Obama's Faux Iraq Flip-Flop May Finally Die
For the past week and a half, the media has been attempting to hammer home the notion that Senator Barack Obama "flip-flopped" on withdrawing troops from Iraq. It never made much sense. The "false flip flop" meme originated from the news of Obama's plans to visit Iraq, and it gained traction after opposing partisans started walking out the idea that a visit to Iraq would be just the thing to demonstrate the surpassing wisdom of the Iraq war. From there, the unlikely news of tomorrow became the universally-accepted news of today, and report after report suggested that Obama had developed feet of clay on Iraq.
The anatomy of this falsity can be seen in riveting clarity in this piece of reporting by Jeff Zeleny in the New York Times' "Caucus" blog. The news peg is Obama seeking to "better explain a statement he made earlier about continuing to 'refine my policies' regarding a timeline for withdrawing troops from Iraq." Zeleny presents two statements from Obama - the first statement and the "clarification" - neither of which suggest any whiff of contradiction. That doesn't stop Zeleny from suggesting that there was a difference between the two statements -- based, quite literally, on the quality of Obama's vocal inflection. Finally, around 4:15pm, he updates the piece with the news that "Republicans seized on the remarks," and so began the lemming-like march off the cliff of common sense.
The flaw at the heart of the misreporting seems to have been simple illiteracy, as the press corps seemingly decided en masse to simply stop recognizing the common definition of the word "refine" ("to make more fine, subtle, or precise") and pretend that it meant "reverse" ("to turn in the opposite direction; send on the opposite course"). It's always annoying when well-educated adults begin acting like simpletons, but I'm afraid this happens in the media all the time. Ezra Klein's withering critique stands as the most well-stated:
Among the people who follow politics professionally, there's a lot of talk about Barack Obama "refining" or "changing" his position on Iraq. Among people who follow Iraq, or the politics of Iraq, closely, there's been almost no discussion of this, except a lot of confusion as to what's changed. This is presumably because people who follow the issue and read the plans are stupid and unable to understand Obama's Iraq position as well as people who follow campaigns and read press releases.
I had begun to wonder if there was anything that might arrest the media's headlong descent into this inanity, when there finally came a moment where the "politics of Iraq" were finally presented in press release form, so that they could understand it. That moment: Nouri al-Maliki's call for a timetable for ending the U.S. occupation. Suddenly, one of the presidential candidates found himself on the horns of a "flip-flop" dilemma: John McCain, who had, in 2004, told the Council of Foreign Relations that "it's obvious that we would have to leave" if the Iraqi government ever asked us to do so, adding, "I don't see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people."
If this morning's Washington Post is any indication, the media has suddenly rediscovered the proper definition of "refine." In a piece by Anne Kornblut and Michael Shear, titled "Candidates Refine Their Stances on a Changing Iraq," "refining one's stance" is finally presented as an acceptable practice of common sense, as opposed to an obscene demonstration of political expediency.
Of course, the article mainly gets it wrong. Al Maliki's call for a timetable doesn't force Obama to refine any of his positions. In fact, it emphasizes their larger wisdom. The article also states that "both candidates scrambled to clarify their visions for Iraq in the face of changing events on the ground." But that isn't true. Only John McCain has the need to make a clarification based on the events in Iraq. Barack Obama only had to scramble to do so because the media did not report his statement correctly in the first place.
It just goes to show that anytime you hear someone in the media talk about a candidate having to "clarify" themselves, one should ask the question: is the clarification necessary because the candidate misspoke? Or is it because the press needs the remedial assistance?
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July 9, 2008 10:56 AM