a plan" 13 times in Friday's debate without going into more details than "download it off my website." Saturday Night Live even poked a comic jab at that in last night's opening sketch. I'm working on reading these plans. They are properly complex in response to the realities of international relations, and there is no way to do them justice in two minutes. If Kerry tried to set them out in a sound bite, he would be criticized for oversimplifying.

All of those inaccurate figures and references to an unstated plan came from the debates, where the candidates had to make whatever point in less than two minutes. We're asking the future Leader Of The Free World to explain himself in less time than we give to a bag of microwave popcorn. This world is not an easy or simple place. Unfortunately, most Americans seem to have shorter attention spans than lab mice, who can be trained to complete a task if you bribe them with food pellets.

If you have a longer attention span that Pinky (see "Pinky and the Brain"), check out this article from the New York Times magazine section. Yes, it is 11 pages long, but it goes into some of the reasons why Kerry seems so distant and defensive around the media, his character (contrast the description of what he did when security evacuated the Capitol to the My Pet Goat fiasco), and just what brought him to some of these enormously complex views of how the world works. Also, if you manage to get all the way through it--and you're all smart people, I know you can--you'll read a very sensible strategy in fighting this War On Terror(ism) that, since it does not involve bombing the crap out of anyone, will never resonate with the large chunk of America that is still stuck in On-9/11 mode.